Our region is leading a collaborative effort to apply for the ARPA Good Jobs Challenge, a grant from the Economic Development Administration.
The Industry Roundtable event is an opportunity to share what your current hiring needs so that we can incorporate our regional needs into the grant application. In addition, we would like to share with you an overview of the grant. Our final goal is to explore a commitment from you to provide a letter of support, potentially commit to sharing you training needs, and hire the workforce that we will train through this grant.
Overview of ARPA Good Jobs Challenge:
The ARPA Good Jobs Challenge is designed to meet the needs of businesses and workers in each type of region and help develop or strengthen dynamic regional workforce training systems and the sectoral partnerships they implement. EDA anticipates funding the following three phases of regional workforce training systems/sectoral partnerships, as applicable to regional
needs:
• System Development
• Program Design; and
• Program Implementation.
One of the primary goals of the Good Jobs Challenge is to get Americans back to work withgood, quality jobs. To that end, EDA is seeking applications that have firm employercommitments to hire. The employer commitment may come in different formats. Some examplesinclude:
• Work-and-Learn, including Registered Apprenticeships: See descriptions above.
• Conditional Hire: Employer hires worker on the condition of successful completion of the training program and demonstration of skill acquisition.
• Employer Commitments: Employers commit to hiring a specific number of workers who successfully complete the training program provided through the regional workforce training partnership.
In addition to these commitments, employers should be leading partners in the sectoral partnership and drive the sectoral partnership’s agenda. While sectoral partnerships contain a broad-based team of partners and are a “team effort” made up of education, worker groups, workforce development, and economic development leaders who collaborate to support the partnership, the partnership should focus on responding to the industry’s needs. This requires strong leadership from employers. Business leaders should define the priorities and be integrally involved in crafting the solutions (as opposed to providing input only). Employers define their
skills needs and the priorities for addressing them; these needs may be linked to joint competitiveness needs that they face and wish to resolve. Employers and the other partnersshould all commit resources to identify and solve the problems.