Partnering with Workforce Development Boards to Improve Outcomes for Underserved Workers: Insights from ECMC Group EIF Knowledge Sharing Convening

This article was originally published on LinkedIn.

ECMC Group’s Education Impact Fund (EIF) is a $250M+ mission-driven impact fund investing across the postsecondary and workforce landscape in high-impact solutions that remove barriers to quality education and improve economic outcomes for underserved learners and workers. In addition to capital, our fund is committed to accelerating the impact of our portfolio by providing access to resources that increase their collective knowledge, supporting strategic projects to measure and articulate impact, and establishing spaces for collaboration within our network.

As part of that effort, we recently convened our portfolio companies and workforce development leaders from Wisconsin and Ohio for a candid forum to surface common challenges and successful approaches, and identify opportunities to partner more effectively to reach underserved learners. This convening offered an opportunity to learn directly from workforce development leaders, who provided insights on the unique challenges hidden workers face and shared feedback on how to augment workforce development initiatives.

Participating companies represented a myriad of innovative solutions such as work-integrated learning and simulation-based training to serve diverse populations including justice-impacted individuals, the blind and visually impaired, and skilled trades workers. The common through line for each company was the massive potential that local workforce boards present as a channel to deliver quality outcomes to their end users. But as was made clear during the discussion, successfully working through this channel requires thoughtfulness, intentionality, and a fit-for-purpose approach to business development.

Case in point: As technology continues to drive a structural change in the labor market, capital needs to flow toward the scalable workforce development partnerships that center the worker and have an eye toward long-term outcomes.

The Current Workforce Development Landscape 
According to the Future of Jobs Report by the World Economic Forum (2023), less than half of workers have access to training opportunities necessary for a successful transition into the jobs being created by the A.I. revolution. Lack of advancement opportunities make it difficult for employers to retain their entry-level and frontline workers, and as result, has created a persistent skills shortage across the nation. Though research confirms the benefits of a skills-based hiring strategy, employers are still reliant on traditional credentials that filter out hidden worker populations and those with alternative credentials. This eliminates over 60% of the working-age population and creates barriers to high-quality employment, feeding a vicious cycle that only perpetuates inequalities across the workforce and limit economic production.

While significant workforce development dollars are pointed toward solving these issues, there is an opportunity to leverage innovative technology and training models to deploy them more effectively. Today, most workforce development funds are spent on overhead (23%), staff (32%), and supportive services (9%), with only 22% going directly towards training. Local workforce development organizations and their staff work diligently to serve all members of their communities, tackling challenges from language barriers to transportation issues. However, they are consistently overburdened and have limited bandwidth to prioritize innovation over execution, which often inhibits new approaches to workforce development from taking hold. The workforce development ecosystem is also highly fragmented, making ‘grass-tops’ strategies very difficult to execute and necessitating local, on the ground relationship building.

Overcoming the Challenges of Workforce Development
To uncover new approaches to scaling workforce development initiative, the convening included a panel discussion and breakout sessions, where the workforce development leaders and companies aligned on ways to circumvent the issues facing workforce development boards. Key takeaways include:

1. Designing products and business development efforts to seamlessly integrate into WFB processes and workflows is critical. Reducing the administrative burden for staff can have an outsized impact on product adoption.
2. Reporting on metrics that are aligned to stated WFB objectives and emphasize outcomes for WFB clients is a must for scaling and sustaining engagements.
3. Working top-down to track national and state funding will help zero in on local organizations that have the best impact-alignment. Private funders (e.g., foundations) can increase the pool of unrestricted capital local boards have to invest in their communities, however not all boards are seeking this type of funding.
4. Partnering with public spaces that reach all individuals such as libraries can minimize overhead costs and maximize the impact of programming.
5. Facilitating consortia and partnerships with local stakeholders, such as education, training, and skills-based institutions can build momentum and help scale and sustain workforce development programming in communities.
6. WFB staff are looking for training, events, and other educational opportunities to help them stay relevant and up to speed on the latest technologies and tools to serve their clients. 

Looking Forward 
As our nation ramps up investments in the workforce and prioritizes skill development, we see increased opportunities for private-public partnership to redefine the way we train, place, and retain workers. Whether addressing the youth skills movement by providing access to training and supports necessary for ensuring they persist toward employment, or supporting working parents that need flexibility to obtain the credentials necessary for living-wage careers, our nation needs new models that ensure all workers benefit from an evolving economy. In turn, new ventures that are developing innovative approaches to training and supporting learners and workers in partnership with workforce development organizations need patient capital and investors that are willing to prioritize investing in the product and reporting capabilities needed to adequately reach these learners and unlock the significant workforce funding that is available.

We are grateful to the portfolio companies and workforce development leaders that participated in this event and candidly shared their experiences launching and scaling workforce development initiatives. We are also thankful for our partners at Gener8tor Skills who helped us coordinate the event. Going forward, our EIF is excited to continue convening mission-aligned companies and leaders that expand our collective understanding of the challenges facing workers throughout the nation and support our collective impact goals.