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“As of 2008, the war for good jobs has trumped all other
leadership activities […] The lack of good jobs will become the root
cause of almost all world problems that America and other countries will
face.” –Jim Clifton, Gallup Management Journal (September 2011)

Our economy is in trouble. Today, over 25 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed, and over 46 million are in poverty. Jobs and economic security are the single most important issues on the minds of people across generations, geography, and political parties.

The last time we faced an economic crisis of this magnitude was during the Great Depression. At that time, the federal government stepped in. Between 1935 and 1943, the Works Progress Administration (WPA, later renamed the Works Projects Administration) provided almost 8 million jobs.

But today’s labor market is different than that of the 1930s, and its challenges more complex. Moreover, the near crisis brought on by the administrative task of raising the debt ceiling last month suggests that bold, quick, and effective responses from our nation’s capitol are not likely.

Clearly, we need new solutions.

What’s the Problem?

Part of the reason the jobs problem is so difficult to solve is that it’s not one problem.
The national unemployment rate dominates headlines, but labor markets generally follow economies—they are regional, not national. For example, last month, the metro region of El Centro, California recorded an unemployment rate of 30.8%, while Bismark, North Dakota’s was 3.0%.

Communities face competing priorities—not just between “the jobs agenda” and other priorities (public safety and emergency response, for example), but also within the jobs agenda itself.

• Should communities focus on supporting growing industries? Their largest industries? The industries with the largest share of exports? Those that promise to keep jobs local?
• Young people are having difficulty getting on a career path, older workers can’t afford to retire, and Gen X is sandwiched between, often supporting children, parents or both. How do community leaders set priorities in this context?
• Would tackling social ills (e.g., helping adults learn to read) yield returns? Or would investing in community strengths, on the theory that “a rising tide lifts all boats”, offer a better way forward?

While leaders are under pressure to respond to all of these priorities, resource scarcity makes “both/and” approaches difficult. And many of our formal tools—from laws and regulations to institutions and funding streams—lack the agility to effect the changes we need when we need them.

Connecting Bright Spots

Despite the complexity of these challenges, there is hope. People from all sectors and all levels of “rank” and experience are coming forward to solve these problems and are finding new ways to lead in the process.

During our one-year study of the field of public policy known as workforce, we found many examples of leaders—including non-traditional leaders—creating new solutions in unexpected ways. In particular, they are experimenting with new methods of public participation, co-creation, and volunteer-led initiatives to expand learning opportunities (even if not in traditional “schools”), and connect people to work (even if not in traditional "jobs"). They are embracing agendas that, a decade ago, would have seemed far afield—from broadband adoption to entrepreneurship.

These leaders are social innovators, in addition to their roles as elected officials, bureaucrats, policy wonks, “geeks”, moms, or neighborhood activists. They are both ordinary and extraordinary.

Below this brief video accompanying the report Weadership: The Future of Workforce Leadership are two examples of leaders in action from our respective home communities.

Portland hacks. In May 2011, Cyborg Anthropologist, entrepreneur, and twenty-something Amber Case organized an Education Hackathon on a Sunday in a business incubator in downtown Portland, OR. A handful of senior level education officials identified key problems they thought technology might be able to help fix. About 25 technologists (programmers, hackers, strategists, designers, etc.) listened, asked questions, and then divided into teams to tackle three problems. It was a friendly competition. Eight hours later, the winning team had developed a mobile app to better connect young people and their parents or guardians to summer activities and jobs in their communities—a problem clearly spanning workforce, education, and community development domains.

The team also conducted an impressive amount of asset mapping in the process. The gaps and opportunities identified that day inspired program changes right away, and highlighted systemic fixes for challenges youth-serving organizations had long struggled with. The city, county, workforce board, and youth providers are all working on next steps.

