This article reports on four synthesis findings from the Credentials to Careers (C2C) initiative -- a consortium of seven community colleges working to create and implement innovative programs to train or retrain unemployed and displaced workers for STEM, advanced manufacturing and health-care-related careers. These are 1) collaborating with…

The U.S. workforce is increasingly comprised of older adults, women, and minorities who lack basic skills and are unable to acquire these skills through traditional educational and training programs. New approaches are needed to provide effective training to the adult learner and flexible support for nontraditional students who must balance…

Workforce pipelines are essential to sustain a productive workforce in an increasingly competitive, high-tech environment. Advanced automation, sensors, materials and data analytics will increase the need for highly skilled workers in the manufacturing (and manufactured construction) sector. Attracting and developing the next-generation workforce…

Southwest Tennessee Community College (Southwest) received a Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant from the U.S. Department of Labor in 2013 to fund the Southwest Solutions program (Solutions). The goal of Solutions is to prepare, credential, and place veterans, dislocated workers, and unemployed or…

Despite the desire of many older adults to remain in the workforce, those without jobs face unprecedented durations of unemployment. Many of the unemployed lack current skills for jobs in demand and need to either upgrade their skills or be trained for a new occupation to become reemployed. An aging workforce, combined with the negative effects of…

This descriptive qualitative case study investigated the perceptions of dislocated workers offered program services through the Workforce Investment Act's (WIA) Dislocated Worker program in Minnesota. This research focused on recently dislocated workers who lost their jobs through no fault of their own and hence were eligible for unemployment…

The Congress passed the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) in 1998 seeking to create a system connecting employment, education, and training services to better match job seekers to labor market needs. However, questions have been raised about how WIA funds are being used and, in particular, how much is being spent on training. Contributing to the…

Prairie State 2000 began as an Illinois initiative to guarantee dislocated workers access to training funds from a pool of employer and employee contributions. Although its rationale was sound and the need was great, it was beset with a number of difficulties: there was no real market for the training, its grants and loans were not worth the cost…

A study evaluated the economic outcomes of one state-sponsored training program--the California Employment Training Panel (ETP)--which captured the benefits of private job training within a public program. It examined the impact of ETP training on a new group of 41,959 ETP trainees trained in 1990-91 in the year after training and estimated the…

This paper presents new evidence regarding the benefits of retraining prime-aged adults by analyzing the impacts of community college schooling on displaced workers in Washington State during the 1990s. The authors also conducted a similar analysis of a small program that provided community college courses to workers displaced from their jobs…

From 1991-93, 2,147 dislocated workers from timber-impacted counties of Washington state received Timber Retraining Benefits (TRB), with 81% using the aid to attend a state community or technical college. To determine the impact of the TRB program on the dislocated workers and their timber communities, the Washington State Board for Community and…

The transformation of Singapore from a stagnating colonial port city in the late 1950s into a newly industrialized city-state in the early 1990s was the outcome of planned adjustments to changing internal and external conditions. Training and retraining programs played a role in these adjustments. Although full employment prevailed in 1979, the…

Job loss through technological advancement, particularly technologies based on microelectronics, is increasing for all economic sectors in a nation already hard challenged in world and domestic markets for goods and services. But assessing technology's employment impact remains difficult not only because of its direct and indirect effects and…

This monograph studies unemployment in relation to labor market vacancies throughout the United States, using a new set of data: the Survey of Firms from the Employment Opportunity Pilot Project, a labor market experiment conducted by the Department of Labor at 28 sites in 1979 and 1980. The monograph is organized in five chapters. The first…

An emerging U.S. employment system is the Security, Employee Involvement, and Training (SET) system. The system is characterized by the following: (1) a high degree of employment security based upon flexible job assignment; (2) employee involvement in problem solving and continuous improvement; and (3) continuous training of all employees. Case…