We are thrilled to share the news that the Cuyahoga County Workforce Funders Group, a public-private partnership that unveiled a $2.5 million commitment in 2018 to support workforce system realignment, has chosen RITE, the tech talent arm of the Greater Cleveland Partnership (GCP) to lead the Workforce Connect Information Technology (IT) Sector Partnership. GCP RITE will work together with employers and job seekers in Cuyahoga County to build a diverse, highly skilled IT talent pipeline for an industry critical to our region and employers in need of talent. The IT Sector Partnership with GCP RITE is the third of three sector partnerships for Workforce Connect. The Healthcare Sector Partnership with Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) was announced in September 2019, and the first was announced in December 2018, with MAGNET and the Greater Cleveland Partnership being selected to implement the Manufacturing Sector Partnership. Workforce Connect is an important building block in Cuyahoga County’s overall workforce development ecosystem that will help support employers in finding the right skilled talent.
Why Sector Partnerships?
DF is proud to have led the Workforce Funders Group that launched Workforce Connect. This work is core to the changes we are working towards, namely a significant increase in the number of individuals earning family-sustaining wages, particularly people of color; a significant reduction in the supply of jobs that are unfilled due to a shortage of suitable candidates, and improved collaboration, coordination, and impact within the workforce development ecosystem.
Sector partnerships, like the one that GCP RITE has just been chosen to lead, are mechanisms for coalescing labor demand from a group of employers. They are nationally tested workforce development best practices, and a departure from the ways in which our community previously operated. Before Workforce Connect, job seeker-serving organizations had to go employer to employer, seeking information about labor needs and hiring trends, and then respond on their own timeline by preparing candidates whom they hope might be hired by the individual employer(s) from whom input was initially sought. Though Cuyahoga County has several strong organizations that are excellent at doing this work, it can be inefficient, and job seekers can easily fall through the cracks. The promise of Workforce Connect is that the intermediary organizes a forum through which employers in a certain industry can give collective voice to their talent needs, learn from and leverage each other’s effective hiring and retention practices, and work collaboratively to assure that service providers are delivering candidates that can step successfully into open positions. Sector partnerships are a dual-customer approach, serving both employers and job seekers.
Intermediaries, like GCP RITE, perform backbone functions to manage, support, and facilitate a sector partnership. Those functions include:
- Engaging and convening employers and other partners and stakeholders;
- Developing and sharing data and expertise;
- Coordinating resource development and alignment;
- Coordinating communication both internally and externally about the partnership;
- Linking the partnership’s activities to initiatives and resources of the broader workforce system, including the public system;
- Managing projects, staff/contractors, and budgets related to the partnership’s activities.
Why GCP RITE?
Since its launch in 2009, RITE has worked to provide a sustainable structure for industry, education, workforce and economic development to advance IT employer-driven education and workforce strategies. RITE has already started much of what we need to do for both IT employers and job seekers in our region to have a lasting positive impact. The work of RITE and the Workforce Connect sector partner intermediaries for manufacturing and healthcare is especially critical as Northeast Ohio continues to deal with the economic and unemployment fallout as a result of COVID-19. In 2019, RITE became part of GCP to create a more aligned operating structure and more effective joint initiatives and strategy in support of the Northeast Ohio workforce and CIO engagement in economic development, as well as innovation and commercialization in our region. The integrated structure provides a platform to channel industry leadership and engagement, better connect employers to talent solutions and more aggressively address the region’s most critical talent gaps.
What’s Next?
The Cuyahoga County Workforce Funders Group is comprised of leaders from Cuyahoga County, City of Cleveland, Cleveland Foundation, Deaconess Foundation, Fund for Our Economic Future, Greater Cleveland Partnership, The George Gund Foundation, Cleveland/Cuyahoga County Workforce Development Board, Team NEO and United Way of Greater Cleveland. We’ll continue to work together to support Workforce Connect, as well as pursue an overall goal to achieve systems and structural changes that improve workforce outcomes and close disparities.
Learn more about Workforce Connect.