Quality Works
in New York
New York's Workforce
Development System
| James J. McGowan, Commissioner of Labor | Richard P. Mills, Commissioner of Education |
Quality Works
The economic imperative. New York, like every state, faces tremendous economic pressures from the rapid pace of technological change and an increasingly interdependent global economy. But unlike most other states, from an economic perspective, the gross domestic product (GDP) of New York is greater than the country of Canada and contributes 8 percent of the United States' GDP To compete successfully with low-wage countries without a drop in standard of living, New York State must achieve ever-increasing levels of productivity through the widespread use of technology and knowledge. For this strategy to succeed, the State must develop and maintain a highly skilled workforce.
The need for skilled workers. In the long run, raising productivity will increase the competitiveness of New York State's businesses. But business cannot continue to raise productivity without employees who have the necessary skills to work in transformed, high performance workplaces, which require all workers to understand the problem, contribute to the solution, be adaptable and learn new skills, measure quality on a regular basis, and learn from mistakes.
Rigidly defined jobs are being replaced with assignments to quick turn-around projects where employees work in teams. The majority of new jobs require some postsecondary education. Moreover, workers will be compelled to make multiple career decisions, including changing careers, throughout their lives; they will need lifelong learning to remain employable. In this context, workforce development assumes immense importance for the economic well-being of the State and of the individuals who are the workforce.
Creating a seamless educational and training system. The system charged with teaching skills to emerging and current workers has come to be known as the "workforce development system." This system is actually made up of many systems (e.g., education, job training, vocational education, worker retraining) that adhere to their own standards and ways of doing business. This lack of integration of systems that seek the same outcome & building the skills of the workforce & makes current workforce development efforts ineffective and inefficient for most jobseekers and employers.
Meeting employers' needs. To date, policy and programming has focused on the supply side of workforce preparation, improving the skills of current and future workers. Almost no attention has been paid to the demand side & what it takes for businesses to thrive, grow, and create jobs. Linkages with economic development have been sporadic or nonexistent. Yet, the fact is that when business is productive and successful, workers benefit from greater opportunity, increased wages, and a higher standard of living.
Reengineering the system. The challenge is clear. The new workforce development system must become demand-side driven: responding to business's need for qualified workers based on the skills required for economic competitiveness; creating a labor exchange function that is easy to use; changing relationships with the employer community in radical ways; and making employment and training services a competitive enterprise.
To do this, it will be necessary to restructure the way the State and localities plan and manage public workforce development efforts. The skill levels of large segments of the citizenry require significant upgrading. The disparity between the resources required and the resources available is a critical issue.
The public dollars traditionally devoted to workforce preparation are insufficient to meet this challenge. This is unlikely to change. Therefore, those public dollars will have to be spent more efficiently to produce greatly improved results, which must be measured and reported to the public through local "report cards." Until this happens, the private sector business community will lack the necessary confidence in local workforce development efforts to consider coordinating, much less integrating, their private funds with the overall local workforce development strategies.
In the fall of 1996, the New York State Department of Labor (NYSDOL) and the New York State Education Department (SED) agreed to create a state-level partnership to build consensus and support for an integrated workforce development system for New York State. As a first step, SED and NYSDOL identified these key issues for exploration:
The membership of the teams was comprised of local and state leaders from all segments of workforce development: employment and training, economic development, education, employers, labor, and social services. While each Design Team examined the workforce development process through the lens of a single key issue, observations from one area often overlapped other issue areas.
At the end of six months, approximately 700 people had participated in 51 focus groups across the State. Each team then presented its findings and recommendations for implementing a new workforce development system. The characteristics of this system, as well as the teams' recommendations, are described both in the full report and in a brief overview given below.
The system is customer-driven with universal access. A new workforce development system must be focused on serving all customers, that is, employers and jobseekers. Employers include small, medium, and large organizations seeking workers with a range of skills & from the highly trained to entry-level, part-time, and temporary employees. Jobseekers include:
The system integrates services. To respond to customers' expectations that access to jobs & and access to qualified job applicants & should be convenient and user friendly, a commitment to integrated services must be the new way of doing business. The goal of integrated service delivery is to strengthen the connection between responding to employer needs and providing qualified jobseekers.
