Meeting adult learners where they are means being present in many places. In a rapidly evolving labor market, integrated support must persist along extended pathways. Educators and trainers, workforce developers, nonprofit organizations and employers offer significant but siloed touchpoints along those pathways. That’s why CAEL delivers much of its impact as an intermediary, aligning disparate stakeholders around one mission driven by diverse strengths and expertise.
Communication is often scarce among these groups, leading to a lack of awareness about talent pipeline challenges, opportunities and even outcomes. A major challenge is the lack of data sharing and interoperability. Educational institutions may track enrollment and completion, but they have no way to connect these efforts to employment outcomes. Employers worry that curricula are irrelevant to their actual needs, yet they often lack the data to identify the specific cause of talent shortages. The workforce ecosystem struggles to ensure that training and experience are consistently awarded credit or that credentials officially count toward higher degrees.
In summer 2023, CAEL partnered with Midwest Urban Strategies, Pittsburgh Scholar House, Vibrant Pittsburgh, Strada Education Foundation and Koch Foundation to address these challenges through the development of MyCareerForward. The program is dedicated to bridging silos to deploy holistic, persistent support at every segment of the talent pipeline in Pittsburgh and the surrounding Allegheny region. MyCareerForward connects employers, educators and trainers, support services networks and workforce developers, so adult learners, especially low-wage populations, have more clearly defined, navigable and supported pathways into high-wage occupations.
MyCareerForward’s end-to-end design focuses on tracking learner/earner outcomes from initial outreach to training to credential attainment to employment (or reemployment). It’s an approach that embodies CAEL’s vision of the learner/earner journey not as a linear, one-and-done odyssey but as a cycle of continual improvement that advances individual careers in response to ever-changing employer needs.
Credit for prior learning and a stackable progression of credentials are important assets within the MyCareerForward arsenal. Their ability to address short-term job needs as well as longer-term career and academic attainment supports flexibility, always a critical quality for adult learning. As profound as their potential is, its effectiveness depends heavily on a shared understanding of how competencies are assessed and how various credentials capture them. MyCareerForward anticipated the growing importance of interoperability as short-term credentials began proliferating at seemingly exponential rates. Its vision includes a connected suite of data-informed technology tools that track the learner/earner’s journey, aggregate results into a live data dashboard that improves job placement.
SkillsFWD, an initiative of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, also launched in 2023 with a focus on advancing economic mobility through data-driven cross-sector collaboration. It specializes in developing the potential of learning and employment records (LERs) to advance competency-based education and workforce development. LERs capture diverse forms of education and employment achievements, offering individuals a more equitable way to showcase their competencies and making it easier for employers to recognize them during the hiring process.
Seeking to accelerate the maturation of the LER concept from the theoretical to the practical realm, SkillsFWD planned to showcase promising real-world LER implementations that could generate valuable insight for practitioners. It executed this plan by funding teams that could exemplify the complete LER lifecycle. Grant recipients were selected according to their ability to engage stakeholders throughout the workforce ecosystem, track and report key performance indicators, and deliver a plan to scale work beyond the grant period.
A rigorous application process considered nearly 60 applicants for six available grants. CAEL’s closely aligned work in MyCareerForward would prove to be a harmonious match for the funding opportunity. A recently published SkillsFWD report details how. The SkillsFWD Demonstration: What We Learned offers a comprehensive summary of the grant program’s objectives and the different approaches participants took to help realize them.
Through MyCareerForward, CAEL had already established a strong foundation of partnerships and objectives aligned with SkillsFWD’s goals. For example, CAEL had partnered with the Energy Innovation Center Institute’s BankWork$ program, a credentialed training initiative, and Literacy Pittsburgh, an English language and literacy training organization, providing a ready pipeline of learners for the LER pilot.
During the grant period, CAEL engaged employers to confirm ideal roles for a competency-based hiring pipeline linked to BankWork$ curricula. It completed labor market research, validated career pathways with employers, and mapped priority skills to local hiring needs in the region. This work informed the design of a digital credential that signaled individual mastery of employer-validated competencies for three priority occupations. CAEL collaborated with SmartResume and Parchment Digital Badges to platform and standardize the credential to ensure seamless interoperability and visibility among jobseekers, employers, community-based organizations and other stakeholders.
The collaboration that had always been at the heart of MyCareerForward proved critical to CAEL’s success during the grant period. “In order to engage the ALICE [asset-limited, income-constrained, employed] population in accessing the training opportunity through Bankwork$ and new LER tools available, CAEL activated a network of CBOs that collectively serve thousands of learners each year,” SkillsFWD notes in the report. “These partners agreed to introduce learners to LERs, SmartResume and the Talent Marketplace as part of their career navigation and job placement services. They also launched digital marketing campaigns and localized career exploration tools in the Skillup platform. SkillUp allowed them to track these engagements and adjust messaging based on age and role interest.”
The grant work is allowing CAEL to realize its vision of a dynamic analytics platform to anchor MyCareerForward’s outcome tracking. It supported the build-out of a data dashboard supported by AGS Prime that will collect insights across the initiative. The data dashboard, which CAEL plans to publish, will help identify trends in key areas like learner engagement, credential use and hiring. CAEL is already using these data in planning for scaling the LER impact and, more broadly, the MyCareerForward framework, which it plans to replicate in additional regions in the future. CAEL also intends to complement its LER work for the banking sector with similar credentials serving the IT, advanced manufacturing and energy sectors.
Meanwhile, the SkillsFWD report offers takeaways from its support of MyCareerForward. Echoing its focus on operationalizing the LER concept, the report presents CBOs as important intermediaries for ensuring that LERs reach the people who can most benefit from them. It notes that CAEL’s Pittsburgh-based CBOs have a long and effective legacy engaging the ALICE population. The trust they have accrued positions them to authentically encourage the adoption of LERs. The report also underscores LERs’ ability to increase the visibility of qualified candidates who might remain unseen in traditional recruiting channels. For example, CAEL’s partnership with Vibrant Pittsburgh engaged employers interested in diversifying their workforce to encourage them to become early adopters of the LER approach.
The full report is available at skillsfwd.org.