As we’ve been considering how our work should evolve in our changing ecosystem and workforce landscape, we’ve decided to re-engage with two partnerships:
1) We are in the process of developing a performance dashboard, populated with both macroeconomic data (such as the number of open jobs, and the number of jobseekers, across Greater Cleveland) and performance data from our grantee partners, who are doing the work to prepare the jobseekers for those open jobs. We are thrilled with the prospect of being able to see the pace of progress and determine if and how to respond based on this data. Many thanks to our regional partner TeamNEO, whose analytics team is one of the best in the state. TeamNEO will be pulling the macroeconomic data as well as aligning the data with many of its other reports, including the jobs demand/supply report Aligning Opportunities. Thank you Team NEO!
Also of note in this initiative is the commitment of many practitioners in the workforce development space, as well as many workforce funders, to align around common metrics to measure performance. This seemingly “administrative” action may sound inconsequential, but in truth, having alignment across the entire system as to the performance measures which will really drive impact – that is transformative. We are now all driving towards the same activities and impact, together.
2) We are also in the process of better understanding the flow of public workforce funds in greater Cleveland, including the funds which come from Federal sources as well as Statewide sources through some of our local agencies. We also want to understand the intentions, and related restrictions, on each of these sources of funds, and where there might be additional pockets of public funding which may help to achieve our goals. The Center for Community Solutions will be searching databases, pulling information, and using their deep understanding of policy analysis to help us uncover new opportunities for more support of all kinds (funding or administrative opportunities) for workforce in greater Cleveland. Thank you to the Center team!
Hold us accountable. Ask us how this work is going in the coming days!!! We certainly plan to share the report and the dashboard. More to come.
P.S. Speaking of how the work is going, we are also expecting an update to the WorkAdvance analysis, reflecting additional years of results after the initial WorkAdvance report. This initial report, from 2017, summarized a groundbreaking test-and-control study undertaken across 4 U.S. markets (including NEO). It showed definitively that workforce training is more effective in every way – in helping someone gain actionable skills, secure a job, and keep that job – when the job seeker has access to coordinated, comprehensive skills training, career coaching and supportive services (these are all different things and are often not coordinated or comprehensive). If you have time, please read this report– or at least the introduction – to see why the data proves some of the strategies we have undertaken since then. We believe the TeamNEO work and the Center work outlined above can have a similar impact on our understanding and related direction.