Career Ladders Matter … and they Exist

Another thing that caught my eye in that NY Times story was this tidbit: Alexandria Wallace grew up in a middle-class home topped by Spanish tile, with a swimming pool out back and a view of jagged reddish mountains. Her decline from work to welfare began in the spring of 2009. She was working three [...]

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The Child Care Catch-22

You can’t afford child care without work, and you can’t work without child care. Child care subsidy programs are supposed to address this problem, but… Parents across the nation are finding it even more difficult to go back to work, since many states are cutting critical child care subsidies, reports the New York Times. These [...]

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Tulsa World Features Initiative’s CareerAdvance Program

The Tulsa World ran a feature last Saturday on the CareerAdvance program being piloted by the Tulsa Initiative (slash Innovation Lab) here at CAP. A little taste: CareerAdvance is offered to parents who have children enrolled in early child-care programs for lower-income families at the Skelly and Disney Early Childhood Education Centers. The program is [...]

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Blogging the National Network of Sector Partners National Conference

Washington, D.C. – This week I’m at the national conference of the National Network of Sector Partners. The conference will cover a wide range of topics related to industry driven workforce development initiatives, including sector case studies, policy and systems change, green jobs and other emerging industries, and program sustainability. Dinner Thursday night is being [...]

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CareerAdvance: New Pathways to Economic Security

The Tulsa Initiative is getting set to launch a new pilot program to help our Head Start and Early Head Start parents advance their careers and secure a better economic future for their families. The project, called CareerAdvance, is a multi-faceted approach to job training and supportive services. It includes: Sector-Driven – Our initiative will [...]

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Apprenticeships: They’re Not Feudal

For some reason every time I hear the term “apprenticeship” I think of feudal workshops of blacksmiths and shoe cobblers. In my role as coordinator of a sector-based career advancement project, I’ve been hearing the term quite a bit more lately but I still haven’t known a lot about them. So here are some things [...]

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Hispanics in the Workforce

According to the National Council of La Raza, “Latinos have the highest labor force participation rate in the United States (68.7%), yet they earn the lowest median weekly wages at only $545 per week.” I also didn’t know that NCLR has a workforce division with a Health Care Career Pathways Initiative: The NCLR Health Care [...]

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Workforce Wonkery Received

Matt Yglesias, of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, took in stride my comment that policy writers missed the point of that CEA report – it was about reforming workforce programs, not about the growth of healthcare and education jobs (which we already knew all about). He writes: But Micah Kordsmeier explains that the [...]

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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 [...]

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Quote of the Day

“The most important ‘post-high school’ education and training reform is a strong early childhood and elementary and secondary education system.” – From the Council of Economic Advisors report “Preparing the Workers of Today for the Jobs of Tomorrow“ By the way, you are owed a substantive post from me and you shall get it. Get [...]

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