Employment and Training and the Urban Workforce

This paper highlights the shortcomings of key components of the employment and training system, showing that both school-to-work efforts and second chance employment and training programs suffer from systemic and programmatic problems. In American schools, work-oriented learning takes place predominantly through programs which are isolated from traditional academic education, and thus stigmatized. These programs serve few students and frequently operate with little involvement from local business. Career guidance in schools is limited, and classroom learning is widely perceived as poorly matched with the requirements of the labor market. In this atmosphere the vast majority of non-college-bound students find themselves without a clear route from education to employment, lacking the skills and connections needed for success in the work arena. Similarly, second chance programs offer little opportunity for disadvantaged workers to mitigate inadequacies in prior preparation. As economic development strategies that promote the transition to high-performance work organizations are formulated, a coherent system for workforce development must also be pursued, to provide the foundation of skilled labor which new growth industries will increasingly call for. Such investment in human resources requires that employment and training services be provided in a systematic, strategic manner. This will mean that the employment and training system will have to be reconfigured to meet this growing emphasis on educated and skilled workers.