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JFF Guest Blog: How Workforce Development Boards Can Drive Innovation in the Career Navigation Technology Market
By: Josh Copus, director, JFFLabs
Often referred to as “intermediaries,” workforce development boards sit at the career development intersection, often supporting individuals during times of crisis (like today) or other important points of transition as they make important decisions about life, learning, and work. For entry-level and middle-skill workers, especially, workforce development boards are lifelines at times of job transition or disconnection.
Workforce development boards and job centers invest in technologies
to provide services to workers and learners more efficiently, reinforce staff capacity, and navigate the complex career and industry landscape themselves. Having the client base, scale, and spending ability to make big investments in technology and digital transformation, they are a powerful catalyst for innovation in the career navigation technology market.
Intermediaries are using many of the most fully featured career navigation systems available today, including tools that help jobseekers connect with education and training options, jobs, career guidance, and employers looking for workers. They’re also using technology to provide a broad range of wraparound supports, such as coaching or connections to community resources.
A growing number of technological tools have emerged to facilitate career guidance in educational settings, oriented toward students and entry level or early career workers discovering pathways and connecting to employers.
In this moment, the intermediary market has an opportunity to significantly influence the ongoing development of career navigation technologies, with an emphasis on innovations that yield more human-centered systems.
Wielding Existing Influence, Revealing Innovation Opportunities
Public intermediaries such as workforce development boards have the power to drive wide-scale adoption of career navigation technologies, because they touch so much of the job seeking population in their areas. But the systems that intermediaries, like workforce development boards, use have to check many boxes to meet public funding requirements that often vary by jurisdiction—adding complexity to the product design process and constraining innovation. Still, some leading companies have found a way to move the needle.
Vendors also continue to shape the career navigation field. Geographic Solutions, Launchpad, Social Solutions, and PAIRIN
have become staples of workforce development boards and American Job Centers, touching millions of unemployed workers, especially now, during the pandemic.
While no survey of career navigation tools can overlook powerful incumbents like Geographic Solutions, more flexible public requirements could help make the ecosystem more hospitable to innovation—especially when innovation helps providers do an even better, more equitable job of reaching and serving unemployed and disconnected jobseekers.
Long-Term Allies Among Workers
For many workers, career navigation that leads to economic mobility is built on trust and ongoing engagement with local institutions. Yet many workers engage with institutions and organizations such as workforce boards, job centers, community-based organizations, training providers, and other intermediaries with short-term goals in mind—and they aren’t encouraged to do otherwise. Workers turn to the workforce system looking for a steady paycheck, a part-time job to help cover this month's rent, or even for advice on where to find affordable child care or repair the broken-down family car. Long-term connections with these intermediaries are key to building an extensive network of contacts that facilitate opportunities for employment and career advancement.
Career navigation tools can help career navigators understand the importance of maintaining these connections. This could take the form of guidance or tips about how to make use of community resources. Or—keeping in mind the need for robust data privacy protections—platforms could be more proactive, triggering reminders or nudges to users about organizations, agencies, or companies they had previously engaged with, months or years ago, to make them aware of new training and career pathways.
This article is one in a series by JFFLabs
featuring impact opportunities in the career navigation technology market. For more information and to learn more, visit JFF.org/careernavtech.
ABOUT JFF
JFF is a national nonprofit that drives transformation in the American workforce and education systems. For more than 35 years, JFF has led the way in designing innovative and scalable solutions that create access to economic advancement for all. www.jff.org.
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