Promoting the Adoption of Sector Strategies by Workforce Development Boards Under WIOA shares key insights from five workforce development boards across the country that have successfully implemented sector strategies.
What is a Sector Strategy?
A sector strategy is a partnership of employers within a critical industry that brings to get her education, economic development, workforce systems, and community organizations to identify and collaboratively meet the workforce needs of that industry within a regional labor market.
How Do Sector Strategies Affect What a Workforce Board Does?
Sector strategies represent a new way for workforce boards to conduct business: moving from a program administration and oversight focus to a more strategic role building regional talent pipelines, addressing skill gaps, and creating meaningful career pathways for a range of workers in important regional industries.
Lessons from the five workforce boards include:
- Involving employers in a structured and continuous manner, instead of a sporadic process, to keep them engaged in local workforce efforts;
- Examining ways to blend resources from a variety of local, state and federal funding streams;
- Developing relationships with direct service providers to assist with child care, transportation, housing and other barriers that job seekers might face; and
- Using unemployment insurance wage data to track participant outcomes as workers move through the labor market.