Workforce Development Seeks Focus Shift
Workforce training and employment agencies who try to match available workers with the needs of employers should focus less on the employee and more on the employer, the state's top labor official told an audience of more than 125 people this morning at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester.
"The workforce development system needs to be employer-driven," said Joanne Goldstein, secretary of the Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development. "It has long been employee-driven."
That has been the case, said Navjeet Singh, co-author of a new report on the topic from Commonwealth Corporation, because workforce professionals are often more comfortable focusing on individual outcomes of clients rather than on assessing and measuring the varied needs of employers across different sectors.
"Fundamentally, this is not easy work," Singh said. "This is challenging."
The report from Commonwealth Corporation (a quasi-public agency under Goldstein's agency) urges workforce professionals to use methods that measure the return on investment for businesses that participate and invest in employee training programs.
Such a focus will be important in the coming two years, Goldstein said, because federal funding for workforce programs is declining, although the state's workforce training trust is fully funded for the current fiscal year. Goldstein also said more outreach is needed to tell businesses about the training resources available to them.
"We need to make sure we use our resources as effectively and efficiently as we can," she said. "Now more than ever, we need to align workforce training educational efforts with the skills and demands of businesses."
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