The emerging green economy is expected to create millions of new jobs – but who will get them, and how can we ensure that low-income communities of color won’t get left behind? In this session, leaders from national organizations involved in shaping policy and practice related to the green economy discuss their strategies for extending opportunity to all, particularly the economically disadvantaged.

Industry and labor-management partnerships provide sector initiatives both direct funding and other resources, such as training facilities and instructors. They also help sector initiatives leverage additional resources and enable activities that would otherwise not be possible. This plenary presents two models for bringing significant investments to the table in support of sector initiatives – with benefits to workers, industry, and partnering organizations.

Job Training That Works: Findings from the Sectoral Employment Impact Study, the first random-assignment study of sector initiatives, shows that well-implemented sector-focused training programs significantly improve the earnings of low-income, disadvantaged workers and job seekers. We open the 2009 NNSP National Conference with a discussion of the study and its results, involving the originators and authors of the study, leaders of the initiatives who participated - and you.

As key initiatives mature and gain momentum, there is an increasing focus on looking to sector strategies as a way to increase opportunities for women and communities of color. In this plenary session, leaders from organizations dedicated to increasing economic opportunities for women, immigrants, and people of color will discuss their efforts to shape workforce development policy and practice as it pertains to equity.

Accelerating State Adoption of Sector Strategies, an initiative of the National Governors Association’s Center for Best Practices, the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce, and the National Network of Sector Partners, has over the last four years brought 18 states together to develop state sector strategies – industry-focused strategies that keep regional industries strong and provide quality jobs and advancement opportunities for workers, particularly those with low incomes or at-risk of job loss. Another 10 states have participated in the project’s Virtual Policy Academy.

This workshop will discuss the characteristics of state sector strategies, trace their growth and development, and highlight lessons learned by participating states and the project team for state policy-makers and stakeholders who want to help develop state support for sector initiatives.

Launched in 2005 at Port Jobs' highly successful Airport Jobs Center at Sea-Tac Airport, Airport University is a sector intermediary/community college partnership that helps low-wage airport employees work toward college certificates and degrees at their workplace.

Airport University integrates credit-bearing college courses with a vocational English-as-a-second-language (ESL) focus to offer airport workers, and the employers they serve, convenient access to higher education.   Port Jobs, South Seattle Community College, and Highline Community College are embarking on a new effort to expand Airport University into a "mini-campus" within Sea-Tac Airport that ultimately links workers to Associates and Applied Bachelor's degrees in business, business technology and hospitality/tourism. 

This workshop demonstrates innovative practices for creating change in the community college system to meet the career pathway needs of working adults, particularly those who speak English as a second language.

One formidable barrier faced by low-income adults seeking credentials leading to good jobs is the academic skill gap and the lengthy process to close it. Lower-skilled adults are less likely to advance in their educational and career pursuits the longer it takes. This interactive session features lessons learned from the Breaking Through initiative in accelerating the pace of learning and explores how practitioners can apply some of these lessons in their own work. Breaking Through is a national initiative helping adults with less than 8^th grade English and math skills access and succeed in community college occupational certificate and degree programs.

Springfield, Illinois identified the healthcare sector as a potential economic development opportunity, yet it faced a shortage of skilled healthcare professionals, especially nurses.  What makes Springfield unique is the way community leaders have come together to build the healthcare sector in a comprehensive way by addressing workforce challenges and creating effective partnerships.

This workshop will lead participants through the process of creating an effective sector collaboration, discussing who needs to be at the table;  how to engage stakeholders, including representatives from business, community organizations, education and foundations; and how to develop and implement both short and long-term strategies for success.

Documenting the Business Benefits of Advancing Low-Wage Workers, a project of the National Network of Sector Partners (NNSP) funded by the Hitachi Foundation, documents human resource strategies  that have provided significant returns to businesses and have helped lower-wage workers succeed in moving up to better jobs.  By focusing on companies that have achieved these outcomes and identifying the innovative approaches they have pursued, the project will make it possible for other businesses to adopt similar practices.

This workshop will discuss findings to date from interviews with employers in the manufacturing and healthcare sectors.  In particular, the session will describe innovative human resource strategies, investments, and partnerships - including partnerships with sector initiatives - that have resulted in advancement for low-wage workers and simultaneous benefits for business.

Following the catastrophic damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development decided to redevelop the C.J. Peete Public Housing Development into a new mixed-income community. Urban Strategies, Inc. was selected to manage the Community and Supportive Services Program, which includes case management, developing critical program partnerships, and coordinating the Federally-mandated Section 3 program. Urban Strategies has developed an integrated strategy that gives residents the first opportunity for economic benefit while at the same time addressing the complex guidelines that govern the hiring components of these large-scale development projects.