Silicon Valley remakes and retools. For decades, Silicon Valley has been a fast changing economy. More risk tolerant than many communities, it has seen some firms radically and rapidly expand and others collapse overnight. Whole new industries emerge with regularity. But today, even Silicon Valley faces high unemployment, especially among seasoned technology professionals who can have difficulty reentering the job market after a lay-off. Leaders have responded with all of their traditional tools, but they are also trying some new ones. For example a diverse partnership jointly commissioned a study of the technology cluster to provide a shared body of knowledge and common set of strategies for colleges, economic and workforce development professionals, and city and county leaders from the public and private sectors.

Workforce leaders are also responding to what some call the “job mindset” which keeps many experienced workers from securing employment. Flexibility Bootcamps use peer learning, open space, improv, and other techniques to help job seekers identify and market their value to an enterprise, rather than their ability to do a specific job. Some even decide they can make their own jobs.

Uncommon Approaches

In our research we encountered dozens of examples of workforce leaders learning from policy innovations like crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, social innovation and entrepreneurship, “Gov2.0” initiatives, even “gameful” technologies, with the intent of engaging their communities in productive learning, work, enterprise, and problem-solving.

Most promising is the swell of interest in such solutions from leaders across sectors in communities everywhere. As innovators they demonstrate the potential of uncommon partnerships and a focus on significant, sustainable, and scalable experiments for remaking community prosperity.

They, you, us—we are the new WPA.

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Photo Credit: DB's Travels on Flickr

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An Exploration of Leadership

There was a moment this spring, mid-way through a a project about the changing nature of leadership in the field of policy concerned with work and learning (we call it “workforce”), where we began to feel a renewed sense of excitement and promise.

The last several years have been tough for leaders working to help their communities achieve greater prosperity, especially in those parts of a Europe and the US where the rise of unemployment and corresponding social ills has been fast and severe. The housing crisis, unemployment, the escalating costs of health care and education, and a public sector in fiscal crisis—it can feel like an onslaught.

For policy and community leaders, the relentless push for efficiencies, cost-cutting strategies, and evidence-based practices—each important in its own way—can inhibit deeper thinking about the most critical contributions these leaders and their organizations make to the well being of their communities.

What We Learned

But we found leaders who were thinking deeply about their communities’ most significant challenges and what they could do about them—in partnership with government and non-profit organizations, and with businesses and citizens themselves.

The goal of our project was to explore the changing nature of workforce leadership—what leaders do, in what context, and toward what end, and how these have shifted over the past decade (a more complete explanation is here).

We engaged 519 leaders from public, private, and nonprofit sectors at the federal, state and local levels, documenting our activities on the project’s website along the way. We identified a framework and set of six practices sufficiently different from a decade ago to constitute a new model of leadership—we call it WEadership, a nod to its collaborative nature.

Three Insights Worth Thinking About

Three ideas that emerged during the project that strike us as posing fundamental challenges to the way we organize, manage, and assess investments in workforce.

1. Conversation Matters.

Repeatedly, workforce leaders told us that convening conversation with partners, stakeholders, program providers, local elected officials and citizens is the most important work they do. Not just important work, the most important work.

This will not be surprising to those experienced in the art and science of innovation as it is a social process. The source of much innovation is the blending and mixing of new ideas, technologies, and methods from one sector with those of another. Workforce leaders have long been hosting (both formally and informally) conversations about how to solve the jobs, skills, and economic development challenges in their communities. These conversations inform the actions of not just policy makers and workforce leaders, but everyone around the proverbial table that employs or develops people or supports a business. Such conversations have never been more important.

The problem is that the effects of this kind of work are difficult to evidence, especially in the short term.

As one a respondent in rural Iowa put it:

“When you use networks to move an agenda, it’s influence and momentum thatmatter. Changes can be small, but they are also cumulative—one day you look up and a lot of things are really different. But we don’t always have the ability to say “A led to B.’”

This fuzziness makes some leaders uncomfortable. As a result, we do not acknowledge convening as legitimate work. This means we do not invest in our capacity to do it successfully, and we do not talk about it when we are successful for fear it will be seen as lacking in rigor. But such convening is an essential ingredient in good policy and a necessary one for implementing better solutions to our most intractable problems.

