Workforce Developments

Help design an initiative to serve "marginalized males of color"

Public/Private Ventures is looking for input to help them develop an online Practitioners Network that will

"provide technical assistance, up-to-date research, and other resources and tools for organizations working to improve outcomes for 'marginalized males of color' - African American, Latino and other males of color who are at high risk for poor economic, educational, social and health-related outcomes."

If you serve that population, they want to hear from you. Click here to take their survey.

P/PV is interested in getting information from workforce development programs, as well as programs providing all of the following services:

• Education
• Violence reduction
• Adult prisoner and juvenile offender reentry
• Sexual and reproductive health
• Civic engagement
• Mentoring
• Fatherhood and parenting

Finding resources in the Recovery Act (ARRA): An interactive tool

If you're trying to get details on resources are being made available to help families and children through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), you might want to check out this interactive online tool.

The tool was created by Zero To Three, a national nonprofit that "informs, trains and supports professionals, policymakers and parents in their efforts to improve the lives of infants and toddlers."

The tool is basically a slideshow with extensive hyperlinks allowing you to jump straight into details about specific programs you're interested in. Programs are organized into three categories, those for Good Health, Strong Families and Positive Early Learning Experiences. WIA and other DOLETA programs are included in its listings.

The tool indicates which programs are new, shows how much each is getting, and links to outside sites for more details where appropriate.

This resource goes well beyond the field of workforce development, but may be useful to workforce development program planners, as so many of the people we're helping have families who need additional assistance beyond what we're providing. This might help you get thinking outside the DOL silo and help you identify programs for partnerships.

To get started with the interactive tool, click here.

Speak now or forever hold your peace: NAICS codes revisions

If you're like me and your heart goes pitter-patter when you hear someone say "NAICS codes," keep reading.

If you're in workforce or economic development and you don't know what NAICS (rhymes with "snakes") stands for, take a moment to find out now.

It's the North American Industry Classification System, and it's what the feds use to classify all businesses in the country. Using those classifications, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census Bureau, your state labor market information agency and others calculate how many of what kinds of businesses are in your neighborhood.

By extension, that data is used in workforce development to figure out what jobs in what industries are in high demand nationally, by state and at the local level. You can connect up this data with Standard Occupational Codes (SOC) data to develop career ladders and other useful tools (click here to learn how). This information is very useful for deciding what kinds of advice to give job seekers and what kinds of job training programs to invest in.

If you've been around the system for a while, you may remember the old Standard Industrial Classification (SIC codes) system. NAICS replaced that in 1997.

Like any data, NAICS is only as useful as the codes are accurate. As the economy and businesses change, they need to be updated periodically, which is about to happen again. Your chance for input into the process is going on right now.

The federal Office of Management and Budget's Economic Classification Policy Committee (ECPC) is open for public input. This won't be a wholesale reopening of the NAICS system; they specifically are seeking comments in the following areas:

• The advisability and desirability of reducing national industry detail in the manufacturing sector;
• Proposals for new and emerging industries;
• Classification of distribution centers, logistics service providers, and sales offices of publishers; and
• Suggestions to clarify the classification of establishments that outsource manufacturing transformation activities and provide manufacturing services in the market given the increasing specialization and globalization of business activities in the economy.

If you have an opinion, jump right in, although you have some time to craft just the right comment. You're encouraged to send in both a hard copy and an email or fax version. Deadline to file comments is April 7.

Photo by Marek Szczepanek

Mapping your partnerships

Workforce Developments contributor Racy Ming at the Marin Employment Connection, the Marin, CA, one-stop, sent me the Google map she's created of MEC's local community partners:

View Larger Map

If I've embedded it properly, when you click on a blue marker information will pop up showing the address, phone number and website for each partner, plus a photo of the location. (Click here to get to the map in Google if it's not working.)

A simple map, but a powerful collection of information. You probably have a list of your partners somewhere, maybe in Word or Excel, or even on your website. Think how much more useful it could be to customers and clients if they saw it in a map like this.

Here's what Racy says:

Feedback from the partner agencies has been extremely positive. Based on their requests, I added hyperlinks to each of their websites and their physical addresses, so that the information shows when they click on a tab. I'm hoping this gets people thinking about other ways they can use Google maps to make their lives easier.

Making maps work for you

Think about the data you access and share with others on a regular basis. Maybe you keep a list of agencies and nonprofit service providers to share with your job seeking customers. Maybe you report to funders on activities and events.

Could you make that information more usable and easier to understand with maps?

