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Public Libraries and the Workforce page at the Institute of Museum and Library Services

The Institute of Museum and Library Services, a grantmaking federal agency, has a page devoted to the role of libraries in providing workforce services and to the partnership with ETA.

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North Carolina Workforce Professionals Help Train Library Staff in Job Search Tools

By Linda Strong, JobLink Unit Manager, North Carolina Division of Workforce Development, and Mary L. Boone, State Librarian, North Carolina North Carolina has been very successful in its library and workforce development partnership, and the key to that success has been a state-level collaboration fully supported by North Carolina’s Governor Beverly Perdue. The partnership between the North Carolina workforce development system and public libraries began last year when the Secretary of Cultural Resources saw newspaper reports on how libraries were being affected by the economy and asked the question “Can’t we do something to help them?” The Secretary tasked the NC State Librarian to create a program of Job Search Workshops to support public library staff in addressing the needs of job seekers in their libraries. The Department of Commerce and the Employment Security Commission were identified as important partners and were asked to participate in the Job Search Workshops. The Department of Commerce’s Division of Workforce Development (DWD) and the Employment Security Commission (ESC) had a commitment to address the increased demand on the workforce development system, and this project was viewed as a valuable opportunity to expand capacity of local communities to meet the workforce needs of their residents. The DWD and ESC work together in implementing the NC JobLink Career Center (One-Stop) system, so they established the connection with existing workforce development partners and resources throughout the state.

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Making it Work @ the Public Library

It is a great pleasure to join in this partnership with the Department of Labor. The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 123,000 libraries (including school, academic, research and public libraries) and 17,500 museums. We are primarily a grant-making agency and we have a strong and growing policy and research focus. During the past ten years, thanks to support from IMLS, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, state and local funding, the e-rate, and resourceful librarians, more than 99 per cent of public libraries offer free access to the Internet. Wherever you are, large city or small town, your library and librarian will help guide you to the information resources you need.

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A Note from NAWDP: Using ARRA RES Funds for Staff Capacity Building

The Recovery Act provided an unprecedented opportunity for states and local areas to invest in the professional development of One-Stop employees who are on the frontlines of reemployment services. Building the capacity of front-line staff to serve the unemployed and develop their own careers is an investment that will pay off over the long term. As the demands of today’s businesses and job seekers increase, it is critically important that the workforce development profession continue to evolve. That means that we, as professionals in this field, need to continuously update our skills in order to meet the changing needs of our customers and to develop our own career pathways within the system. When customers come to a One-Stop Career Center, one of the first things that frontline staff do is to assess their skills and abilities. They help them identify the best path to achieve re-employment and self sufficiency. One Stop staff encourage the unemployed to create a career plans, take the necessary training to remain current with their particular field of interest, and obtain an industry-recognized credential as a way to remain viable in a shaky economy. But what about the One Stop staff themselves? Where is the system’s dedication to creating our career pathways? While it is easy to use overwhelming workloads as a reason to not invest in our staff, the fact remains that it is imperative that the workforce system takes its own advice.

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Public Workforce System and Public Libraries: Stronger Together

In my career with the workforce development system, I have time and again seen that our mission relies critically on making connections. At the most fundamental level, we connect individuals with career assistance and employment opportunities. We are also connecting workers, job seekers and employers with other community resources to ensure that we are meeting the complex and varied needs of our customers. In this light, I am especially pleased at the opportunity to use this Community of Practice to share an exciting partnership ETA is developing with the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Library professionals are expert at facilitating access to and helping people make sense of new information, and I know that our system can benefit enormously from engaging them in meaningful and concrete ways. We have summarized the different aspects of our partnership, from sharing information about our electronic tools to the July 19 Webinar highlighting promising state and local examples of workforce-library collaboration, in the newly issued Training and Employment Notice No. 50-09, “Encouraging Partnerships between the Workforce Investment System and Public Libraries to Meet Career and Employment Needs.” I hope that after you read the TEN, you will be inspired to engage your local library and find out if there are logical areas where its resources complement yours. After all, this is what we do best as workforce developers—leveraging assets from multiple sources to make a difference in the lives of people, whether they walk in the door of our One-Stop Career Center, use our electronic tools, or maybe even turn to their community library.