2. Connectivity is a game changer.

The second insight has to do with social technologies. The fact that hundreds of millions of people are connected to one another using technology creates whole new possibilities for engaging in work, learning, and entrepreneurship in very different ways:

The explosion of peer-learning communities in the workplace and web-based platforms like Skillshare, P2PU, and Khan Academy are challenging our ideas about the very nature of educational institutions—is Skillshare school? Workforce leaders are asking themselves how these platforms can play a role in addressing skills gaps or simply engaging people in productive activity.

Manpower and other firms in the business of connecting people to work (even if not in traditional jobs) have been joined by firms like Taskrabbit that enable people to make a living by aggregating “gigs.” In the absence of sufficient numbers of jobs—even if there were a perfect match between the skills firms need and those job-seekers can supply—workforce leaders are asking themselves how these ‘unjobs’ can offer opportunities for those who need them, and what role policy can play in realizing them.

Peer-lending, microphilanthropy, and crowdfunding are helping us reimagine what it means to launch a venture. While nearly every local workforce leader with whom we spoke indicated that job creation was a workforce issue, the linkage became more tenuous at the state level (except in the seven states that maintain self-employment programs) and almost invisible at the federal level. But social ventures of the kind typically supporting through platforms like Kickstarter are a kind of hybrid. They can enable people to make their own jobs (or ‘gigs’) by aggregating investors (“backers”) who support specific projects or initiatives. Again, workforce leaders are exploring how such platforms might connect people to opportunity in nontraditional ways.

3. Boldness wanted.

Finally, across the board, workforce leaders expressed a desire for bolder experiments. Too often, the theories of change driving what are called “innovation initiatives” are determined at the top (whether by foundations or federal agencies) with little input from the field, and reflect the risk-averse culture of their organizations. As a result, local leaders often feel like they are working very hard to improve existing programs or approaches they know should be wholly reinvented. In addition, where innovation does occur, there are few mechanisms to share it with the field.

And yet, many, many leaders we spoke with persevere, seeking to maximize their impact on the economical health and social well being of their communities. Today, leaders at all levels and across sectors need to find ways to learn together, and to better support each other in solving what are absolutely critical community problems.

We are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.

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Kristin Wolff and Vinz Koller, of Social Policy Research Associates, authored the WEadership Guide (August 2011), the result of a one-year US Department of Labor study of leadership in the field of public policy concerned with work and learning. They were thrilled at the opportunity to link their professional pursuits (public policy) with their personal commitments to positive social change and innovation, and look to increase, accelerate, and intensify these connections within the field of workforce in the coming months. The entire project is documented at EnhancingWorkforceLeadership.org. Follow it at @WFLeadership

“As of 2008, the war for good jobs has trumped all other leadership activities […] The lack of good jobs will become the root cause of almost all world problems that America and other countries will face.”
Jim Clifton, Gallup Management Journal (September 2011)

“Jobs Wanted.” While the jobs bill (America’s Jobs Act) commands the attention of elected officials in our nation’s capitol, state and local leaders have struggled with employment issues for decades. They know there is no single solution because there is no single problem.

Most communities face some combination of the following:

• Too few jobs (especially those offering health insurance and family-sustaining wages)
• Skills gaps among applicants competing for good jobs that do exist and those in emerging industries
• Young workers having difficulty making the leap from job to career (or from school to job)
• Older experienced workers who cannot afford to retire or simply want to remain engaged but in different roles than they play today
• Labor markets that lack transparency (e.g., applicants submit hundreds of resumes into “black holes“)
• Persistent poverty, especially among communities of color, which limits access to job
  opportunities and to the social networks that help people advance
• Overcrowded and underfunded public schools and institutions of higher education struggle to cultivate the talents of all of their students
• Ongoing economic shocks—not just unanticipated layoffs, but also natural and weather-related disasters of which there have been 83 in 2011 (a record high in any calendar year)

No one challenge, no one solution. These challenges are not for the faint of heart, and cannot be solved by a single leader,organization or sector. But they are among the defining challenges of our day. And courageous leaders in public, private, non-profit, and civic sectors all over the country are quietly stepping forward to tackle them—increasingly, in partnership with one another.

