Executive Summary

• Highlights
• The Workforce Investment Act and Self-Sufficiency
• What is the Self-Sufficiency Standard?
• About this Guide
• Order a Hard Copy

Highlights

The workforce boards described in this guide have demonstrated their willingness to achieve a high standard of services and quality regarding the work lives of their clients. The following common elements emerged:

• The workforce boards highlighted in Reality Check view self-sufficiency as a mechanism to build a comprehensive and systemic response to workforce development in their communities. Components of such a system include providing information on high wage jobs including the skilled trades; developing a career plan that assesses skills, aptitudes, and abilities connecting jobseekers to supportive services; and providing training for jobs identified in the community with the long-term goal of achieving a job seeker's economic self-sufficiency.
• Workforce boards are investing in staff training to assist One Stop and other staff to effectively translate the concept of self sufficiency to their customers.
• Workforce boards found that structuring their on-the-job training, contracts and sector strategies around a self-sufficiency framework greatly assisted them in engaging employers and meeting the employers’ needs.
• Boards are finding that clients need to be exposed to the range of job and job training opportunities in order to make informed choices in developing short and long term career plans. The self-sufficiency framework is being used as a context in which outcomes in career planning can be established and then measured.
• WIBs who have successfully engaged employers as fully invested partners in conjunction with self sufficiency strategies have done so to the benefit of the employers as well as the customer—each entity must embrace the mutual benefit of working together.
• WIBs that establish customer progress toward self-sufficiency as a measure of success are creating tools to track that progress, and to inform program development. Acknowledging that different demographic groups experience the workforce system differently and have different service needs, WIBs are also analyzing outcomes and customer satisfaction by demographic group. These WIBs are tailoring both their outcome data and their customer satisfaction data to self-sufficiency measures.