The National Skills Coalition (NSC) presented this webinar on September 15, 2015 in partnership with the Commission on Adult Basic Education (COABE). The webinar addressed the current WIOA landscape and discussed opportunities for adult educators to weigh in on implementation issues in their states and localities.

This paper from RTI International outlines key considerations for implementing career pathways strategies and provides a checklist of action items that states or local communities can use to assess the status of their sustainability efforts. It draws from research on change management theory, which has produced strategies for sustaining organizational shifts, and presents lessons learned from states participating in the Advancing Career and Technical Education in State and Local Career Pathways Systems project, a three-year initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education..

This report from the U.S. Departments of Education, Transportation, and Labor indicates that there are likely to be a large number of job openings for high-skill and middle-skill workers across the transportation industry over the next 10 years. The report emphasizes the need for skills training and highlights future growth areas and employment “hot spots” by industry subsectors, occupations, career areas, and geographic areas.

Employers often partner with community colleges in Learn and Earn models of talent development, which integrate important aspects of employment and education to help working learners move along education and career pathways to earning family sustaining wages. This resource from Corporate Voices for Working Families provides resources for business and community college leaders interested in forming similar partnerships. The resource describes different types of partnerships, the keys for successful partnerships, and what both parties have to gain from the partnership.

This resource guide from Jobs for the Future presents working models of successful employer engagement to help education and training providers secure and sustain strategic, long-term, and intensive partnerships with employers. It provides step-by-step tips for practitioners who provide workforce, career, and technical and adult education services.

This brief is part of a series offered by Jobs for the Future, Bridging the Gap: Postsecondary Pathways for Underprepared Learners, to help communities build effective employer-educator partnerships to increase college and career success for underprepared youth and adults.

This report presents findings from two components of the National Implementation Evaluation of the Health Profession Opportunity Grants (HPOG): the Descriptive Implementation Study and the Outcome Study. These two studies address the following two major research questions:

1. How are health profession training programs being implemented across the grantee sites?
2. What individual-level outputs and outcomes occur?

Overall, the two studies found that HPOG programs generally reached their target enrollment levels, and that the majority of participants completed their course(s) of study and found healthcare jobs. However, many of those first jobs after leaving the program were entry-level positions at relatively low-wages. (author abstract)

Mathematica Policy Research is evaluating Pathways to Careers, an innovative employment program for people with disabilities. This webinar, from Mathematica’s Center for Studying Disability Policy, discussed evaluation findings, alignment of the program’s provisions with WIOA, trends in best practices for rehabilitation, and Pathways’ strategies for delivery of services and engagement of employers.