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Florida Region Uses Strategic Doing to Help in Overcoming the Space Challenge as the Space Shuttle Program Comes to an End

About 250 people joined us recently for an interactive ‘strategic doing’ event hosted by Brevard Workforce and the Economic Development Commission of Florida’s Space Coast, (and generously sponsored by FLORIDA TODAY, our local Gannett newspaper) called Overcoming the Space Challenge through Regional Innovation. The group came together to learn more about the challenges we face at the end of NASA’s Shuttle Program, and to actually incorporate our ideas and resources into a strategic plan that would help Brevard and the surrounding region in overcoming these challenges. It was the first such event Brevard has ever experienced. Facilitated by Ed Morrison, strategic advisor to the Purdue Center for Economic Development and Linda Fowler, founder of Regionerate, local, regional and state experts on the leading edge of responsibility in the areas of schools, our economy, the aerospace industry, county services, and help for the workforce started off the event with some insight before attendees broke into groups. Brevard Workforce briefed the audience on our intensive Aerospace Workforce Transition program and the Regional Aerospace Workforce Initiative, efforts that started more than three years ago to serve and assist the talent that will be displaced.

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New York State's Reemployment Services

Karen Coleman, Director of New York's Division of Employment and Workforce Solutions, provides an overview of New York's innovative approach to reemployment services, with particular focus on the use of assessment tools to improve skill matching.

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New York State's Reemployment Services

A presentation by Karen Coleman Director of the Division of Employment and Workforce Solutions, NYS Department of Labor. The presentation lays out the state's innovative approaches to reemployment.

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New York State's Reemployment Services

A presentation by Karen Coleman Director of the Division of Employment and Workforce Solutions, NYS Department of Labor. The presentation lays out the state's innovative approaches to reemployment.

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Quick Reference on Allowable Uses of ARRA RES Funds

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What Is in Your Assessment Toolbox? Making Informed Investments in Your Assessment Suite

The $250 million in Reemployment Services Grants provided through the Recovery Act have generated a host of creative and innovative approaches to helping the unemployed. In particular, we have learned a great deal over the last year about how assessment tools can strengthen reemployment services. Personality assessments, work values assessments, skills transferability assessments/tools, interest assessments, educational assessments, occupational skills assessments, work readiness assessments and the list goes on and on. All of these types of assessments and more increase the workforce system’s ability to match job seekers and employers. If you are still looking for ways to invest your ARRA RES funds, we want to help you learn about which instruments are the most effective by connecting you with your workforce system colleagues who can give you unbiased, first-hand feedback on their experience with specific products. If you are interested in purchasing a particular assessment instrument or tool and would like to see if there is a workforce system colleague that is using the instrument you are interested in, please contact our resident expert on assessment tools: Lauren Fairley-Wright Workforce Analyst USDOL – ETA – Office of Workforce Investment wright.lauren@dol.gov

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Subsidized Jobs and the Recovery Act

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The Reemployment Dollar Menu: New York State’s Investment Yields Great Value

Lawrence C. found himself without a job. The collapse of the financial sector (and related industries) had affected him and 868,000 other fellow New Yorkers. New York State’s Workforce Development System was overwhelmed and ARRA funds helped provide additional staffing for New York’s bustling One-Stop Centers. With some One-Stop Centers seeing over 700 customers daily, New York’s Labor Department was concerned about providing quality services to customers like Lawrence C. New York got SMART – literally. With a financial investment of less than the cost of a cheeseburger per customer, New York’s SMART 2010 job lead service was launched. New York State has partnered with Burning Glass Technologies in developing their existing recruiting tool to work for New York State’s unemployed. This technology has been successfully used by the private sector and has now been transformed into a job lead tool for job seeking customers. Minnesota’s experience with this technology, helped New York State plan their SMART 2010 pilot. One Stop staff submit customer resumes to SMART2010 where they are then “matched” with existing job openings in the New York Job Bank. The SMART 2010 system goes beyond traditional job matching technology. SMART doesn’t focus only on keywords; it understands s the knowledge, skills and abilities that people acquire over their entire work history. SMART then rates the selected job leads (using a five star rating system) and emails these leads directly to the customer’s email in-box. Customers can read a brief description of the job lead and click on a hyperlink that provides additional detail on the job opening.

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NASWA WEBINAR ON ARRA REEMPLOYMENT GRANTS

April 30th Webinar: Approaches to Obligating Reemployment Funds by September 30, 2010

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Utah: RES Technology Upgrade Project

Integrating Unemployment Insurance and Employment Services IT systems is an excellent way for states to spend their Recovery Act RES funds. Such integration can enhance the work of both services and yield tremendous benefits through shared access to relevant information about clients. I’m writing today to let you know how we’ve done this system integration in Utah and how we’ve overcome obstacles along the way. Our RES Technology Upgrade Project has been developed over the course of 2009 and 2010, and it has required hard work and critical thinking. The process began in January 2009, when I attended the “Re-Employment Works!” Summit in Baltimore, Maryland. Ideas were discussed there about how to integrate Unemployment Insurance (UI) and Employment Services (ES). The conversations ranged from technical integration to brick and mortar integration. The merits of self-service delivery verses face-to-face service delivery were also actively debated.

