The Labor Secretary scandal grows, a key new skills-first partnership, and $7.3 billion in grants listings.
Plus, the limited protection of new "protections" in the Congress' spending plan and the big questions about the Ed-DOL merger.
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Behind today’s paywall.
The phrase “Labor Secretary strip club scandal” and why I would take it seriously.
Fact versus fiction on protections in Congress’ new workforce bill on education and workforce agencies and their grant programs.
A big question about the DOL-Ed merger.
Toplines.
News you should know about money and things getting people to work.
Lightcast, Opportunity@Work team up to help employers identify jobs that are good fits for skills-first hiring.
I wrote Tuesday about how sorely we need for “easy buttons” to help employers do stuff that is hard but can help them improve hiring and training. Two organizations I think quite highly of are announcing today that they’re teaming up on something that sounds like it could be one of those easy buttons.
This morning, Lightcast and Opportunity@Work announced they are partnering on a new tool that will help employers identify jobs that can be filled through skills-first hiring strategies that de-emphasize things like degrees.
Skills-first hiring, for the uninitiated, is hiring based on skills verified through the hiring process, not based on things that may have nothing to do with whether someone can do the job, like degrees. You probably know Lightcast from all sorts of places if you’re in the workforce field, but I think their analysis of the real-life AI hiring landscape has been vastly more useful to planning for identifying AI skills and hiring for them than what you’re hearing from tech CEOs or federal policymakers. To me, O@W is skills-first hiring’s OGs, and they were great collaborators when I was helping build federal skills-first resources during my time at the Department of Labor.
Starting in March, Lightcast’s labor-market software Analyst will show users job postings that can be filled by workers whom Opportunity@Work calls STARs, or “Skilled Through Alternative Routes.” The organizations pitch this as “simplif[ying] the process of removing degree requirements” to expand the talent pool for those jobs.
“We identified over 17 million new US job postings that require a bachelor’s degree,” said Cara Christopher, Lightcast’s chief marketing officer, in a statement. “If even a fraction of those jobs go to STARs, we’ll have made valuable progress in building a job market that works for everyone.”
Employers have made a lot of commitments around ending degree requirements for jobs, but research shows they have not made a ton of headway in actual skills-first hiring. In a statement, O@W Chief Impact Officer Papia Debroy, who I did an interview with last month, said that the new partnership is “translating. . . awareness to action” by “embedding skills-first insight directly into the systems that shape hiring decisions.”
This week in ‘Nah.’
Government Executive, quoting the President.
“We cut millions of people from the federal payroll—I don’t like doing that, but the good news is I don’t feel badly because now they’re getting private sector jobs and they’re getting some times twice as much money, three times as much money,” he said. “They’re getting factory jobs; they’re getting much better jobs and much higher pay.”
There’s quite a bit of “Not at all the case!” going on here, but it’s worth noting this comment doesn’t exactly help out the Administration’s emphasis on hiring for manufacturers, who maintain they’re really struggling to find turnkey talent to fill their open jobs—which government workers very much would not be.
Trump I’s workforce agenda was harmed in some material ways by Trump firing off some Trump thoughts. The Greenland Thing is not being received as warmly by Republicans as you might think, especially in states that have bet—and spent—quite a bit on plants built by European companies. Those companies—from countries that have had viable college alternatives for generations—could be vital allies to the Administration in, say, meeting a lagging goal to reach one million apprentices.
Keep an eye on it.
This week’s grant listings number: $7.3 billion.
New private money and the return of a DOL grant that I’ll break down in greater detail once there are fewer scandals and appropriations bills.
So… August, maybe?