A colleague recently shared a terrific (if sad) example with me. Graphic designer, journalist and news junkie Erica Smith is tracking layoffs and buyouts in the newspaper industry here on Paper Cuts. Take a look at the map - you quickly get a sense of where those layoffs are taking place, and each event is color-coded by how many people were laid off. Scroll down the page for more details on each one.

Erica is using Google Maps, a free, web 2.0 application that allows you to create your own online maps. It's incredibly easy to use. Last year I created a map of all the One-Stop Career Centers in Los Angeles County. All I needed was a list of one-stop addresses and internet access.

Try it for yourself. Click over to Google Maps, select the My Maps tab, and click on Create New Map. Enter an address in the search bar, and save it to your new map. You can add all sorts of info in the pop-up bubble - address, phone number, website, even photos.

Imagine maps of 

• All the companies where your clients have landed jobs
• The layoffs averted through your Rapid Response activities

What else can you map?

Once you have a map you can link to it, embed it in your website, or print it out in your next report. It could be an internal management tool, or a public resource. Amaze your customers, clients and funders with your maps! They don't need to know how easy it was to do.

Help for the average bear

Turns out I wasn't joking when I talked about workforce development-style madness Friday. That same day, I got the following in my inbox:

1. Update on efforts to restore funding to NOVA, which runs the one-stops and other workforce services in California's Silicon Valley. They no longer provide services on Fridays due to budget cuts;
2. Call from the Workforce Alliance to press Congress to restore $2 billion the White House proposes to cut from employment and training programs in the 2009 budget (didn't we do this last year?);
3. Federal Reserve announcement that it would bail out Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns, and
4. This memorable quote from Bush's speech to the Economic Club of New York: "You've helped make our country in many ways the economic envy of the world."

All this, only a week after the Department of Labor announced a third consecutive month of job losses, combined with 644,000 people leaving the workforce entirely.

This morning we wake up to learn that over the weekend, the Feds approved giving JPMorgan Chase a $30 billion credit line to buy Bear Stearns.

Makes me wonder what help the Feds plan to extend to the average bear. Bigger print on mortgage documents isn't going to cut it for the average American worker. A check for $600 won't begin to put a dent in the average American's annual expenses, especially not those who've lost their jobs. Cuts to employment and training programs at a time when more American companies are eliminating jobs and putting people out of work may seem penny-wise, but is pound-foolish.

If you're interested in helping out the average American bear, here are a few places to start:

• Sign the petition in support of funding for NOVA, and
• Send a letter to your Senator urging them to support more funding for employment and training.

Three new workforce development job listings

I haven't updated my Workforce Development Jobs page in a while, so I'm happy to report three new positions were posted yesterday.  Two are with The Workforce Alliance, and one with the Insight Center for Community Economic Development / National Network of Sector Partners.

If you have any workforce development job listings you'd like to see on this list - full-time, part-time or contract - please send them along. It's free, and I get a good number of hits on this page every day.

To read the job listings, click here.

NYC transit workers online

Want to know what it's like to work in New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority? Ask these folks. Or this blogger. 

The web 2.0 revolution is creating ever more opportunities for workers to talk directly to each other, and to share their stories with the wider world. These web pages, blogs and other online media are a great source of info for job seekers, as I highlighted last year.

HomeStation Online is a web portal by and for NYC transit workers. The Underground is a blog by Marvin Holland, MTA Station Cleaner, former Shop Steward, and editor-in-chief of HomeStation Online. Check out his analysis of a new blue ribbon report on Engaging, Recognizing and Developing the MTA Workforce.

Image credit: NYC MTA

Calculating the cost of your one-stop activities

Sure, you've got your line-item budget that tells you how much your staff, office supplies and all those other things cost. But how much do you spend providing intensive services to a single job seeker? How much to place a job seeker in a job?

Last year I reported about a study completed by professors at Cal State Northridge, that used Activity-Based Cost (ABC) accounting to calculate those per-service costs. Now those professors are going to share their methods with you. At the California Workforce Association's upcoming Spring Conference, there will be a one-day workshop where you can bring your budgets and a laptop, and they'll walk you through the process.

You don't have to register for the full conference in order to attend the workshop. Click this link to download a detailed description of the workshop, including instructions on how to sign up. Click here for more on the Spring Conference. Click here to read the ABC accounting study.

There will be other great workshops at the CWA conference too. Hope to see you there.

Job search goes web 2.0

My colleague Michele Martin over at the Bamboo Project blog does a terrific job of writing about how ordinary mortals like you and me can use technology to make our lives easier and do our jobs better. She's one of only a handful of us out there in the workforce development world who are blogging. She also has a really lovely image of bamboo and stones on her blog banner.