Often, when we begin sector work, we start with the industry clusters that are most important to our regional economies.  Health care, manufacturing, logistics and transportation, business and financial services, retail, and hospitality usually jump right out of the statistics.  This presentation offers a case study in use of Strategic Advantage and other data tools and explores how to go deeper and find "hidden" sectors that require more detailed data analysis but that ultimately may lead to more and better opportunities for the people that we serve.

In a down economy, it can be harder than ever for sector initiatives to stay engaged with employers and function as effective workforce intermediaries. In this workshop, representatives of Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership (WRTP) discuss how WRTP stays close to industry needs while simultaneously meeting the needs of job-seekers and incumbent workers. Presenters will discuss WRTP’s partnership with labor and its important role in their ongoing success. They will provide an update about WRTP’s new staffing company, Triada, including how the company is introducing its employer and union partners to federal tax credits that are available them.

The latest Census reports that 39.1 million people in America struggle to survive on incomes below the Federal Poverty Guidelines. However, the Federal Poverty Guidelines vastly understate what individuals and families actually need to make ends meet.

In 1997, recognizing the need for an accurate measure of income adequacy, Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW) and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development helped to launch the Family Economic Self-Sufficiency (FESS) Project: an innovative, nation-wide effort to gain support for proven practices to help working families reach economic security. At the center of the FESS Project is the Family Economic Self-Sufficiency Standard, a county-and-family specific measure that includes the costs facing working individuals and families: housing, food, child care, health care, transportation, taxes, and tax credits.

Come learn about the Self-Sufficiency Standard and explore how sector initiatives and other workforce agencies use it to benchmark individual and organizational impact and progress, determine eligibility for workforce training funds, conduct labor market analysis, assist in career planning, and inform labor-management negotiations.

This interactive session will present a promising sector strategy for improving job quality and promoting career advancement in health care. Jobs to Careers supports 17 demonstration projects nationwide that target diverse settings and occupations. Through innovative, work-based curriculum and partnerships of employers with higher education, frontline health care workers attain new skills while earning academic credit and industry-recognized credentials on the job. The workshop will explore a Philadelphia-based partnership of behavioral health employers with a labor/management training fund, and a Youngstown (OH) collaboration of hospital employers and technical education centers, drawing out common themes and lessons.

Identifying industry clusters that are important for our regional economy is just the first step in doing sectors work.  The hardest job is figuring out what do we do next in getting a sectoral project underway.  This presentation helps newer sector practitioners to answer some of the major questions that confront new projects such as how does this initiative fit strategically into the rest of what we do, who are the related stakeholders and how do I get them together, what is the role of intermediaries, who "owns" the project, how to let the business voice energy, who do we need to involve in staffing the initiative, and how do we fund it in the short and long-term. 

With Federal support for sector initiatives growing and key legislation pending, the NNSP conference offers attendees an opportunity to connect with Federal policy-makers about sector initiatives. In particular, attendees who schedule Hill visits will be able to:

• Build momentum for the SECTORS Act as Congress moves towards WIA reauthorization
• Increase visibility for sector approaches in other federal policy areas
• Establish relationships with policymakers and staff

In this workshop, the Workforce Alliance will provide tips, training, and materials to help communicate the importance of sector initiatives and to make your Hill visit effective.

The idea of "green jobs" has captured attention, emotion, and resources. Green doesn't represent a new sector, however, and includes very few entirely new jobs. Capturing the benefit of the greening economy involves understanding how existing sectors incorporate old and new skills to meet new business, market, and efficiency objectives. This session will use a skills analysis process conducted in San Antonio, Texas to illustrate a framework for understanding how environmental and sustainability concerns impact skills needs within and across sectors and to explore how sector and workforce professionals can use this framework to understand how skills will make our sectors greener.

Sector strategies have proven to be very effective in moving unskilled and low-skilled individuals from poor communities into high growth, high wage jobs with career pathways. Very little, however, has been done to focus sectoral workforce research and strategies to address the underutilization of women and people of color in industries and occupations that are high growth, high wage with career pathways. Sectoral workforce development provides an avenue to support these programs by utilizing data driven strategies, which resonates with both private and public funders and is in line with the funding directions of the Employment and Training Administration of the U. S. Department of Labor. This workshop will highlight research tools that work to address these workforce disparities and offer hands-on tools for agencies and non-profits to conduct their own research.

Targeting sector initiatives at high-wage industries can be effective at helping low-income people access good jobs, and programmatic interventions with employers can be effective in improving job quality for workers. Nonetheless, large segments of the workforce work in low-wage sectors and poor quality jobs – and these sectors of the economy are only growing. In this panel, representatives of national organizations that share the goal of improving job quality in low-wage industries discuss their strategies for addressing the problem of job quality through combinations of industry engagement, legal advocacy, policy development, organization, and other strategies.