To accomplish this goal, all components of the workforce development system must be unified instead of fragmented by multiple funding streams, cross-purposes, or turf competition. In their place, an integrated, efficient, and cost-effective system must be created that uses common definitions, common outcomes, common quality standards, and a common database.
A system of integrated services can be realized only when all parts of the system work together. Progress to achieve this goal will be aided by common systemwide skills standards, Local Partnership leadership, and a platform of high-quality labor market information that is easily and universally accessible through technology.
The system continuously improves. A customer-focused workforce development system requires a strong commitment to discovering what customers value and what they consider to be service deficiencies. Building such a quality system therefore involves the use of principles and practices of two management philosophies — Total Quality Management and Reengineering — that speak to the importance of focusing on external expectations versus the internal expectations of the organization. Both management philosophies define ways an organization can change how it does what it does, reduce non-value-added steps to ensure a continuous work flow, and manage this change through the use of empowered staff teams.
Continuous improvement requires everyone's commitment to work every day to make improvements based on customer information and to eliminate waste, rework, unnecessary paperwork, bureaucratic rules and procedures, and interruptions — all in order to improve the ultimate service outcome of connecting employers and jobseekers. With this approach, the focus shifts to problem prevention through continuous process improvements rather than punitive standards. To accomplish these goals, the new system must concentrate on:
State Workforce Development Commission. The creation of a State Workforce Development Commission is recommended to provide policy leadership, establish high levels of accountability, and promote quality and effectiveness based on continuous evaluation of the needs of employers, the resources of providers, and ongoing customer feedback. In addition, the Commission will have four advisory councils: the School-to-Work Council, the Incumbent Worker Council, the Transitional Worker Council, and the Registered Apprenticeship Council. The Commission will not, however, replace the administrative responsibilities of State agencies.
Cross-cutting themes. Two issues intersect nearly all of the design principles as identified by the five Design Teams: technology and marketing.
The report card system for services endorsed by the Design Teams is one of the most important marketing strategies. With these report cards, employers and jobseekers alike can judge how well services are likely to meet their needs and can make decisions as informed consumers. In addition, content guides delineating what customers can expect from the workforce development system can also serve as tools to reach out to customers.
The following section summarizes each of the Design Teams' recommendations from the full-length paper, "New York's Workforce Development System." This synopsis does not and cannot substitute for each of the chapter-length reports, which were crafted after six months of investigation and conducting over 50 focus groups across the state with 700 participants. Anyone seriously involved and/or interested in reengineering New York's workforce development system is encouraged to read the full-length report in its entirety.
Responsibility for implementing the following recommendations rests with many individuals and organizations, some not yet created. Implementation will require the cooperation, commitment, and goodwill of many.
Create a State Workforce Development Commission. A State Workforce Development Commission will be created to assess the needs of employers and jobseekers, evaluate the ability and capacity of providers to meet those workforce needs, and recommend strategy to the Governor. The State Commission will develop the annual Workforce Development Plan for coordinating workforce and economic development as well as review plans of all State agencies providing employment, training, literacy, and related services. The State Commission will also establish the parameters for local integrated workforce development systems and set statewide quality criteria for skill and customer satisfaction outcomes to guide Local Workforce Development Partnerships. A high level of accountability will be ensured through the establishment of outcome measures rather than process measures.
Create Local Workforce Development Partnerships. Local Workforce Development Partnerships will work with the chief local elected officials to conduct oversight of the workforce development system. Local Partnerships will assess economic development and workforce development needs throughout their communities, identifying service gaps and emerging trends and recommending a strategy to target resources. The Local Partnership should set outcomes for the local system, including entered and retained employment, wage levels fortraining program graduates, decreased welfare dependency, and attainment of industry recognized credentials, and collect and make public outcome results for all workforce development programming. Each local partnership will submit a comprehensive three-year strategic plan to the State Commission. The plan will incorporate all plans under its direct authority and will also include strategies designed to coordinate and integrate funds controlled by others.
The Local Workforce Development Partnership is defined by geographic area, at minimum one county. Counties will be encouraged to work together formally, under one Local Partnership, or informally, in self-organizing systems to address cross-over issues, such as regional transportation or economic development. Multi-county arrangements will be encouraged through two types of incentives: facilitative incentives, primarily administrative actions, such as cost sharing/pooling arrangements, that eliminate barriers and make it easier to come together, and direct incentives, providing added encouragement, such as financial rewards, needed to motivate those who have not yet thought about the benefits of coming together.
