SECTORS AFTER COVID

The coronavirus crisis has completely upended the past many years of wisdom and programmatic experience about the role of the workforce system:  in a tight labor market, the workforce system was to be focused on labor force participation – on getting those sitting things out back into the labor force.

After week after week where millions filed for unemployment benefits, a fivefold increase on the past highest-week-ever total, the above focus is clearly going to be shifting, fast.

How do workforce boards, state agencies, local career centers and nonprofits respond?  Do we wait to see what comes next, and to find our purpose and place?  Or, do we initiate and orchestrate a strategic response that best aids in employment recovery and best leverages the knowledge and resources the above partners have to offer?

In the immediate term, the priority is clear and tactical:  deliver service to millions of people and get them unemployment cash assistance, when in the past mere thousands were served.  What will it take, in people and in technology, to make this happen?  In the coming days and weeks this provision of service and assistance is very obviously job one.

At the same time, as the ground shifts under our feet, will we fall into a sinkhole never to emerge, or will we make use of our talents?  The opportunity for immediate strategic reframing and action may be in the realm of sector strategies.

In the past ten years, the workforce system has migrated from its old “train and pray” model of aligning services with the interests and capacities of individual customers, to a “sector strategies” approach.  In this model, industry, workforce and education partners gather around industry sectors, much as campers around a fire, and build coordinated services that bring groups of trained workersinto the hiring circle of interested employers.

Most if not all workforce service providers have used some form of an industry sector approach to provide services, and most if not all geographies have concentrated on “high growth, high wage” sectors of health care, manufacturing, logistics, IT, and construction.

Now that the pandemic is upon us, and now that our tactical priority is the provision of unemployment cash assistance, our strategic moment cannot wait.  If we are to show initiative and be at the table for the economic response and reconfiguration conversations that have already begun, should we:

1.       Double down on sectors – re-establishing our interest and resources on our existing sector strategy to ensure that we upskill the newly unemployed into our established sectors;

2.       Recalibrate our sector strategy to adjust the focus and resources between sectors, enabling a clearly needed immediate and extreme investment in the health care sector and an adjustment of manufacturing sector focus into the manufacturing of health-related goods and equipment; AND/OR

3.       Redefine our sectors for the future that has now arrived.  New, fast moving and complex problems may mean that the concept of sector strategies is right, but that the sectors themselves are too backward-looking and distinct.  Perhaps this event has shown us that a “health care logistics” sector is high-growth, high-wage and of the greatest import.  Perhaps that will require partners who have not worked together previously to quickly and effectively build new sector models.

This crisis is so enormous, and fast, and impossible to fathom.  It is hard to know where and how to respond.  Perhaps we can chart our sector course, now and as it unfolds, and feel both grounded in the work that has come before this moment, and ready for the work that lies ahead.