Moving Beyond ‘Train and Pray’

An in-depth look at Gina Raimondo’s playbook for business-led workforce training, which merges economic development with mobility and has bipartisan backing. Also, a look at how one Commerce-led jobs program is playing out in Nebraska, a podcast interview with a CHIPS official, and a recently launched expert blog series on nondegree credential quality.

New Playbook for Workforce Development

The federal government made an unprecedented bet on manufacturing and job creation during the Biden administration. The U.S. Department of Commerce has played a lead role in shepherding this industrial policy push and is spending $70B on a novel approach to regional competitiveness that links economic development with workforce development.

The stakes are high for the surge of federal investments, which seek to bolster both economic and national security. Resulting benefits for working families will be measured in decades, not years, administration officials say. Some of the programs also face an uncertain future under a Republican-led government and could be reshaped or even cut back.

Yet many experts think the Commerce Department’s $2.9B workforce development strategy offers an enduring playbook for how to bring supply and demand together through employer-led coalitions that prepare workers for rewarding careers—an estimated 125K jobs under the CHIPS and Science Act alone.

“We're not here to do ‘train and pray,’” says Rachel Lipson, a senior policy advisor at the Commerce Department’s CHIPS for America. “We want to and need to focus on job placement. That’s the most important metric.”

(Here are new fact sheets from the department on regional competitiveness and on CHIPS and the semiconductor workforce.)

Real Jobs: The various Commerce investments in the workforce have different goals. But all of them are place-based, locally designed, and focused on economic mobility as well as growth. The blueprint for industry-specific spending, broad regional partnerships, and a data-driven focus on ROI and jobs aligns with a growing consensus about how to do workforce education and training right, with lessons that apply at the federal, state, and local levels.

“Without the workforce, there is no economic strategy,” says Kevin Gallagher, who was a senior advisor to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, serving as her top aide on workforce until last February.

Even so, workforce education and training wasn’t always a top priority for the Commerce Department. Several past and present department officials say that changed with programs like the Build Back Better Regional Challenge and the 2022 creation of the Good Jobs Challenge, through which Commerce’s U.S. Economic Development Agency awarded $500M in grants to colleges, employers, and state and regional agencies to work together on job training. 

The coordination challenges the department has faced are enormous. Under CHIPS alone, Commerce has awarded more than $33B to back the construction of 17 new semiconductor fabrication facilities, with about 119 football fields’ worth of “clean room” space—all for a type of manufacturing that hasn’t existed in this country for decades.

“These companies make semiconductors. They’re not education experts,” says Scott Jensen, director of workforce strategy for CHIPS. “Without doing something different, it’s not an exaggeration to say there’s not going to be a workforce.”

Avoiding a Mess: Raimondo has drawn heavily from her time as Rhode Island’s governor. Both Gallagher and Jensen worked with her on workforce development in the state.

That experience has been particularly useful in figuring out the right balance for administering workforce grants, says Jensen. Government agencies shouldn’t just dole out money and walk away, or micromanage the process.

“There really needs to be a partnership that moves with the business cycle,” he says, with a necessary amount of front-end requirements on data collection. “Rhode Island does it this way. We learned the hard way that this is how you do it.”

Commerce was able to build on its previous workforce efforts, including those during the Obama and previous Trump administrations. And the agency tapped its strength with data from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Even so, past and present Commerce officials say Raimondo deserves a lot of credit for the playbook that emerged, and the bipartisan support it’s earned.

“That certainly wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t part of Secretary Raimondo’s core belief that you can’t have economic development without a workforce strategy,” says Gallagher.

Hiring Commitments and What’s Next: Any attempt to prepare working Americans for good jobs requires a strong role for employers. Yet it’s hard to develop deep, durable partnerships between companies and community colleges or other training providers, and the sort of coalitions that are necessary to do regional workforce development at scale remain rare.

Better engagement through advisory boards or other connections isn’t enough, Gallagher says. “We also need employers to commit to hiring these folks.”

That’s particularly complicated for small and midsize employers, which may recruit just a few workers at a time. As a result, Rhode Island has leaned on trade groups and other organizations that can help to aggregate the employer voice while developing and customizing workforce strategies. Raimondo’s team has brought that approach to the federal government.

