A workforce development policy and strategy report, from experts with multiple think tanks and universities, presents ideas for streamlining employment and training programs, scaling sectoral successes and better positioning community colleges. Last month, the Workforce Futures Initiative issued the report What’s Working? Perspectives on Key Issues in Workforce Development Programs and Practices. The publication compiles papers on more than a dozen topics related both directly and more tangentially to the workforce development system. Several influential experts contributed to the publication. The Workforce Futures Initiative is a collaborative project between the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution and the Project on Workforce at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. The Walmart Foundation supported this work.

A goal of the publication is to present strategies and policies for improving program outcomes. However, a project steering committee struggled early on with limited evidence about the success of programs. They suggested that a conundrum exists in that the United States spends little, relative to other developed nations, on employment and training programs, and has produced limited evidence in return. “The lack of evidence on what works, while disappointing, is an important signal to policymakers. It indicates that the greatest need in the U.S. workforce system is for more innovation, research and evaluation to generate new and better evidence-based models.....

.....A host of authors take on sectoral workforce development initiatives. The paper Scaling the Impact of Sector-Based Employment Strategies argues that major challenges in this area include difficulties in successful replication and fidelity to program models, project stability and funding flexibility. “Twenty years ago, we lacked good models for increasing earnings. Most programs got people into work but did not affect earnings or wage levels. Now, we have a proven model that works. That represents significant progress. To have further progress, we need to reduce the model to its crucial elements and document precisely the model’s features and requirements,” according to Richard Hendra and Kelsey Schaberg, both of the research and evaluation firm MDRC.....