The American workforce is undergoing rapid changes driven by demographic shifts, technological advancements, and evolving skill requirements. During this time of rapid disruption, the question arises: How can our training programs and workforce development systems do a better job of supporting workers and employers to meet their skill and employment needs?
This is the question the Workforce Futures Initiative (WFI)—a collaborative research effort between the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the Harvard Kennedy School Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy—sought to answer when it was launched in 2021. Over the past three years, we’ve probed workforce development policy and programs looking for evidence of success. The answers we found, published today in a new volume of reports, What’s Working?: Perspectives on Key Issues in Workforce Development Programs and Practices were surprising.
Despite decades of reforms and hundreds of billions in spending, US workforce programs still lack the robust level of evidence necessary for guiding policy reforms. While a few training approaches, like rigorous sector-based training, demonstrated strong outcomes in improving employment and higher wages, they were the exception in our review rather than the rule.
Even if evidence is lacking for policy changes that would spur a broad overhaul to the labor market, this doesn’t mean that workforce development programs have failed. It’s arguable that the under-funding of workforce programs in America (the US lags behind almost every developed nation in spending on active labor market programs) is a key source of programmatic weakness. However, without more evidence of success, Congress is unlikely to increase funding, a classic catch-22.
In light of these complications, how can we break out of this negative policy equilibrium? We have some answers. Our volume contains a range of recommendations for improving the existing system including increased funding, streamlined eligibility processes, and greater flexibility for states to design innovative programs. As several authors recommend, we need to nurture and expand successful sector-based training programs. This is challenging because these programs are small, and their size, which fosters strong connections with participants, may be crucial to their success. Thus, we suggest a number of ways to leverage the expertise of programs like Per Scholas and Year Up. For example, the number of participants could be increased from a few thousand to several tens of thousands to advance more workers toward family-sustaining employment.
Still, the relative absence of data on the efficacy of workforce development programs suggests that innovation is our greatest need, an issue addressed in the essay co-authored by Ken Troske, Peter Meuser, and myself. To encourage this kind of experimentation, Congress should explore ways of providing enhanced flexibility to states for top-down reform of their workforce systems. The bipartisan workforce reauthorization bill that passed the US House of Representatives contains demonstration authority for this purpose. If the US Senate concurs with the House in this Congress or the next, the new authority would allow us to turn to the “laboratories of democracy” in the states to create and evaluate new, innovative job training and workforce development approaches. This approach would allow us to reform gradually from the bottom-up rather than impose reforms from the top based on weak or inadequate evidence.
Now is the moment to face the reality of our workforce. Evolving demographics, technology, and skill gaps are daily rewriting the rules of the economy and the workforce. Our knowledge of how to respond to that change is very limited. The recommendations the WFI collaboration has identified are solid steps toward building a workforce system that can help more Americans keep up in an economy that is accelerating toward a challenging future.
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