"Integrated Learning" connects development of basic skills and work-related skills as a strategy to advance low-literacy or limited English-proficient students along a clear career pathway. The strategy uses curriculum contextualized for specific career pathways in key industry sectors, as well as other supports, to address the problem that few students in stand-alone developmental education courses progress to occupational skills training.

This workshop will address "Integrated Learning" and various approaches to it from Federal, state, business, and community-based perspectives.

Almost two straight years of steady job loss, a national unemployment rate of 9.8%, and a significant percentage of people so discouraged that they have given up looking for work have devastated families and communities. This workshop will explore experience with and strategies to turn the situation around through government intervention. For instance, the workshop will explore the important role of wage subsidies in getting people back to work after 9/11 in New York City.

Sector projects boomed in the early part of this decade, particularly as the public workforce system became more and more involved. As support for sector initiatives has grown, many organizations have became involved in multiple sector projects or developed sector initiatives in addition to their other workforce development activities. The recent recession has forced a rethinking and reprioritizing of these projects as funding has decreased at a time when the sheer volume of unemployed job-seekers has stretched existing resources. Nonetheless, sector work remains crucial, particularly due to its close connection with business. This presentation has two foci…how to manage multiple sector projects and how to do it with less funding and more pressure from the public sector.

Denver’s experience with the Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development (WIRED) initiative and other regional efforts offer many lessons that can be applied to sector initiatives. These include key questions related to choosing industries, ways to engage industry, how to develop career pathways for low-income individuals, ways to structure programs to maximize efficiencies and eliminate redundancies, the role of sector coordinators, the appropriate role of the state and WIBs in developing and operating regional initiatives, and other promising practices.

The Minnesota FastTRAC initiative is building identifiable, sustainable, and highly effective career pathway employment and training programs that provide opportunities for low-wage, low-skilled adults to increase basic and occupational skills and acquire stackable credentials that bring sizable payoffs in the labor market.

Stackable credentials are a key component of Minnesota's regional and industry-focused approach to workforce and economic development.  Thus far, stackable credential programs have developed "organically" (through competitive funding which incentivized cooperation) among willing parties with mutual interests, program goals and complementary capacities. These parties include WorkForce Centers (One-Stops), Adult Basic Education/ESL providers, two-year state community and technical colleges, community-based organizations, and employers. To realize the Minnesota FastTRAC vision, policy adjustment efforts are underway that will build, improve, sustain and institutionalize stackable credential programs.

The National Fund for Workforce Solutions is a public-philanthropic initiative to help workers and employers succeed by creating new ways to rebuild our economy by better preparing our workforce. This session will show how the four NFWS principles provide a framework to accomplish this goal.

The Los Angeles Workforce Funding Collaborative, a NFWS member, is focused on strengthening sectoral workforce partnerships in Los Angeles County. Together with one of its grantees, the Healthcare Workforce Development Project, LAWFC will describe its civic leadership role in bringing together government, business, community organizations, and educators to support and sustain sector initiatives.

Labor market information is a critical tool in operating successful sector initiatives. The use of labor market data in sector work can provide a clear vision of the local and regional economy, guide programmatic decisions of where to focus money and resources, and lead to successful outcomes for employers and jobseekers. This workshop will discuss practical strategies for using labor market information within sector initiatives from deciding on which industries to focus to crafting and implementing a business development plan. The panel discussion will include policymakers from NYC Department of Small Business Services and a practitioner from the Workforce1 Transportation Career Center, New York City’s first Sector-Based Career Center focused on the Transportation industry.

This session presents a non-traditional, innovative model of Registered Apprenticeship for Certified Nurse Aides developed and initiated in a large, rural region. 

The Healthcare Regional Skills Alliance in Northwest Michigan is a partnership of 100 employers, educators, WIBs, and community organizations that was specifically developed to address workforce development and policy in healthcare.  The RSA developed a career path for entry-level through RN occupations, including skill development for incumbent workers, and is now implementing an apprenticeship in healthcare, beginning with CNAs.

Michigan has had the highest unemployment rate in the country for 3 years, and Northwest Michigan includes the county with the highest unemployment rate in the state.  Nonetheless, the RSA is training and transitioning folks from automotive to healthcare, particularly long term care - one of the highest demand occupations in the nation.

For the publicly-funded workforce development system, setting and maintaining standards for job quality is a difficult undertaking. However, the City of Chicago’s sector-based workforce initiatives have shown considerable promise in making job quality a priority. This session will present a framework for thinking about job quality from the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) before exploring examples from Chicago’s manufacturing-focused workforce center, ManufacturingWorks, of successful strategies for integrating job quality goals into sector work.

