Partnerships for a Skilled Workforce, Inc.

The target population is low-income individuals of all ages who face challenges in securing the education and employment they need to support their families. Our vision is young people who want to work do, reversing the trend of declining youth employment rates. Our vision is that people who have been unemployed for months and years re-enter the labor market in well paying jobs. Goal One: Integrate work and learning in high schools to expand jobs for high school students. Goal Two: Support the re-entry of the long-term unemployed by transforming the one-stop career system to deepen relationships with employers and advocate for their customers. Goal Three: Work with higher education to ensure that graduates have the qualifications required by employers. Goal Four: Erase literacy deficits among low-income health care workers to enable them to succeed in professional post-secondary programs. Success is defined by completion of education programs at both the secondary and post-secondary levels and by employment.

Objective one. Work with the classroom teachers to develop units where students apply classroom learning in a company or community project. A pilot at the Marlborough STEM Early College High School will be the first step. All students in those classes will work. Objective two. Strengthen the ability of the career centers to place the long-term unemployed (LTU) in jobs by ensuring that the career specialists and staff responsible for working with business work as a team, and that their performance is measured by the number of jobs that are the result of staff identifying jobs for which the candidates meet the qualifications and sell the applicant to the employer. This would be a move toward the talent or staffing agency model from the case management model--a model shown by current research to be effective.Objective three. Through internships and on-the-job training allow job seekers to demonstrate value to companies, overcoming the too frequent discrimination against people who have been out of work for a long period of time. Again, successful programs make extensive use of work experience. Objective four. Improve the literacy and numeracy of front-line health care workers by expanding access to the Health Care Learning Network--a web-based, instructor facilitated college preparatory program contextualized to health care--through the state Adult and Community Learning Services. Since its inception in the fall of 2007, almost 600 people have enrolled and over one-third have matriculated into post-secondary education. (Because HCLN has been funded by term-limited grants, follow-up has been limited.)

PSW has a decade-long track record in (1) the development of sector approaches to address unmet industry needs in health care and companies with high concentrations of technology workers and (2) the development of paid internships for high school students. Staff know how to work with industry.PSW also has extensive experience building education and business coalitions. In addition to the two mentioned above, work has begun with the information technology industry and the community colleges to revise and expand the STEM departments to meet the needs for computer science, IT and data security personnel.

A primary responsibility of the Board of Directors is oversight of the one-stop career center system. The result is a new business plan to be implemented in FY15 focusing on the direct placement of individuals in jobs and on relationships with employers. $1.3 million is available for industry sector work and federal Workforce Investment Act funds are available to support the transformation of career centers.