Whether these promising tactics will continue under the second Trump administration is anyone’s guess. But some observers are cautiously optimistic. For one thing, industrial policy and its anticipated boost to regional economies and jobs are benefiting red states and congressional districts, perhaps more so than their blue state counterparts.

Likewise, Congress has endorsed the principles of the Good Jobs Challenge, recently including the program in annual appropriations. Commerce officials also point to the reauthorization last month of the U.S. Economic Development Administration, through which Congress backed EDA’s core functions. 

The Kicker: “Universally, we can agree that the goal of workforce development programs is to support workers getting good jobs,” says Gallagher.

Click over to Work Shift for a deep dive on the Commerce Department’s take on workforce development during the Biden administration, and for reporting on how Build Back Better has played out in states like Nebraska. In addition, The Cusp podcast features this new episode with Rachel Lipson.

The Real Deal on Nondegree Credentials

As readers of this newsletter know, we don’t have enough information about the quality of nondegree credentials. Rutgers University’s Education and Employment Research Center is a top authority on the nondegree space, which is poised to receive major public investments.

Work Shift recently began publishing The Real Deal, a blog series from the center’s Michelle Van Noy and Tom Hilliard. They’re exploring what nondegree quality looks like, how to measure it, and what would count as success in improving quality. Van Noy and Hilliard also are describing the people, organizations, and agencies that nurture the quality of nondegree credentials.

For example, the latest post digs into the complexity of quality, which means different things to different stakeholders across the spectrum of nondegree credentials. The piece also describes the role of key influencers in a complex ecosystem. Stay tuned for future takes on these cutting-edge issues.

Open Tabs

Enrollment Projections
The enrollment of first-year college students increased last fall, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center announced, correcting its earlier estimate of a 5% decline. The center said it mislabeled some students as dual enrolled, leading to an undercounting of first-year students. James Kvaal, under secretary at the U.S. Department of Education, said the department was encouraged and relieved by the updated data.

Tech and Jobs
The global labor market is being reshaped by technology, the clean energy transition, and economic and demographic shifts, leading to the creation of a projected 170M new jobs this decade, with 92M being eliminated, according to a World Economic Forum report based on a survey of 1K+ employers. Frontline roles like construction workers and delivery drivers will see big growth, as will nurses. Clerical and administrative workers will see the largest decline.

HELP Committee
Senator Bill Cassidy was officially seated as the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Cassidy, a physician and Louisiana Republican, was previously the committee’s ranking member. He has backed a bill to expand Pell Grant eligibility to shorter-term workforce programs and supported a failed attempt to reauthorize the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act.

HVAC Scholarships
With heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning jobs expected to be in high demand, Johnson Controls has invested $15M in a workforce partnership with 30 community colleges, reports Ellen Ullman for Community College Daily. The program seeks to engage students from underrepresented groups, including through scholarships and hands-on training. Colleges also have used the grants to overhaul HVAC programs—Henry Ford College condensed a two-year curriculum into 10 months.

Policy Predictions
Congress will pass a reauthorization of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act by the end of 2025, predicts Lewis-Burke Associates, a D.C.-based government relations firm. Also anticipated is the introduction this year of a bicameral legislative AI package, which would build off the final report from a House task force on AI. The package likely would address AI literacy, education and training resources in K-12, as well as workforce development.

Job Moves
Keith Sonderling has been tapped as the deputy secretary of labor, President-elect Trump announced. A lawyer and former commissioner at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Sonderling served in several roles at the Labor Department’s wage and hour division during the first Trump administration.

Adam Leonard will lead the analytics and insights practice in the Workforce Center of Excellence from Natcast.org, a nonprofit that operates the National Semiconductor Technology Center under the CHIPS and Science Act. Leonard is the chief analytics officer and data evangelist for the Texas Workforce Commission.

Gregory Haile is the founding lead partner for the new higher education and workforce advisory practice at Strategos Group, an education consulting firm. He previously was president of Broward College, departing in 2023 after a five-year stint.

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