In Need of More Workforce Wonkery

Washington Post writer Ezra Klein must be reading too, because he clicked over to that Council of Economic Advisors report on the jobs of tomorrow and had a thing or two to say:

The first is that the private sector is not projected to do a lot of job creation on its lonesome over the next couple of years. The second is that the public sector has a lot of influence over the shape of the industries with heavy growth over the next decade or so. And the third is that a lot of the job creation we are going to get is coming in sectors — health care and education — that everyone agrees aren’t working too well, and so it’s not clear that this will be a terrifically productive bunch of new jobs.

He also says that this CEA report is “a bit of a slog.” I guess healthcare wonks can’t also be workforce wonks. Too bad. I think Klein paid too much attention to the job growth projections (which aren’t really news at all) and not enough attention to the very important solutions being proposed in the report. And that misdirected attention is a consequence, I think, of too little familiarity with the relevant issues in workforce policy on the part of mainstream policy wonks, writers, and bloggers.

These solutions are a key to unlocking the limited success of job training and re-training programs, which many across the blogosphere noted a couple weeks ago (see here and here for good examples), and which I’d been meaning to write about. As summarized by the report, these innovations are:

institutions and programs that have goals that are aligned and curricula that are cumulative; close collaboration between training providers and employers to ensure that curricula are aligned with workforce needs; flexible scheduling, appropriate curricula, and financial aid designed to meet the needs of students; incentives for institutions and programs to continually improve and innovate; and accountability for results.

All of these components are important aspects of the career advancement project that the Tulsa Initiative has been developing over the past year with the Ray Marshall Center. In particular, our project seeks to be driven by employers, flexible and supportive to participants, and provide basic education and ESL training that is integrated with occupational skills training (often called I-BEST and is well-explained in the report).