Adopting more collaborative, open-minded, and entrepreneurial approaches than in years past, these leaders prioritize the goal—community well being and prosperity—above the means, be it program, funding, agency precedent, or political jurisdiction. We call this new approach WEadership in a nod to its collaborative nature.

Collaboration required. One of the most important opportunities this collaborative approach offers is the potential for shared learning and experimentation in ways that spread the risk and share the benefits. Here are three examples:

• Volunteer-run services. In one California community, the need for workforce services had so overwhelmed a strapped public agency that staff began encouraging clients (job-seekers) to run their own activities. To their surprise, many job seekers jumped at the chance. Staff trained a small number of clients to use some basic organizing tools and allowed them to use the agency offices and equipment to run job search clinics, industry meetings, and other activities. As a result, volunteer organizers learned new skills, grew their networks, and were engaged in ways that made them feel valued—some secured jobs as a direct result. In addition, more job seekers could access a wider range of services (including those offered in the native languages of the organizers) at no additional cost. And other community leaders noticed. They valued the agency’s flexibility and creativity.
• Returnships. In communities whose key industries are shifting, public, private, and non-profit leaders are working together to provide adult internships (sometimes called “returnships“) for individuals who are returning to the workforce after caring for children or families or who are transitioning from one industry or field of practice to another. These experiences can help job seekers gain tacit knowledge and build networks that enable them to secure longer-term employment or launch their own ventures. Because adults demand specific learning and development opportunities, these internships tend to be carefully structured, not just provide an introduction to the workplace as many youth-oriented internships do. This focus can build the capacity of host firms and organizations to provide higher-quality internships and development opportunities for younger interns and existing workers, as well as returners.
• Social innovation. In grassroots communities everywhere, social innovators in state and local governments, tribal nations, and nonprofit and
  private sectors are organizing their communities in ways that enhance economic opportunity. From helping aspiring entrepreneurs crowdfund small ventures on Kickstarter to organizing off-line peer learning communities around on-line learning and professional development platforms like P2PU and Skillshare, to promoting bartering on NeighborhoodGoods or “gigging” on Taskrabbit, social innovators are increasing access to work and learning, even if not in traditional ways. These experiments can even complement or incent changes in programs and services offered tradition institutions

Many small steps. Workforce leaders (who can come from any level, sector, or jurisdiction) are innovating in ways that can be hard to recognize because their innovations comprise many small iterations, rather than one headline-grabbing breakthrough. And often, they are disconnected. But these small steps matter. And leaders who take them are demonstrating ways in which can all play important roles in solving our most significant problems.

We are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.

Kristin Wolff and Vinz Koller, of Social Policy Research Associates, authored the WEadership Guide (August 2011), the result of a one-year US Department of Labor study of leadership in the field of public policy concerned with work and learning. The entire project is documented at EnhacingWorkforceLeadership.org. Follow it at @WFLeadership.

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Photo credit: Senator Mark Warner on Flickr.

As of 2008, the war for good jobs has trumped all other leadership activities […] The lack of good jobs will become the root cause of almost all world problems that America and other countries will face. – Jim Clifton Jobs and economic security. These are the most important issues on the minds of Americans [...]

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(Click image to play video above)

What's OpenGovWest?
Part conference, part unconference, OpenGovWest is an open government accelerator and community builder. The idea is to provide a forum for people and government to meet and learn about collaboration, transparency, and participation.

Convened in Portland, Oregon this past weekend, the event was FANTASTIC! And it wasn't just "west" - our people map revealed representation from Florida, New York, Iowa, Nebrask, Brasil, and all over Canada. The knowledge and energy OGWers shared was impressive. Panels on apps competition to culture change to participatory budgeting were highly engaging and loaded with insight.

