The Workforce Almanac: System-Level View of U.S. Workforce Training Providers

Abstract

The future of work increasingly requires workers of all education levels to reskill and upskill. As the rate of emerging technologies integrating into work rises, so do the costs to people who do not update their skills. Crucial skills for the future of work can be learned in reskilling and upskilling workforce programs. While the U.S. workforce development sector provides an infrastructure for training workers to succeed in the workplace, this sector goes largely unrecognized due to its fragmentation. Practitioners and researchers alike have struggled to understand the connected picture of how higher education institutions, apprenticeships, nonprofit organizations, and for-profit organizations train American workers. This working paper describes the Workforce Almanac, a first-of-its-kind effort to understand workforce training at a system-wide level. We provide a new open-source directory of nearly 17,000 workforce training providers across the United States. This dataset (available at http://www.workforcealmanac.com) offers ​​the most comprehensive view to date of U.S. workforce training providers, including provider names, locations, and types. To create this Almanac, we combined training provider information from four distinct sources into one new dataset, capturing federal Registered Apprenticeship providers, nonprofit providers, Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA)-eligible training providers, and higher education providers.