Coordinate skill standard efforts. New York should coordinate its skill standards efforts with the efforts of the Board of Regents and the National Skill Standards Board. Information about national and industry-based skill standards should be disseminated to Local Partnerships and all stakeholders through a variety of technologies, including the Internet.
Help customers use the standards. To help jobseekers and employers use skill standards, several mechanisms are recommended, including: development of curricula, integration of employability skills into new SED assessments, establishment of core elements for a standard portfolio, career development and guidance activities, customized employer services, and customized services for individuals who face barriers to employment.
Support customized services to employers. To support customized services to employers, existing sources of funding must be analyzed and a variety of funding mechanisms developed, such as a revolving loan fund that employers could use and repay based on increased revenues resulting from the services received or a State tax credit for businesses that provide training to their employees.
Drive system with high standards. The new system should be driven by high academic and workplace skill standards in the following areas:
Create a continuum of education and training. A continuum of education and training must exist so that preparation for the workforce begins at the earliest levels of schooling, and employers and jobseekers already in the labor market can access and re-access further education, skill upgrading, ancillary skills, and other educational services necessary for continued workforce development. Three levels of access to the workforce development system are recommended, so that employers and emerging workers, current workers, and transitional workers can select the level of access they desire and can move from one level to another according to their needs.
Provide value-added services. In the new system, activities that do not add value should be revised or eliminated. For employers, value added means direct access to the system through a single point of contact, and, where applicable, the development of long-term relationships with agency contacts who are knowledgeable about the employer's business and needs. For jobseekers, value added means the availability of comprehensive workforce development information that is relevant, timely, and accurate.
Serve special needs and target populations. The disabled, the poor, older workers, displaced homemakers, homeless, veterans, prisoners, welfare recipients, and other special needs and target populations should receive specialized services to ensure full participation in the system.
Provide multiple levels of service and access points. An overriding premise that sets the context for a customer-focused system is that employers and jobseekers select for themselves the level of service they desire. The new system should therefore have multiple points of access and meet jobseekers and employers where they are.
Undertake a staff development initiative. An extensive staff development initiative must also be undertaken for workers in the system to support the major organizational culture change.
Coordinate technology development. Technology for the new system must be developed based on policy recommendations; it must not be an independent force that dictates what the system can and cannot do for its customers. An ongoing leadership-level body must be developed to coordinate with the Governor's Task Force on Technology throughout the development phase and after the systems are in place and operating.
Create task forces to fund new technology and design the information system. The new workforce development system must have the resources required to equip and build the technology infrastructure to meet system goals of integration and efficiency. To fund the substantial investment in new equipment, systems design, implementation, and staff training, a task force should be commissioned to identify and secure resources. In addition, a practitioner-level information system task force should be appointed to design the system.
Use technology to integrate the system. The Design Teams were unanimous in their recognition of the pivotal role that technology will play in integrating the system. Some of the key uses of technology are:
In short, technology upgrades, improvements, and new development will be essential to connecting jobseekers to jobs — the ultimate purpose of the system.
Develop the linkages to form a central repository of data. Current strategy calls for a common workforce development system database and common definitions as part of a central, state-level repository of data. An extensive infrastructure already exists, operated by State agencies, Federal grantees, local service providers, and others, such as SUNY and BOCES. The workforce development system will not duplicate existing equipment and systems, but rather provide linkages among them. In this new system, certain customer information will be shared to eliminate process redundancies. Data elements for consideration include:
Adopt guiding principles for the development of the information system. These principles should streamline the number of data elements adopted, make data accessible to local-level planners, standardize presentation of the data, make the system easy to audit, address the need to compare new data with longitudinal data collected under existing elements and definitions, and make data accessible to support a wide range of uses.
Ensure community funding. Ensure that funding is provided not only at the state level, but also at the community-based organization level, so that these local organizations can acquire the computers, software, and training necessary to participate fully in the system.
Develop a comprehensive accountability system. To achieve continuous improvement, mechanisms must be in place to collect data continuously for decision making and system building. This data collection, in turn, must be based upon a uniform set of outcome-based, context-sensitive core performance measures for the entire workforce development system. These performance measures will not only benefit program operators, who can use them to monitor the system and continuously improve services, but also system customers, who will be able to use the information to make informed comparisons across programs. To achieve this goal, easy-to-understand report cards need to be developed to inform customers of the quality of the services offered.
