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The literature review reviews what is known about sector-based training strategies to date, and why they have become so popular with policymakers. It also reviews several major challenges to expanding them while trying to maintain their quality. These challenges include the fact that only workers with strong basic skills and employability are likely to benefit from these strategies; the likely tradeoffs between short- and long-term impacts and between general and more specific training; the difficulties of replicating and scaling the best models; and uncertain future labor demand. The literature review concludes with a number of policy recommendations in light of the challenges sector-based strategies face.

Key Takeaways

• Job-driven or sector-based training actively tries to match worker skills on the supply side of the labor market with what employers seek on the demand side of the market.
• Despite the popularity of job-driven/sector training strategies, and the widespread efforts to expand their use, we face some significant challenges in trying to do so.
• Job-driven training seems to constitute an effective anti-poverty strategy while, at the same time, it meets the needs and concerns of employers in the hiring process.
• A source of tension in demand-driven training strategies involves the extent to which training is specific to certain occupations and sectors or more general.
• Current efforts to scale demand-driven training programs in states around the country, and federal support of those efforts, have been at least partly driven by the strong impacts that were found in the rigorous evaluations of sector programs.
• Given the widespread interest in developing more and better demand-drive training systems for workers, and also given the strong impacts of such programs in evaluation evidence, it is inevitable that we should, and will, continue to do so in the U.S.

Research Gaps

• In addition, real-time data on job vacancies are now becoming more available and more complete from sources that scrape the internet for such information, both public and private. Though these are shorter-term in nature, they give us a sense over time of the set of jobs which employers have had some greater difficulty filling. Finally, these data can be merged with O*NET data on occupational tasks from the Department of Labor to give researchers and state analysts some sense of the tasks that need to be performed on the jobs in high demand, which in turn give us some sense of the skills that need to be provided in these sectors. (page 13-14)

Citation

Holzer, H. J. (2015). Sector-Based Training Strategies: The Challenges of Matching Workers and Their Skills to Well-Paying Jobs. Symposium on the Future of Work, Washington, D.C. Chief Evaluation Office, U.S. Department of Labor.

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The Department of Labor’s (DOL) Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) sponsors independent evaluations and research, primarily conducted by external, third-party contractors in accordance with the Department of Labor Evaluation Policy and CEO’s research development process.