Michele is starting a series this week where she's walking a mid-career training professional named Shari through the process of figuring out what kinds of interactive online (web 2.0) tools she can use to help in her job search. I've read the first post, and I plan to continue reading it through the week. Topics she'll cover include

• Setting up A Job Search Dashboard
• Tools for Organizing Your Job Search
• Setting up an Online Portfolio
• Developing Your Personal Brand
• Tools to Support Branding

Although it sounds like the series will be focused on more educated professional workers, I'm sure a lot of the tools she talks about can be used by other job seekers too. Perhaps Michele will address that a bit in this series.

If this sounds interesting to you, click on over. Should be good reading.

WIRED gets a wiki

 

Last week I told you about workforce development on YouTube and wikipedia. Now DOL's WIRED initiative is joining the web 2.0 generation, with a new site, WIRED Nation. It's a collaborative workspace you can read and where share your own ideas and knowledge with your peers and colleagues. You'll find a blog, discussion forums, stories from WIRED projects and an events calendar.

You don't have to be part of a WIRED project to join - I just did. Free and easy to do. For more FAQs about WIRED Nation, click here.

If all this talk about "wikis" and "blogs" still doesn't make any sense to you, don't worry. Just click over to the site and start exploring. See what looks interesting, and if you want, join the online conversation.

[And if you happen to be going to the California Workforce Association's upcoming Spring Conference, I'll be hosting a workshop where you can learn more about web tools like these.]

define: career pathways

Want to know what career pathways are? Ask Wikipedia. The folks at the Workforce Strategy Center have gotten the ball rolling by writing an entry for the online encyclopedia. Click here to read it.

Want to edit, refine or improve on their definition, or write an entry about another term? Click here to learn how.

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia, whose content is written and edited by volunteers like you and me.  A "wiki" is a type of software that allows people to create, edit and link webpages easily. It's based on the idea that collectively, we are smarter than we are as individuals. Over time, people will correct each other's work and continually improve on the webpage. Wikipedia is probably the best-known wiki out there, but there are many others. Some are open to the public; some groups and companies working on projects use wikis to manage them.

Wikipedia isn't perfect, and it isn't without its controversies (see also here and here). Nonetheless, a study published in the respected journal Nature found Wikipedia entries to be about as accurate as those in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The bigger differences are that all Wikipedia content is completely free (not so for Britannica), and if you don't like the Wikipedia entry, you can change it.

Here's another little web tip on the side. The headline for this post [define: career pathways] is a cool little trick you can do in Google. Type in define: in the search box, then the word or phrase you're looking for. Google will search the web for only definitions of that term.

Back on the global supply chain gang

Exponential growth in the movement of goods and services around the world in recent years has led to a significant rise in the number and types of jobs available in a field that some call transportation, distribution and logistics, some call logistics and international trade, and some call supply chain management.

Are they good jobs? The research isn't conclusive. Here's one study that says they make a great replacement for the manufacturing jobs we've lost as production has moved overseas. Here's another one I worked on that found the field does offer opportunities, but that pay, benefits and advancement opportunities are more limited.

If you or a client are interested in learning more about what jobs are available in the field, where to find those jobs and how to qualify for them, the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) has a Careers website that has a lot of info. I especially like the diagram on this page showing exactly what is a "supply chain." CSCMP also has created a DVD on careers in the field. It's $50 and I haven't seen the whole thing myself so I can't give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. But here's the preview:

If you can't see the embedded media player or if it doesn't play properly, click here for the QuickTime version, or here for other viewing options. 

The candidates' positions on workforce development

Another great resource from The Workforce Alliance, courtesy of their Skills2Compete campaign. They've analyzed the presidential candidates' proposals and statements on education and job training, and they've created a very easy-to-read, user-friendly document summarizing what they learned. Click here to get it.

You'll find an alphabetical table comparing the candidates' positions on four specific policy issues, followed by summaries of each one's overall position. TWA links to their source materials, so you can read them in more detail for yourself.

Some highlights:

• Nearly all the Democratic candidates have sponsored or support some kind of green jobs initiative;
• Ron Paul believes "the federal government has no constitutional authority to fund or control schools" (try telling that to the education First Lady);
• Mitt Romney is being advised by Rep. Buck McKeon; and
• Bill Richardson has called for a reversal of the trend of declining federal funding for workforce programs (you go, Bill!).

When you get tired of reading all those horse-race-metaphor articles about the presidential election, check out this resource for carefully documented facts and policies.

Image credit: http://www.skills2compete.org

Connecting industry and occupation data: the feds reply

Be careful what you say on a blog. The feds might answer.

In this case, it's a good thing.

