Career Pathways Colleagues,
If your adult basic skills program or adult school is located in an urban area, and in many cases even if it is not, you may be part of a local workforce system. If you don't know what that is, you may want to, especially with the changes you can expect to see under WIOA. Your program's success, perhaps its continued existence, may depend on your understanding what that system is, whom it serves and how, and how to partner with other components of your local workforce system. If this is all new to you, there is a terrific, easy to read, Urban Institute primer on this, Understanding Local Workforce Systems.
Even if you are familiar with your local workforce system this may be a useful check for completeness of your understanding. Of course the primer is generic, and your particular local workforce system may not look exactly like what it describes, but it should help you better understand local workforce systems, and perhaps to better understand your local variations on the theme.
Thanks to Cynthia Zafft for pointing out this primer.
David J. Rosen
Moderator, Program Management, and Technology and Learning CoPs