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Enterprising States: Creating Jobs, Economic Development and Prosperity in Challenging Times

The National Chamber Foundation has partnered with the American Free Enterprise. Dream Big. campaign to spur the creation of 20 million jobs in the next decade – restoring the 7 million jobs lost to the current recession, and creating the 13 million new jobs that our growing nation will need in the next 10 years. Each individual state will play a pivotal role in achieving this goal by creating the conditions for competition, innovation, and productivity through a focus on education and training, science and technology and infrastructure. Enterprise-friendly policies at the state level can facilitate local job growth by championing entrepreneurship and mobilizing effective partnerships for improving the conditions for business and job growth. Our study connects the success of free enterprise to our nation’s economy by correlating key policy inputs and best practices in state-driven economic development with job creation and other substantive economic outputs. Brief case studies of each state highlight policies and strategies that work. From the interviews we conducted for these case studies, it is clear that the states are making job creation a high priority, and are implementing meaningful changes in their approaches to job creation. While this varies by state, there is a renewed focus on creating more favorable conditions for business growth.

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Enterprising States: Creating Jobs, Economic Development and Prosperity in Challenging Times

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No End in Sight: The Agony of Prolonged Unemployment

Despite positive signs of economic growth and a rising stock market, millions of unemployed American workers see no end to the Great Recession that wrecked their finances and threw their lives into turmoil. A new nationwide survey conducted in March 2010 of more than 900 workers who were jobless in August 2009 documents their continuing struggle to find jobs and the sacrifices they have endured in a punishing economy. The report, entitled No End in Sight: The Agony of Prolonged Unemployment, was prepared by professors Carl Van Horn and Cliff Zukin of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, a research and policy center at Rutgers University. The report is based on a six-month follow-up survey with the national scientific sample of unemployed Americans reported in the Heldrich Center's widely acclaimed Anguish of Unemployment report released in September 2009. Seventy-six percent of those interviewed in August 2009 were re-interviewed by Knowledge Networks of Menlo Park, California between March 10 and 23 of this year. No End in Sight underscores that positive growth in the nation's economy has done little to reach millions of skilled workers still adrift in the most severe period of prolonged joblessness in decades. According to Professor Van Horn, the study's co-author: "Despite recent signs that the worst phase of the Great Recession may be behind us, the vast majority of jobless Americans have not found new jobs. When they did find work, most took pay cuts and/or lost benefits. Among those still searching for work -- many for more than a year -- are millions who have never been without a job and who have at least a college education. The inability of these job seekers to find new opportunities is an economic and cultural disaster."

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Making the Most of Our Reemployment Services Grants

When Congress included $250 million for Reemployment Services (RES) in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s (ARRA), we knew it was a great opportunity to reinvigorate one of the public workforce system’s most vital functions. Since February 2009, states have made a variety of innovative investments to meet the urgent challenge of reemploying millions of Americans – from mobile RES units, to new skill assessment tools, to integrated information management systems that support the seamless delivery of reemployment services to all job seekers. Through our travels to regional conferences and our conversations with you, we have learned of the steady progress toward our goal of system integration and transformation.

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Transitional Jobs: Background, Program Models, and Evaluation Evidence

The budget for the U.S. Department of Labor for Fiscal Year 2010 includes a total of $45 million to support and study transitional jobs. This paper describes the origins of the transitional jobs models that are operating today, reviews the evidence on the effectiveness of this approach and other subsidized employment models, and offers some suggestions regarding the next steps for program design and research. The paper was produced for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by MDRC as part of the Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ project, which includes two random assignment evaluations of transitional jobs programs. Transitional jobs programs provide temporary, wage-paying jobs, support services, and job placement help to individuals who have difficulty getting and holding jobs in the regular labor market. Although recent evaluation results have raised doubts about whether TJ programs, as currently designed, are an effective way to improve participants’ long-term employment prospects, the studies have also confirmed that TJ programs can be operated at scale, can create useful work opportunities for very disadvantaged people, and can lead to critical indirect impacts such as reducing recidivism among former prisoners. Thus, in drawing lessons from the recent results, the paper argues that it may be important to think more broadly about the goals of TJ programs while simultaneously testing new strategies that may produce better long-term employment outcomes.