Broken Links in the Workforce Development System: The Social-Human Development Need for Assessing Psychological Self-Sufficiency

Abstract

The broken links in the U.S. workforce development system is that it focuses largely on bringing economic actors together to invest in education and training as inputs and to generate job match results as outputs in an employers’ market. Integrating Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory with psychological self-sufficiency (PSS) as a bottom-up system recreating process through productive practices of human actors is examined. The purpose of the study was to examine how the change in PSS affects one’s later stage economic self-sufficiency (ESS) outcome in workforce development. The study sample consisted of 350 low-income jobseekers from a U.S. federally funded health care career pathway education and training program called the Health Profession Opportunity Grant (HPOG). A multiple regression analysis found that PSS positively affects ESS while controlling for other sociodemographic variables. These findings guide the policymakers and service providers to invest more resources in building a culture of PSS to relink the workforce development system. We develop a case for assessing PSS to inform humanistic human resource development and management in helping individuals to switch from barriers to hope to achieve career goals in their lives. We propose further agenda for PSS research to be applied in industry-based employee engagement.

Transforming Impossible into Possible (TIP) for Financial Capability: Application of Practice-Based Program Theory and Measures in Intervention Design

“…By normalizing barriers-whether they be structural or individual-as those that everyone experiences in one's goal-directed journey, a noncognitive forward movement naturally forms to make the goal achievement process a true, intrinsic, and purposeful one (Hong, 2016a;2016b;. Reflecting on the desired state as being possible, the feeling of worth and capability generates the actions that one can sustain-an authentic self-sufficiency process (Hong et al, 2020c;2020d;2022a). By doing or initiating hope actions, more calming sets in during its iterative process of tackling the perceived barriers and taking further hope actions toward goals.…”

Transforming Opportunities into Productivity (TOP): A New Social Development Model for Social Transformation

“…The new problem definition is illustrated in the bottom boxes in Figure 2. PSS at the individual level (PSS-I) represents an appropriate response to psychological barriers to help jobseekers reach economic self-sufficiency within the employer-defined workforce development system-referred to as being plagued by "broken links" in the system (Hong, Holland, Park, & Kim, 2023). Based on the human-centered theory and metrics of PSS-I process that originated from community participants in job training programs, one can link the longitudinal PSS-I data to various holistic HSD outcomes that are related to workforce development-for example, youth empowerment, fatherhood, motherhood, and family strengthening, health promotion, behavioral/mental health strengthening, substance use prevention and treatment, housing for homeless and under-housed, second chance citizen reentry, veterans well-being, employee engagement, violence prevention, etc.…”

“…PSS-I has been found to strengthen career pathways and financial capability in workforce development programs delivered by Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act one-stop career centers and other contracted job readiness training programs (Hong, Holland et al, 2023;Hong, O'Brien et al, 2019;Hong, Wathen, Shin, Yoon, & Park, 2022). Also, PSS-I has been applied and tested among the summer youth employment program participants and was found to explain what may be inside the "black box" of how vulnerable youth become empowered to reach their goals .…”