State and Local Government Review | 2019
Workforce Policy for the Future: Connecting Skills and Careers
Abstract
While the economic recovery from the Great Recession of 2008–2009—until recent months—had produced job gains, low unemployment, and modest wage increases, it also revealed troubling new realities—uneven geographic recovery and losses, lower labor force participation, stagnant wages, heightened skill requirements, community and labor market disruptions from new technologies and job structures, and persistent and growing racial and ethnic disparities (Groshen and Holzer 2019). More broadly, questions about the sufficiency of work-based earnings and engagement have shaped new policy thinking about the future of work (Bartlett, Creticos, and Rahn 2019). Longer-term workforce and education-related policy challenges have become more serious since the Great Recession and will continue past the current downturn. The collapse of the youth labor market has reinvigorated the debate about the “college for all” approach to the detriment of vocational training and integrated career pathways (Hamilton 2020; Hoffman and Schwartz 2017). At the same time, overall improvements in high school graduation are tempered by lower rates of persistence and graduation for students of color and for youth engaged in child welfare and juvenile justice systems or homeless. Student debt has exploded and college costs are increasing while the relative amount of resources dedicated to developing talent pipelines has diminished (Carnevale et al. 2019). On the positive side of the ledger, there has been substantial innovation in redesigning high schools, transition to college, guided pathways in college, career pathways, employer engagement, workbased learning, and youth and adult apprenticeships (Hoffman and Schwartz 2017; Carnevale, Gulish, and Strohl 2018). This article shares a road map of state and local workforce policies that are effectively addressing current and emerging challenges. The focus is on local and state policies in part because many federal programs, such as the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), are state-administered or blockgranted and have local flexibility. This article concludes by identifying the requirements for successful state and local workforce policy in both urban and rural settings.