Workforce Development

The High Growth Job Training Initiative (HGJTI) was a national grant program administered by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), Employment and Training Administration (ETA). Between 2001 and 2007, more than 160 grants were awarded to establish industry-focused job training and related projects designed to meet the industry’s workforce challenges. This report is the third and final in a series from the national evaluation of the HGJTI conducted by the Urban Institute, the Institute for Policy Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and Capital Research Corporation. This report documents the national initiative, describes the structure and implementation of projects by selected grantees, and provides nonexperimental analysis of the early impacts of job training in selected HGJTI-funded programs. The analysis relies on a review of grant applications and quarterly reports; visits to nine selected grantee sites; data collected from grantee training programs; quarterly earnings data from state unemployment insurance wage records; and administrative data from state and local public workforce system agencies.

To improve the employment rates and earnings of Americans workers, we need to create more-coherent and more-effective education and workforce development systems, focusing primarily (though not exclusively) on disadvantaged youth and adults, and with education and training more clearly targeted towards firms and sectors that provide good-paying jobs. This paper proposes a new set of competitive grants from the federal government to states that would fund training partnerships between employers in key industries, education providers, workforce agencies, and intermediaries at the state level, plus a range of other supports and services. The grants would especially reward the expansion of programs that appear successful when evaluated with randomized controlled trial (RCT) techniques. The evidence suggests that these grants could generate benefits that are several times larger than their costs, including higher earnings and lower unemployment rates among the disadvantaged.

New York launched a pilot employment program to help parents behind in their child support in four communities between 2006 and 2009. The program was part of the state's Strengthening Families Through Stronger Fathers Initiative. Our evaluation found that the program's combination of employment assistance, case management, and other support services substantially increased the earnings and child support payments of disadvantaged parents who were not meeting their child support obligations.

This brief provides information on what we as a country can do about unemployment by drawing together information presented in three UI forums about ways to jumpstart the job market, how younger and older workers are faring in and after the recession, and how the safety net needs to be retooled in times of high unemployment.

Senior Fellow Demetra Smith Nightingale answers five questions about workforce development policy—how it’s evolved, when it's most effective, and what policymakers can do to improve job training and education. The Obama administration has emphasized community colleges' key role in workforce development and the need to forge partnerships between community colleges and employers to better train future workers.

The Women's Foundation and the Urban Institute co-sponsored a Stepping Stones Research Briefing, featuring two panels touching on issues of affordability, homeownership, and rental assistance through the continuing housing crisis and the role of training, work, earnings and savings in building economic security for low-income, women-headed families.

This paper explores the reasons why employer partnerships are important for improving economic outcomes for both low-skill workers and businesses. It identifies the factors that have hindered the growth of these partnerships as well as promising approaches-incumbent worker training and sectoral training-to build partnerships. It concludes with a discussion of policy considerations for creating and sustaining partnerships with employers to provide skill development opportunities.

From 2006 to 2010, the OECD reviewed the youth labor markets in 16 countries, including the United States. After diagnosing each country’s situation, a new OECD report reviews what worked and what did not to help youth get off to a good start in the labor market, and makes country-specific recommendations for improving young people's employment prospects. This synthesis also provides a wealth of promising practices that countries have implemented in recent years, partly in response to the jobs crisis but also to tackle long-standing structural weaknesses in youth education, training, and labor market policies.