| Notes |
Skillful State Playbook
7 Steps to Building a
Skills-Based Labor Market
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About Skillful
Skillful, a non-profit initiative of the Markle Foundation in partnership with the state of Colorado and others, is working to
achieve a skills-based labor market to help millions of Americans overcome barriers to obtaining better-paying jobs in today’s
digital economy. Skillful helps employers achieve the workforce they need by providing data, tools, and resources that enable
the adoption of skills-based hiring and training practices. Coaches and digital services enable job seekers to learn what skills are
in demand and access training at any stage of their career. At the same time, Skillful aligns employers and educators so that their
training programs teach the skills required to succeed in today’s economy.
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The nature of work in the digital economy is
changing. We need a playbook for state leaders
to enable their workforce to change with it.
We haven’t seen a transformation like this since the Industrial Revolution, when jobs moved from farms to factories.
Technology is demanding new skills. Long-standing occupations are disappearing or changing almost beyond recognition. New
innovations and opportunities are turning up everywhere, yet the talent-development system is not preparing people for these
opportunities, and the labor market is not connecting capable job seekers, particularly the nearly 70 percent of Americans who
lack a college degree, with employers who need skilled workers.
In the current credential-based labor market, workers are struggling to adapt, and employers who are embracing new technology
to transform their businesses can’t find enough talent to fill open positions. The solution requires a new frame of mind.
Let’s build a labor market in which job seekers, employers, and educators focus on the skills
required to do a job, and in which there’s new flexibility in how those skills are obtained.
This will take leadership and collaboration, and we invite you to join us in deploying the tools, practices, and resources that
will bring a skills-based focus to the workforce—helping expand employer talent pools and offer opportunity to all workers,
regardless of how they obtain their skills.
This Playbook is where we get started.
Sincerely,
Zoё Baird
CEO and President
Markle Foundation
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Here’s how we make it happen:
The Skillful Theory of Change.
At Skillful, we know that capability isn’t merely measured by college
degrees or work experience; when we use these proxies for skills,
employers forego talent, and skilled workers lose out on opportunity. So
our job is to help you create a market focused on the skills needed to do
the job. Together, we will build a skills-based labor market by effecting two
great shifts in the status quo:
1. Engaging employers, educators and trainers to help them adopt
skills-based practices.
2. Breaking down the traditional barriers between these sectors and
helping integrate their efforts to achieve true systems-level change.
Together, we can empower key labor market actors to move toward
skills-based practices, providing them with tools and resources to shift
their approach. In doing so, we will unlock opportunity for all Americans.
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Our focus is on skills, regardless of
where or how they’re obtained.
Building a skills-based labor market requires a commitment to being: • Ecosystem Focused: Engage with existing players to create a
skills-based labor market
• Skilled-Worker Centric: Design initiatives to reach and support job
seekers who have completed high school but do not have a college degree
• Evidence Based: Create and iterate approaches based on research and
experience with partners across the labor market
• Partnership Oriented: Collaborate with existing players to pursue the
fastest, most effective path to change
• Technology Enabled: Harness the technologies and data transforming the
economy to help companies and workers thrive
• Locally Supported: Incorporate local support and human connections to
change behaviors
We can help meet the needs of Americans transitioning into great
digital-economy jobs. We’ll do so by achieving impact across the
labor market ecosystem.
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STEP
1
Align your partners.
Change on this scale takes buy-in from governments,
employers, educators, and various segments of the
education and workforce system. You already have
leaders across all these sectors doing innovative
work in your state. Spurring their commitment to
skills-based practices can create the systemic change
needed to build a skills-based labor market.
This section will help you:
• Map stakeholders across the segments of
the ecosystem
• Identify the right leaders to help lead this work
• Consider the barriers that prevent partners within
and across segments from working together
TOOLS AND ASSETS:
Skillful Ecosystem Map:
Build your initiative on this
foundation, using these key
questions to identify barriers
and align the right partners to
advance skills-based practices.
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Assess your labor market
and identify the hot jobs.
A foundational step in building a skills-based
labor market is to understand the drivers of your
economy—including identifying growing industries,
as well as skilled jobs that are hard to fill. When an
economy moves toward skills-based practices, these
jobs—which may previously have been inaccessible to
many—can provide tremendous opportunity for your
residents, especially those without a college degree,
who either have or who can get the necessary skills.
In this section, you will be able to: • Develop a profile of your labor force • Identify growing industries in your state • Identify your “Hot Jobs”—opportunities that can
offer skilled constituents quality pathways
TOOLS AND ASSETS:
Process Guide:
Develop an economic profile of
your state to better understand
your population and labor force, as
well as growing industries and hot
jobs in your state.
Excel Template:
A tool to conduct your labor
market analysis.
PowerPoint Template:
This PowerPoint template can help
you visualize and present your
labor market analysis.
Hot Jobs on Skillful.com:
Once you have identified your
Hot Jobs, help your constituents
understand them better by sharing
key stats. See an example on
Skillful.com
.
STEP 2
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Help employers recruit
and hire based on
competencies.
Support industry intermediaries and businesses in
deploying skills-based employment practices for
all jobs in your economy—especially those hot jobs
that can make a difference to skilled job seekers.