Establish systemwide measures. In measuring the performance of the workforce development system, many desired outcomes are interdependent, so a positive change in one desired outcome may have a negative impact on another. Balance will therefore need to be established among the five categories that define the scope of potential performance measures to be addressed:
Emphasize customer satisfaction measures. Customer satisfaction measures will include: repeat usage of services, timely feedback, ease of access to information, satisfaction with services, and response time. Timely, relevant, and understandable report cards on provider performance will be made available to customers and other stakeholders.
Encourage continuous improvement through world-class benchmarks. Benchmarking against world-class organizations should be conducted and results used to promote continuous improvement of the system.
Reengineering the workforce development system for New York State will require the concentrated efforts of many state and local partners. The Governor, as Chief Executive, must lead this initiative. The Legislature, local government, employers, and many others, such as the Board of Regents, will have strong and important roles to make it succeed. Many separate systems, such as job training, education, and economic development, must begin to take a new view of themselves and each other in relation to the workforce development system. New partnerships must be forged in which the economic prosperity of the State and its citizens is achieved.
Initial actions will include:
After all is said and done, what will be different in New York State as a result of this initiative? And what does this report mean for State legislators and business leaders? How will you benefit from the recommendations contained in this report, and what will you need to do differently as a partner to ensure success? Following are just ten potential answers to these questions.
The recommendations in this report constitute a new way of doing business. What is contained in this report is anything but "business as usual." In fact, it will require a new way of thinking, a new way of taking action & a new way of doing business for the State of New York. To succeed with this agenda, a true public-private partnership will need to be forged and sustained. Public policies must be driven by and responsive to the market place & to the needs of employers and the needs of jobseekers.
The recommendations in this report are interconnected, as are the issues of workforce development, economic development, and education improvement. Thus, they have a ripple effect on economic policy, welfare policy, education policy, and workforce policy. One cannot take action in one sphere that does not affect the others; likewise, the changes recommended in this report require concerted and integrated actions. Thus, these recommendations should be kept in mind as new legislation, new regulation, new policies, and new business investments are being considered.
Skilled workers are at the heart of the redesigned workforce development system. They are also the fundamental purpose behind every one of these recommendations. They are key to a vibrant economy, strong communities, and successful schools. They are both a means and an end.
For employers and for jobseekers, this is fundamentally about choices, not chances. The redesigned system as it is described here will provide improved access to a continuum of integrated education and training services. Thus, employers can look forward to a system that serves their needs, delivers high-quality, well-prepared workers, and does so in a cost-effective manner. Job-seekers can look forward to a system that provides a graduated set of options, from self-help to intensive services and support, as needed.
An ongoing dialogue will be needed. To bring policies together in a meaningful and strategic way, business leaders will need to collaborate to articulate their needs, legislators will need to cooperate to shape responsive policies, and both will need to communicate to listen and respond to the needs of each other.
Strategic investments in technologies will be required. To carry out the vision set out in this report, technology must be employed in new ways. It will no longer be possible or prudent to have competing or duplicative computer systems to plan, track, and evaluate effectiveness. Technology holds the key to the common information base which will unite the system.
This report contains a new vision that cannot be communicated effectively to the public without a concerted marketing approach to getting the message out. Every successful public sector campaign of this magnitude has behind it a thoughtful and strategic marketing program. Whether the issue is seat belts, low fat diets, designated drivers, or a skilled workforce, these issues must be presented to the public in a way that influences the discourse, changes behaviors, and changes minds.
From a systems management point of view, total quality management and reengineering will help ensure success. Success in this case means improved services, appropriate staff development, and improved accountability systems. Service delivery entities will need to become "learning organizations," and some will require radical cultural changes. This is no small task, but it is achievable.
Institutions don't change because they see the light & they change because they feel the heat! Both legislators and business leaders need to keep the heat on themselves and each other. It would be prudent to design and implement a report card as a way to build in accountability and inform customers what they can expect from the workforce development system.
A final reminder: legislators, business leaders, and their key staffs should read the full report and take actions accordingly. While this summary of the full report, "New York's Workforce Development System," provides a quick, concentrated overview, it does not substitute for, nor can it adequately represent the richness and the depth of the full-length report.