States to receive nearly $6M in grants for data collection to improveworkforce and education programs, US Department of Labor announces

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Labor today announced $5,945,825 in grants for the fourth round of the Workforce Data Quality Initiative. These funds will enable six states to build or expand longitudinal databases that link workforce and education data and help these states to better understand how education and workforce development programs complement each other.

"This federal funding will help states collect high-quality data to improve their employment and training services," U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez said. "Workers will also benefit by gaining access to information so that they can identify which job training program will best serve their needs."

Grantees will be expected to use these longitudinal databases to conduct research and analysis aimed at determining the effectiveness of workforce and education programs and to develop tools to better inform customers about the benefits of the publicly-funded workforce system.

These grants stem from the administration's focus on access to high-quality data and is a companion initiative to the U.S. Department of Education's Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems grants, which are designed to build education databases.

Grants awarded through the Department of Labor's initiative have been made across the country to single-state grantees. The grantees include four states that will begin to develop their longitudinal databases (Connecticut, Indiana, Kentucky and Mississippi) and two states that intend to expand work already initiated on their databases (Nebraska and New Jersey).

Grantees will be expected to achieve multiple goals during the three-year grant period. These include:

• developing or improving state workforce longitudinal data systems with individual-level information;
• enabling workforce data to be matched with education data to create longitudinal data systems;
• improving the quality and breadth of the data in the workforce data systems;
• using longitudinal data to provide useful information about program operations;
• analyzing the performance of education and employment training programs; and
• providing user-friendly information to consumers, in the form of scorecards or integrated digital platforms, to help them select the training and education programs that best suit their needs.

To find out more about past WDQI grantees, visit http://www.doleta.gov/performance/workforcedatagrant09.cfm.

Editor's Note: A list of grantee follows this release.