2024 Legislative Priorities

Workforce Development Boards (WDBs) are the conveners, collaborators, and navigators of the workforce ecosystem, facilitating opportunities that drive local economic growth. This year, NAWB expects Congress to continue its consideration of comprehensive legislation to reauthorize and otherwise update the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). NAWB’s legislative priorities for 2024 are therefore primarily aimed at impacting this process, particularly in response to H.R. 6655, The Stronger Workforce for America Act (ASWA), which we believe must be further refined as efforts to update and modernize WIOA continue with Congress.

Strengthen Local Capacity to Increase Training Opportunities

• Rather than creating new, one-size-fits-all federal training mandates, increase flexibilities and remove arbitrary restrictions on skills development contained in WIOA that allow local workforce development boards (LWDBs) and other stakeholders to provide training opportunities that fit their communities’ needs.

• Substantially increase funding for core Title I WIOA funding streams including youth, adults, and dislocated workers and target these resources directly to local workforce areas to ensure LWDBs have the necessary resources to meet demand and provide quality services to both workers and employers.

• Center LWDBs as the primary orchestrator of federal workforce development activities at the local level to ensure the public workforce system can effectively and efficiently respond to strategic economic needs and related goals of their communities.

• Ensure the voices and perspectives of LWDBs, especially the communities and regions that they represent, are robustly centered as part of future workforce development legislation and related processes that determine the structure and governance of wider workforce development system.  

Promote Lifelong Learning

• Expand funding for ITAs and tie this funding to mechanisms that account for increased worker demand for training during economic downturns, especially investments that enable employers to quickly fill in-demand positions while ensuring workers successful completion.

• Broaden the underlying definition for training services within WIOA, including what can be funded by ITAs, to better account for costs and expenses that enable successful completion and credential attainment (e.g. “training enabling” services such as transportation, childcare, etc.).

• Create a single point of access for individuals to access training opportunities that are not only funded by WIOA but other federal investments to facilitate a national marketplace for high-quality training opportunities to allow consumers to search for and identify providers that meet their needs.

• Expand Pell Grant eligibility for students enrolled in high-quality, shorter-term skills development programs while utilizing existing WIOA processes to ensure these programs align with in-demand careers and wider economic opportunity. 

Improve Operational Efficiencies 

• Provide dedicated funding for one-stop center infrastructure costs, based on actual system needs, and eliminate onerous infrastructure funding agreement provisions in current law that disincentivize state and local collaboration.

• Eliminate the requirement for physical one-stop centers and grant state and local WDBs the option to utilize either a physical or virtual one-stop center that ensures universal accessibility to the greatest extent possible.

• Ensure common terminology, definitions, and concepts are integrated into future workforce development legislation to increase alignment and operational efficiencies between education and workforce development systems and related investments.

• Allow LWDBs to determine how to allocate WIOA youth funds to ensure these allocations reflect actual needs of local communities and prioritize youth populations that need the most support.

• Ensure the voices and perspectives of LWDBs, especially the communities and regions that they represent, are robustly centered as part of future workforce development legislation and related processes that determine the structure and governance of wider workforce development system

Enhance Data Quality and Invest in Workforce Development Infrastructure

• Promote skills-based hiring initiatives through the use of linked, open, and interoperable data formats for information generated by the public workforce development system and incentivize other efforts that facilitate skills-based hiring practices more generally.

• Expand access to quality sources for individual-level employment data to improve related reporting and accountability efforts, which could include the establishment of a public-private national workforce data exchange to reduce reporting and collection costs, promote interoperability, and increase data quality, value, and timeliness.

• Invest in the public workforce system’s capacity to produce and make use of real-time labor market information to ensure training experiences lead to true opportunities in the labor market.

• Codify and enhance the Workforce Data Quality Initiative to better connect and connect funded activities to other federal investments in state longitudinal P20W data systems with a particular emphasis on efforts to promote data sharing among states and integration of data systems within states.