This spotlight discusses the critical role of immigrants in the U.S. labor market and the importance of services that support their economic integration. Immigrants represent a significant and growing portion of the U.S. workforce and are essential for addressing labor market needs, especially in multilingual and diverse roles. The workforce…

This playbook provides ways in which Governors and teams can blur the lines between high school, postsecondary education, and the workforce. Governors play a significant role to Raise the Bar for student success by developing an "education-to-workforce system" that focuses on Unlocking Career Success.

As the demand for workers with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) skills grows ever higher, employers face stiff competition for qualified employees--and with retirements, the pool of employees grows ever smaller. Meanwhile, U.S. education and workforce systems could be failing to keep pace with the needs of the STEM economy,…

The Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry (L&I) partnered with the Pennsylvania State College of Medicine (Penn State) to create a Project Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes (ECHO) series for employers. The ECHO model, which originated in the medical field, provides virtual clinics led by expert specialist teams to discuss…

The challenge of connecting employers and educators to collaboratively plan for training future workers is an enduring one -- particularly for jobs that are rapidly changing because of technological advancements. This report addresses this challenge as it pertains to employers and educators in the oil and natural gas industry located in and around…

This paper reports results from a resume-based field experiment designed to examine employer preferences for job applicants who attended for-profit colleges. For-profit colleges have seen sharp increases in enrollment in recent years despite alternatives such as public community colleges being much cheaper. We sent almost 9,000 fictitious resumes…

The organizing ideal of educational equity in U.S. public schools, premised on ensuring that all students have equal opportunities to attain the highest levels of achievement, has most recently manifested as efforts by policymakers and practitioners to promote "college and career readiness". These efforts reflect the goal of maintaining…

In late 2020, Pennsylvania community colleges participated in a national study of community college workforce education. Pennsylvania was one of 14 states where education authorities volunteered to encourage colleges to respond early enough in 2020 to receive preliminary statewide results in January 2021. This brief compares Pennsylvania to the 14…

"Middle-skills" jobs require more education and training than that provided by a high school diploma but less education and training than a four-year college degree. Employers struggle to find workers with the needed combination of knowledge and skills to fill middle-skills jobs; this search for workers is particularly pertinent to the…

The need to build a more robust workforce development pipeline is evident in the hundreds of thousands of job openings in our nation's advanced manufacturing industry. Rapid technological change has created a severe skills gap, compounded by a pending wave of retirements due to the aging of the workforce. These challenges are particularly…

Social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are widely regarded as an exciting opportunity to communicate with friends, especially for college students. The overall response to social networking tends to be one of trust regarding a generation that, supposedly has many friends but little sense of privacy. Employers use social…

What does it take to deliver WorkReady Philadelphia's high-quality career-connected programming? In short, it's all about the "elements"--those essential components of the system that combine to produce success for young people. This 2011-12 WorkReady report reinforces this theme by using visual aspects of the "Periodic Table of…

This report is concerned with the procedures used and the conclusions of an assessment of the impact of employability development teams and the manpower delivery system of Philadelphia's Concentrated Employment Program (CEP). Since teams were not implemented until 1970, it is a comparative analysis of CEP's manpower delivery system in 1969 versus…

This booklet describes various aspects of the Skill Training Improvement Program (STIP) in Washington, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and California. Information concerning the funding, administration, coordination, specific activities developed, and effectiveness of the STIP program in each of the five States is provided. Also taken into…

THE PURPOSE OF THE STUDY WAS TO DETERMINE THE PRESENT AND FUTURE OF LOCAL RESIDENTS FOR POST-HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION, THE ABILITY OF EXISTING FACILITIES TO MEET THE NEEDS, FACTORS WHICH RESTRICT THE EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES, AND COURSES OF ACTION FOR MEETING LOCAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS. HIGH SCHOOL SENIORS, ADULTS, MAJOR EMPLOYERS IN BUCKS COUNTY, AND…