Last week, in the first of my two posts on labor market data and career ladders (click here for part 2), I asked, in an aside, when the feds planned to create a crosswalk between the NAICS and SOC code systems. Not even a single day passed before I got an answer via email from my loyal correspondent at DOL, courtesy of one of his colleagues.

They haven't done a crosswalk, but they do have some other tools you'll want to check out when you're trying to connect industry and occupational data. I'll tell you about one right now: BLS's National Industry-Specific Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates. On that page you can pick your target industry or industries, down to the 4-digit NAICS code level. There you'll find a list of two-digit SOC code occupations. Click on those, and it will take you to tables showing employment and wages at the six-digit level. If you already have access to state level data by occupation, you could just jump over to that dataset from here.

Or you can work your way through BLS. Click on the six-digit occupation of your choice, and that will take you to a series of tables showing which industries that most commonly hire people in that occupation, as well as some sample state and metro area data. You can see what it looks like in this example: Retail Salespersons (SOC 41-2031). Click on the "Create Customized Tables" data, and then you can really go to town. Multiple states or cities, multiple occupations. To make the most of this, though, you'll want to have your full list of occupations selected in advance. It's a long, long drop-down list to select through.

This process links industries to occupations and back again, and it will get you to state and city level data. This is what I've been looking for but hadn't found yet. This process might be a little tedious if you're working in a sector that crosses multiple industries, but with good data collection, tedious is often what it takes.

If this sounds confusing, just click over to the first page and try it out for yourself. It will become clearer as you walk through it step by step.

I hope it goes without saying that as good as this data is, mining it effectively is only the first step toward building a career ladder. Once you've pulled all this together, you still have to talk to employers, workers, training providers and other stakeholders to find out what happens in the real world.

My thanks to the folks at DOL for sharing this info.

Labor market data meets reality

Labor market data can be your friend, but you must take care not to abuse it. I began this post yesterday. Today, the conclusion.

As I promised, I'm not naming names, but I read a study recently that used nothing more than basic NAICS and SOC code data combined with some info from O*NET to draw conclusions like this:

Occupation Y requires more training and pays better than Occupation X. Therefore we can place them on a career ladder with Occupation Y as a move up from Occupation X. Occupation Z has even higher training requirements and pays more than Occupation Y, so it can be the next step up on the career ladder, like this:

Who says that just because one occupation pays better, requires more training and is within the same industry as another, that career pathways between the two exist? That might sound logical, but the authors provided no evidence that these pathways exist in the real world.

I've heard from at least one nurse training program that had to learn this the hard way. They originally thought that since being a registered nurse (RN) paid better and required more training than being a certified nurse assistant (CNA) or licensed vocational (or practical) nurse (LVN or LPN), all they needed to meet the huge demand for RNs in their area was train CNAs and LVNs to become RNs. They got the money and created the program, but they weren't having the success they'd imagined.

So they started talking to hospitals, nursing schools and nurses. That's when they discovered that the move from CNA or LVN to RN just never happened in the real world.

Real world experience and knowledge - it's the magic ingredient that's missing from analysis based entirely on LMI data. Without it, you can make major mistakes. In the case of the nursing program, they used this new information to redesign their program, and now it is a real world career pathway.

As a workforce board or nonprofit, you're outside the industry. That puts you at both an advantage and disadvantage when looking at labor market data. You can see opportunities for advancement that employers might not be able to see from their vantage point. But without talking to both employers and workers, you'll never know if those opportunities are real or theoretical.

Having good labor market data in hand will help when you go talk to employers. You can show them what you see in the data and ask if those career pathways exist at their company or across companies. If those pathways don't exist you can ask questions about who gets those better jobs and what prevents people in those lower-paid positions from moving up. Be sure to talk to current workers in those jobs too. Find out from them what are the barriers to advancement.

My point is this: labor market data is good for beginning to look at an industry. I'd say it's a necessary first step. But to get to know a sector or industry well enough to develop effective workforce development programs, you're going to have to do a lot more legwork.

Photo credit: leptonic.com

(Mis)use of labor market data

I love labor market data. Despite its limitations, aggregations and aggravations, it offers a terrific first look at an industry or occupation. The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) and Standard Occupation Codes (SOC) systems each have a sublime internal logic and consistency that is (generally) clear and straightforward.

Problem is that this labor market data is more limited than some workforce development professionals realize. As a result, it sometimes gets used for purposes beyond its capacity. Which gets us to my point today: Woe betide the researcher or practitioner who misuses LMI data. There are some tempting shortcuts out there that might bring you to the wrong conclusions. It's like using a shovel to prune your roses - you can cut the stems if you hack at them long enough, but the results will be ugly, and you could kill the plant in the process.