You know that sector initiatives are regional, industry-focused approaches to workforce and economic development that improve access to good jobs and/or increase job quality in ways that strengthen an industry’s workforce – but how should you go about getting yours off the ground? What should you keep in mind as you engage industry and convene partners? How will you fund your efforts?

In this session, learn the sector essentials: characteristics of sector initiatives and workforce intermediaries, processes for sector initiative research and design, systems change goals, and possible partners and their roles.

What are the keys to success for sector initiatives working in Latino immigrant communities? This workshop, moderated by staff from the National Council of La Raza, builds on the experiences and perspectives of three organizations with distinct approaches to increasing access for Latino immigrants to good jobs in targeted industries. Interactive discussion will clarify what’s different about sector initiatives that serve Latino immigrant populations and will address strategies for addressing language barriers in the context of occupational skills development, helping public systems build responsiveness to and credibility with immigrant communities, and engaging with industry.

Sector initiatives operating in rural settings face particular challenges: engaging with employers across large areas, addressing such participant support needs as transportation assistance, and managing in spite of a dearth of community resources. In this session, we will discuss some ways rural sector initiatives are meeting these and other challenges by considering the perspectives of community-based organizations, regional workforce funder collaboratives, community colleges, and other participants in rural economies.

City agencies in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York have launched large-scale sector-based career centers within their WIA-funded public workforce development systems. In this workshop, representatives from those cities will discuss how they chose to launch those programs, whose existence reflects a major systems change in itself. More specifically, the panelists will address the successes and challenges of integrating these centers into the One-Stop system, attaining scale, balancing high-volume performance metrics, creative uses of funding (including stimulus dollars), and the goal of effecting broader systems change. Panelists will also lead workshop participants in a discussion of ways to integrate sector-focused work into their own One-Stop systems.

This session will present the work of the Great Lakes Wind Network and Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council as an example of a sector based strategy for expanding opportunities for American manufacturing companies in the renewable energy industry in a way that is linked to the rebuilding of our workforce development systems to meet the needs of 21^st century manufacturing. The presenters' vision seeks to identify those elements of the "green" economy that have the greatest economic impact and highest value added, both for existing companies and workers.

A growing number of community colleges are collaborating with non-profit agencies to improve educational outcomes for low-income adults and develop appropriately skilled workers who can be competitive in today’s economy. This session will highlight a demonstration project designed to evaluate six community college-community-based partnerships and share some of the early learnings from the project. The experiences of Training Futures, a partnership between Northern Virginia Family Services and Northern Virginia Community College, will serve as an example of collaboration.

The current economic crisis has had a major impact on funding for sector initiatives, as well as on participant and industry needs. In this session, NNSP will present preliminary findings from our 2009 national survey of sector initiatives, demonstrating how budgets, funding plans, and program activities have been affected by the recession. In addition, sector initiatives that have implemented innovative approaches to ensuring sustainability of their programs will share their ideas for dealing with the downturn.

States have used a variety of strategies to support and scale up sector initiatives. This workshop will explore New York’s Career Pathways Initiative, Pennsylvania’s success in obtaining a continued state appropriation for Industry Partnerships during tough times, and California’s success in bringing together multiple state agencies to support workforce development related to green jobs.

Job Training that Works: Findings from the Sectoral Employment Impact Study, a new random-assignment study from Public/Private Ventures, analyzes the impact of sector initiatives led by three different organizations:

• a medical and basic office skills sector initiative led by JVS (Boston, MA)
• an information technology sector initiative led by Per Scholas (Bronx, NY)
• construction, manufacturing, and healthcare sector initiatives led by Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership / BIG STEP (Milwaukee, WI)

The results show that well-implemented sector-focused training programs improve the earning of low-income, disadvantaged workers and job-seekers. In this session, hear from the leaders of these initiatives about their initiatives and the critical factors contributing to their effectiveness.

After sector initiatives achieve success, they face a variety of questions related to sustainability and scale. This workshop will bring together mature sector initiatives to share experiences related to these questions, identify processes used to identify and address them, and explore the results.

Sector partnerships are playing an increasingly important role in Federal workforce and education policy. Reauthorization of the Trade Adjustment Act included a new grant program for sector partnerships, and the Department of Labor guidance for Recovery Act funds specifically supports them. The SECTORS Act proposes planning and implementation grants for sector partnerships, and legislation affecting post-secondary education also includes them. As Congress prepares to reauthorize the Workforce Investment Act, knowing where Federal policy support for sector initiatives is headed is more important than ever.

This session will provide an update on the status of workforce development policy in Congress and the Administration, with a particular focus on opportunities to advance proposals that promote or support sector initiatives.