Here, you’ll learn how: • Industry associations, business services groups,
and other employer intermediaries can help
identify hard-to-fill jobs and create competency
models to find the right talent
• Employers can leverage these identified skills
and use our skills-based guide to ensure that
their recruitment tools are skills-based
• If IT and Advanced Manufacturing are growing
industries in your state, Skillful’s showcase
contains many additional skills-based tools for
you to use
TOOLS AND ASSETS:
Identifying Competencies:
Business intermediaries can
create competency models that
help identify skills needed for
various jobs.
Skills-Based Hiring Guide:
Employers can leverage
competency models and the
techniques in this guide to hire
based on skills.
Showcase:
Skillful’s work with IT &
Advanced Manufacturing
Employers in Colorado.
Employer Video:
Watch how one employer
put Skillful and skills-based
employment practices to work.
STEP 3
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Help educators and
trainers teach based
on competencies.
Identifying competencies doesn’t just help
employers find the right talent—it helps educators
and trainers equip students with the right skills to
succeed in the workforce. Competency models allow
employers, educators and trainers to communicate
about the underlying skills needed to fill today’s
growth jobs, creating a feedback loop that bridges
supply and demand. Educators and trainers can use
competency models to adapt curricula to teach the
skills needed in today’s economy.
In this section, you’ll learn how:
• Skillful competency models were used to create an
entirely new community college curriculum and an
accredited course
TOOLS AND ASSETS:
Educator Video:
See how competency models can
inform curricula.
Competency Deep Dive:
Explore the Computer User
Support Specialist Deep Dive that
Aurora Community College used
to build a certificate program
in Information Technology and
Support.
STEP
4
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Help job coaches
help job seekers.
Career coaches*, the counselors who help job seekers
navigate their career journey, are critical to job
seeker success, and investing in coaching is one of
the surest ways to invest in job seekers. Through our
work with career coaches, Skillful has identified a
number of ways to help develop coaches so they can
support job seekers in a skill-based labor market. Our
work has led us to create the Governors’ Coaching
Corps and a Community of Practice as key supports
for coaches in Colorado.
In this section, you will: • Learn about professional development programs
that Skillful has created for coaches
• Read the insights from 18 months of direct work
with career coaches that informed these programs
• Access curated digital tools that your career
coaches can use to help job seekers
• Discover questions to consider when exploring
investments in your state’s career coaches
STEP 5
TOOLS AND ASSETS:
Coaching Video:
The power of coaching put to work.
Coaching Insights:
Learnings from Skillful’s first year.
Governor’s Coaching
Corps Overview:
Learn about the Coaching
Programs informed by our
insights in Colorado.
Governor’s Coaching
Corps Video:
Watch Governor Hickenlooper
launch the program.
Key Questions to Consider
when Supporting Coaches:
A few ways to identify the best
support for your coaches.
Curated Tools for
Career Coaches:
Tools to expand
coaching capabilities
* For current purposes, we are using the term coach to refer to
individuals who, in their professional capacity, help job seekers
navigate their career journey and advance toward a chosen career
path by providing strategic guidance and resources and providing
them with the support needed to help them persist and advance.
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Help job seekers make
the transition to a skillsbased workforce.
Success across the ecosystem depends on reaching
job seekers*. We need to equip them with the right
resources to understand what skills they have, what
skills they need, and how those skills can help them
advance in their career.
In this section, you’ll find job seeker resources and
tools that enable them to:
• See which jobs have the most growth potential
• Understand training options
• Assess their own skills
TOOLS AND ASSETS:
Job Seeker Resources and Tools
on Skillful.com:
Helping job seekers discover their
strengths, enhance their skills and
find the jobs that put it all to work.
STEP
6
*We use the term job seeker to refer to all individuals, regardless of
employment status, who are pursuing opportunities for training and
career advancement.
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Assess your
policy levers.
State governments wield many levers that can
support skills-based practices, including data,
tax incentives, financial aid, and your own hiring
practices. Your commitment can help model,
incentivize, and scale these practices.
This section highlights:
• Tangible levers you can use to help spread skillsbased practices inside and outside government
• Workforce data transparency diagnostics that help
advance governments’ role in creating a skillsbased labor market
TOOLS AND ASSETS:
5 Recommended Actions:
Discover ways that government
can spur skills-based practices.
Workforce Data
Transparency Guide:
Evaluate your data transparency
efforts to see how well you are
informing job seekers about
quality opportunities.
STEP
7
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Thank You to Our Partners
• Adams County Education Consortium
• Arapahoe Community College
• Bell Creek Consulting
• CareerWise Colorado
• Colorado Business Roundtable
• Community College of Denver
• Community College of Aurora
• Colorado Community College System
• Colorado Department of Higher Education
• Colorado Department of Labor & Employment
• Colorado Mountain College
• Colorado Office of Economic Development & International Trade
• Colorado Workforce Development Council
• Colorado Technology Association
• Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce
• Emily Griffith Technical College
• Front Range Community College
• Goodwill Industries of Denver
• Governor’s Coaching Corps
• Larimer County Workforce Center
• Mi Casa Resource Center
• Mile High United Way
• NOCO Manufacturing Partnership
• Rocky Mountain Workforce Development Association
• TalentFound Colorado
• Turing School of Software & Design
• Warren Village
These tools and resources were developed with the support and input of various partners, including:
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Let’s build a labor market that
works for everyone.
Skillful.com
We want to stay in touch. Contact Skillful CEO Beth Cobert at beth.cobert@markle.org
to learn more about Skillful and to share skills-based efforts happening in your state. |