As an alum of similar conferences and events, I am thrilled that the center of gravity is moving away from "open data" and toward a broader, deeper notion of "open government - the one that first sent chills up my spine in the documentary UsNow. The film is so inspiring that even two years after release, I find myself returning to it whenver I lose my compass.

And the Connection to Workforce Leadership?
First, workforce is a policy area of government. Like other policy areas opening themselves up, workforce too, could learn from and contribute to the body of knowledge and practice emerging around participatory processes. From collaborative budgeting, to on-line debating, voting, and collective problem-solving, new tools are helping governments around the world engage their citizens as never before - and at scale. An amazing collection of videos illustrating these trends is here on the O'Reilly Gov2.0 Expo site.

Second, open processes employ multi-level communications in which people can talk (and collaborate) directly with each other. This creates the possiblity for people to go beyond  influencing government policy to actually designing and delivering solutions to policy problems. People tweeting jobs to each other or sharing leads on LinkedIn are small examples. The myriad of emerging social learning platforms offer the possiblity of more profound change. As for collaboration? In a six-hour Code-a-thon at OpenGovWest, the winning team built an open source app that makes editable and sharebale 211 community service information for Portland and Multnomah County. (Wow.) This is information our workforce centers use every day.

Third, the same technologies making government more participatory, transparent, and collaborative are also changing every workplace and every school in America and across the world. The Future (of Work and Learning) is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.* Workforce leaders have an opportunity to help their firms and workers get ahead of these changes, increasing their competitiveness and ability to navigate a career, not just find a job, and engage in a lifetime of learning, and not just school.

And we're just getting started.

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For more information about OpenGovWest:

• Summary and links to notes & presentations (thank you @nwlinux).
• @JulieG's fantastic observations about why the public sector and private sector need each other.
• The #OGW11 tweetstream.
• Knowledge as Power, the host organization of OpenGovWest, founded by OpenGov Superheroine @SarahSchacht.

*Yes, this is a thinly veiled reference to William Gibson.

The last two weeks offered unprecedented drama in the UK, as the general election resulted in the resignation of Gordon Brown as the head of the Labour Party on May 11, and the establishment of a coalition government lead by new Prime Minister David Cameron (Conservative) and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrat). The domestic agenda? Reducing the UK's £163B deficit and addressing the highest rates of joblessness in over 15 years.

And then there's Greece, flanked (in print) by the words "austerity" and "job loss" in roughly equal measure.

Jobs Issues are Central

The jobs issue is at the heart of some of the most difficult challenges cash-strapped governments face the world over (but in particular, where the tango between the finance and housing industries wrought the greatest havoc). Some of these connections are obvious: people who lose their jobs have less money to spend, reducing the government revenue they would otherwise pay in the form of income and sales tax and increasing their need for government services - unemployment insurance, training grants, food stamps, health insurance, transport, even public libraries.

There are also less obvious "costs" linked to unemployment ranging from an increase in public school enrollment as more parents have difficulty paying for private school, to widespread declines in risk-taking on the part of entrepreneurs, consumers, lenders, and even job seekers ill-matched with their current positions but fearful of leaving them. Never mind the longterm and potentially massive social costs.

Community Perspectives on Jobs

This past March, my colleagues and I at Corporation for a Skilled Workforce captured the experiences of workforce professionals at the National Association of Workforce Boards Annual Forum - they are the community faces of workforce policy in communities across the U.S. And they are very concerned about jobs.

Policy Levers for Job Creation

We also interviewed policy professionals and thought leaders representing a wide range of perspectives about the policy prescriptions they were advocating - from Dean Baker's (CEPR) ideas on job sharing to Jagadeesh Gokhale (Cato) on loosening credit and promoting self-employment to Heidi Schierholz's (EPI) case for a second stimulus. Most focused on federal-level interventions. (The entire set of 14 videos is in this playlist.)

Communities, too, are advancing solutions:

• Investing in innovation and growing sustainable industries through collaborative ventures;
• Economic gardening, regional resilience efforts, and other locally-focused development strategies;
• Promoting upskilling among workers and those looking for work;
• Reinventing placement services and supports;
• Experimenting with new (and revisiting old) approaches to training and  placement; and
• Using technology to make information more accessible and transparent,  and to connect job seekers with  resources, information and assistance outside of government - leveraging community resources and social  networks.

