Learning from the Field: Economic Growth and Workforce Development in the 1990s

Abstract

Although attention to labor market preparation, access, and retention for disadvantaged workers has experienced a dramatic turnaround in the past 6 years for economic and policy reasons, serious challenges remain. Today’s workforce development implies more than employment training in the narrow sense: It means substantial employer engagement, deep community connections, career advancement, integrative human service supports, contextual and industry-driven education and training, reformed community colleges, and connective tissue of networks. This article discusses six areas of workforce development learning: (a) retention and advancement, (b) employer and jobseeker customers, (c) regions and neighborhoods, (d) race and labor markets, (e) best practices and replication, and (f) labor market reform. In addition to inevitable economic downturns, optimism should be tempered by three big challenges: the underlying patterns of wage and income inequality, the persistence of race and gender inequalities, and our historic failure to create effective links between schools and labor markets.

New Frontiers of the Innovation Economy and Education

“…In this respect, traditional workforce development has been problem focused (Blakely and Leigh 2010). Consequently, workforce development has expanded beyond notions of employment, training and development to deal with such issues as transportation and human service support (Giloth 2000).…”

Patchwork Intermediation: Challenges and Opportunities for Regionally Coordinated Workforce Development

“…Implicit in current policy recommendations to expand workforce intermediation is an awareness that individual community colleges are themselves part of a larger, statewide community college system. This suggests the possibility that multiple colleges might coordinate their intermediation efforts in order to extend their reach across the regional labor market (Giloth, 2000). The physical proximity between individual colleges in many states adds additional support to strategy coordination.…”

“…This essentially means that multiple colleges often coexist within the same regional labor market boundary. Still, although cross-college coordination of intermediation services may be the policy ideal, potential governance challenges exist that can undermine such partnerships (Giloth, 2000). Even in states that have more centralized system control, such as North Carolina (Garrett, 1999;Lancaster, 1999), there may be challenges in synchronizing efforts across individual colleges (Alssid et al, 2002;Hughes, 2000).…”

The Knowledge Economy and Entrepreneurial Activities in Technology-Based Economic Development

“…Taiwan has increased its per capita income 192 times in 40 years, and the two major reasons for this increase are education and tax incentives [42]. Giloth [43] suggests that education should be broadly defined to include creation of networks, community connections, and employer engagement. Senter [44] finds that education and infrastructure have positive impact on a state's economic development.…”