How can workforce agencies overcome these challenges?
Some of the key changes will include becoming more stakeholder-focused, stripping out complexity to make processes simple and efficient, developing best-of-breed curricula that meet the needs of tomorrow’s workforce and creating a unified experience for residents to find various types of support along their career journeys.
The future of workforce services puts people first
To better meet constituent needs, workforce agencies should pivot from being a safety net to a sought-after resource for career development, reskilling and new employment opportunities.
States have a vested interest in supporting their constituents, a healthy workforce also means increased tax revenue, economic growth and a boost to attracting the best employers and workforce to the state. By focusing on modernizing workforce development services, states can also realize performance gains through process efficiencies, cost savings and interagency collaboration.
States will need to adapt their services to meet the needs of today’s workforce. They will need to help close the technical skills gap, starting with less-educated workers who are at risk of sinking below the poverty line, and moving upstream to serve a broader range of constituents who are looking to reskill to stay relevant in a rapidly changing job market.
Employers will continue to value employees with relevant training and certifications as more employers reexamine their historic mandate for four-year degrees in a world where workers need to focus on lifelong learning to stay relevant.
Shifting from being a resource of last resort to a connected employment journey
Today, a constituent’s engagement with unemployment and workforce development services begins when they lose their job. Services are siloed, with constituents at first filing an unemployment insurance claim. At the same time, in some states, they might be asked to complete an application for workforce development services as a prerequisite to accessing unemployment relief. In the current state journey, access to employment and reskilling services becomes just another barrier to receiving funds rather than an integrated, supportive experience.
The ideal future state we envision for states is one in which they play a much larger and connected role in the lives of their constituents. States need to consider the full career journey of a citizen and seek to play a supportive role in as many phases as possible, to be viewed as a trusted partner rather than an outpost to be visited at the lowest point of their career path.
States can start to engage young learners as early as middle school by exposing them to career options through services such as guidance counseling and engaging in the myriad of web-based learning tools available. By secondary school, students benefit from sessions on financial literacy, including budgeting access to state financial aid, school housing and job search assistance. Many states have even located their “One-Stop Centers” or career centers in high schools for direct career counseling, classes on building resumes, effective interviews and salary negotiations. By establishing a bond with students from a young age, workforce agencies will be more likely to be viewed as a partner of choice and a familiar resource as they continue to progress in their careers.
Modernizing the reemployment experience through workforce support
Playing a more connected role in constituents’ lives will require a technological leap forward for most workforce development agencies. Constituents have been conditioned through years of interactions with commercial e-commerce platforms and digital consumer services to expect seamless, pain-free interactions and transactions. Today’s enrollment and case management processes at states tend to be paper based, in person and manual, creating numerous pain points for constituents.
These include confusion about the enrollment process and eligibility requirements, advocacy that is program-oriented rather than citizen-oriented, and time-consuming processes requiring multiple, in-person visits to agency offices. While some degree of in-person and paper-based services is required today to support low-income workers with limited access to technology, as the digital divide is bridged, consumer-grade digital services will be increasingly expected.
Workforce agencies should look to accelerate the modernization of their systems to meet citizen expectations and improve their service levels. This means both designing user experiences for onboarding and case management that are simple and intuitive, while also building a flexible and scalable back-end architecture to reduce long-term costs and accelerate future enhancements.
Architectures that leverage contemporary design standards, such as the use of microservices and select best-of-breed vendors to support modules such as data management, identity management, learning management and content management, will stand a better chance of being able to pivot quickly to match the speed of change in the jobs market. Advantages of this style of architecture include enhanced integration with third parties that allows for faster deployment of new services, data interoperability and functional modules that can be repurposed and extended rather than rebuilt (reducing the cost of maintenance), and the ability to offer data-driven recommendations that are smart and personalized.
The future: a connected employment journey
Interactions begin with positive support across a lifetime and provide an integrated reemployment experience to intelligently map skills and accelerate re-entry into the workforce.