Over the next six weeks, we will be looking specifically at government policies, programs, and approaches that seek to accelerate job creation and promote prosperity, in a sustainable way.

Thanks to Flickr pal woodleywonderworks.

NOTE: This is a continuation of the series we warned you about a few days ago. We are summarizing several large reports for each other (members of the Community Team at CSW), but we’re doing it here so you can benefit too – you know, if you are interested (since you found your way here for some reason). You won’t find a lot of wit, but there might be some wisdom for the taking.

One thing we love about OECD reports (and international comparisons generally for that matter) is that they remind us that the challenges we face are more universal than we think – and we can learn from looking up and out. On this count, More than Just Jobs: Workforce Development in a Skills-Based Economy does not disappoint.

At its core, the paper argues that although workforce development – the ecosystem of people, policies, and organizations concerned with the intersection of people, skills, jobs, and the economy – has been primarily concerned with narrow targets, transactions, and sets of activities, the field has an increasingly important role to play in improving the prosperity of communities. Author Sylvain Giguère suggests a broader goal for workforce development than the field (on the whole) has adopted to date:

“The comprehensive management of human resources, so as to better meet the demands of a global economy at both the national and local levels, through improving economic competitiveness and social cohesion.”

The reports names governance - leadership, policy coordination, adaptation of policy and program to diverse local conditions, and community engagement – as among the most significant challenges faced by workforce organizations seeking to advance this important aim. It calls for local policy to reflect a better balance between national aims and local needs and greater experimentation throughout the system, tempered with efficiency and accountability.

Policy Recommendations

• Inject flexibility into management. Decisions about strategic priorities in the implementation of public programs and services should be made locally, using a management by objective framework negotiated with central government.
• Establish an overarching management framework that embeds local flexibility to ensure alignment while also encouraging differentiation and experimentation.
• Build strategic capacity. Local staff should have strong knowledge of local economic conditions as well as effective human resource development practices, and the analytical and strategic capacity to be able to set priorities and development methods for addressing them.
• Build up local data and intelligence. The ability to aggregate and organize data in a way that supports local strategy development is essential and could be better supported by national level efforts to develop tools that adapt to local circumstances.
• Improve governance mechanisms. Labor market and workforce organizations should collaborate with education, economic development, business, and civic organizations. There is no governance mechanism for this kind of collaboration, but networks of partnerships go a long way in increasing and extending the capacity of workforce organizations.
• Improve administrative processes. Aligning policies through institutional reform is a difficult challenge, exacerbated by the scale of larger countries. Still efforts should be made to review the cross-agency implementation of broader workforce policy with the aim of better promoting collaboration, efficiency, and effectiveness.

Other Findings

• Workforce development matters because it directly impacts four drivers of economic growth: Skills, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Social Cohesion.
• Three major obstacles impede adoption of the broader goal of workforce development: 1) speeding up education and training systems; 2) fragmentation of local decision-making and workforce resources; and 3) lack of willingness to look long term. All of these could be ameliorated though larger investments and more serious support for governance (collaboration).

Case Studies: Out of Date?

Warning: Although the paper was published in 2008, the analysis of the U.S. Workforce System is very dated. It builds from the original six Workforce Investment Act (WIA) principles (one of which was “strong boards” which was summarily eliminated from WIA implementation documents within a matter of months). Baldridge work (ancient history when I realized I’d become part of the “field” of workforce development in 2003 or so) features prominently, and some of the organizations named in the local case studies have long since been replaced, some more than once.

Having some context from my work in the UK from 2001-2003 (in economic and workforce development), I could see that the U.K. case study was also quite dated, though Departmental names, and configurations change more frequently there (often coinciding with budget reviews).

This made me somewhat suspect of the case study portions of the report, but the larger trends and recommendations identified in the content chapters seem quite sound.