I recently did an LMI data analysis project for a client. We were looking at a sector with notoriously low wage jobs and very limited opportunities for upward mobility. My client wants to work with employers to develop career pathways in that sector, and needs good data to start from.

I compiled data on the relevant industries by NAICS code, then searched O*NET by industry keywords to identify occupations. O*NET didn't give me a complete picture, so I drilled down into the SOC codes from relevant major categories to look for other occupations. To do that, I needed to talk with my client about their experience placing workers in jobs in this sector. Without that on-the-ground knowledge, my list would have been incomplete.

Note to the feds: When are you going to create a crosswalk between the NAICS and SOC systems? Surely you have enough real world data from the states to calculate which SOC code occupations commonly appear in each NAICS code industry.

O*NET provides descriptive data for each occupation as well as wage information. It tells you if the occupation is in demand nationally, and categorizes it by the level of training required (Job Zones 1 through 5). From there you can link to state-level wage data on the America's Career One-Stop page. Of course, if you want data for the county or city level, you're going to have to go to your state's labor market info source. Moreover, if you want data on a large number of occupations, this method of going occupation-by-occupation in O*NET is painfully tedious and time-consuming. In this case, I hope your state agency has downloadable tables with the same info.

I used all this data to create a series of tables presenting and sorting data on this sector. At this point my client had the information they needed to begin building a career pathways ladder. The operative word here is begin. Everything I've told you about so far is not enough information to build such a ladder, but I've seen good people who ought to know better create career pathways from not much more than this.

In fact, tomorrow, I'll give you an example. I won't name names, but I'll show you what they did, and explain why they shouldn't have.

Health care wages to rise 27% in the next ten years

It's time to update your labor market data, and it might be time to reassess your job search strategies. It also might be time to reconsider when you plan to retire.

The Bureau of Labor Stats has issued new employment projections for the 2006-2016 time period. BLS estimates total employment will grow by 15.6 million jobs, or 10 percent. That's slightly less than the 15.9 million jobs created in the 1996-2006 decade.

No real surprises in the data, but in some cases it's stunning to see the hard numbers. For example, the number of 55 and older workers is expected to rise by 46.7%, more than five times the growth in the labor force overall. By 2016 they'll make up nearly a quarter of the nation's labor force, almost double their share in 1996. Getting onto AARP's "best employers" list is going to become much more important for businesses looking to hire.

Opportunities in service occupations in industries like health care, retail and food services will rise, although how many will be new jobs and how many will be replacements for people leaving those jobs varies significantly. See the attached chart.

BLS expects wages in Health care and social assistance, Business and professional services and in Educational services to each rise more than 20% over the next decade. In Manufacturing, wages will decline by 11%.

For the press release and all the info from BLS, click here.

When did workforce become Congress's lowest priority?

If you're not receiving The Workforce Alliance's Washington updates by email, click over to this page right now. TWA does a great job of tracking what's going on in workforce policy, and advocating for our field. At the recent NNSP conference TWA's federal policy director Rachel Gragg explained what's going on in DC and what we as practitioners can do to support positive policy change.

TWA's most recent July-November update includes good - but distressing - analysis of how the recent appropriations bill to fund the federal Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and Education (HR 3043) developed and why Bush vetoed it. TWA summarizes the overall problem this way: 

...the workforce development field should understand that when faced with competing demands, this Congress repeatedly prioritized workforce development programs last—first by failing to increase funding for these programs despite years of deep cuts and then again by failing to reject efforts to further increase funding for politically popular programs at the expense of workforce programs. Not one Member of Congress objected to these cuts, and no one was willing to speak on the floor in favor of workforce development programs. (emphasis added)

How has it come to this? Across the US, companies are begging for skilled workers, and experts concur the problem will only get worse as the population ages. Veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan need help reintegrating into the workforce. Workforce development agencies are reaching out and developing regional partnerships across political boundaries and sector initiatives that target key industries. So Congress and the president reward this kind of hard work and innovation that can strengthen the economy, by cutting workforce development funding?

What's it going to take to turn this ship around? Do we have to wait until after the 2008 election before anyone in DC will pay attention to our nation's workforce?

Check up on your neighbors

Want to find out what your neighbors are doing with their Workforce Investment Act and Wagner-Peyser funds? The Employment and Training Administration at DOL has posted this web page where you can download each state's planned modifications for 2007-09, their annual report for 2006 and link to websites for the WIA administrative agencies in most states. You can also link from there to each of the regional WIRED initiatives. It's not the prettiest site you've ever seen, but it's straightforward and user-friendly.
 

To travel back in time to find out what states planned to do in 2005-07, this page links state by state to each plan.