Equitable Recovery through Career Pathways: National Skills Coalition released a toolkit to help policymakers, human service agency leaders and community colleges develop career pathways systems that emphasize an equitable recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. The toolkit promotes building partnerships between human service agencies and postsecondary systems to address learners’ basic needs as they prepare for a high-quality career, with examples from Arkansas and Oregon.

Relatedly, America Achieves published a playbook that provides states and communities with an evidence-based approach to building a workforce system that matches individuals to high-paying and high-demand jobs. The playbook guides readers through steps to creating an employer demand-driven workforce scholarship program with an accompanying evaluation system to assess job attainment, wage gains and program quality. Additionally, the playbook features policy examples from Rhode Island’s Back to Work program and West Virginia’s Learn and Earn program.

Governors’ Education Priorities: A publication from Education Commission of the States outlines governors’ top priorities in education for 2022 by analyzing 44 State of the State addresses from this year. Among the following top six education priorities identified by the report, recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic served as a backdrop for most, and workforce development and CTE ranked as governors’ second highest priority:

• The majority of governors addressed K-12 funding, with some who suggested cuts due to the COVID-19 pandemic while others, such as governors from Illinois and Georgia, proposed increases.
• About 34 governors highlighted workforce development and CTE by proposing investments in job training programs using federal stimulus funds, such as Nebraska, and by calling for increased grant funding to expand CTE programs, like Missouri.
• Half of governors noted teacher staffing as an issue. As a solution, governors from states like New York proposed strengthening career pathways and creating faster routes to certification.
• Roughly 19 governors mentioned physical and mental health of student and staff as a priority. Additionally, the same number of governors focused on the issue of postsecondary affordability.
• Learning recovery and academic success was addressed by 17 governors as an issue due to the pandemic, and some governors noted investments and out-of-school opportunities as solutions.

Using Data to Improve Education-to-Workforce Pipelines: A recent brief from Education Strategy Group discusses how bringing together early childhood, K-12, higher education and workforce data can be an effective mechanism to improve the education-to-workforce pipeline. Researchers interviewed leaders from Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Texas and Washington to study how these states developed cross-sector data dashboards. The brief outlines lessons learned, questions for policymakers to consider and recommendations for building a cross-sector data dashboard.