Didn’t make it to last week’s MSSC Executive Briefing? This year’s event focused on Biden Administration initiatives in the use of industry certifications and apprenticeships in workforce development and education, and you can now watch the recorded sessions via the links below! |
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Biden Administration Initiatives in Career, Technical, and Adult Education – Link to Video
Amy Loyd, Assistant Secretary
The Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE) is looking right now to leverage the unimaginable disruption that the COVID-19 Pandemic has caused to American education to reimagine education. OCTAE is dedicated to a recovery that connects students to powerful employment opportunities.
Key Areas Essential to Our Nations Success:
- Implementing a strategy to revitalize domestic manufacturing.
- The industrial strategy to revitalize domestic manufacturing centers around accelerating the workforce development of the industry which includes 642,000 jobs having been added to the manufacturing industry since 2021 as well as the CHIPS Act.
- Connecting high schools, post-secondary education, and employers to create high quality career pathways to success.
- Partnerships between secondary, post-secondary, and employers will be essential in making sure the workforce ecosystem remains healthy.
- Preparing for infrastructure jobs and broadband employment investment.
- These investments cover manufacturing, transportation, commerce, and others. The goal is to create not only new jobs but sustainable growth within this framework.
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$65 billion dollars have been set aside to close the digital divide between U.S. broadband connection and other countries. This will also ensure all people in the U.S. have access to reliable, high-speed, and cost-affordable broadband.
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Biden Administration Initiatives in Workforce Development
Brent Parton, Acting Assistant Secretary,
Per Acting Assistant Secretary Parton, we are looking at a series of historic investments in American communities, industries, and employers with the bipartisan infrastructure act, the newly passed CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. Looking at the collective investments, there is a massive opportunity for flexibility with those funds that are being specially allocated for workforce development training, with manufacturing being a core element.
Four Major Areas of Focus for the Employment and Training Administration:
- They have an extreme focus on ensuring that everything that they’re doing and doing well is supporting the most vulnerable workers, most under resourced and underrepresented communities.
- Prioritizing partnerships and good jobs. The ETA is recognizing that industry partnerships need to cascade from the federal level to the state, and there are opportunities to create efficiencies rather than starting from scratch, such as leveraging high quality skill standards so that the skills are portable and valued by industry.
- “Building a Better Care Economy” – the pandemic showed that a functioning labor department requires a functioning care economy. The return to work was complicated by a lack of access to childcare and mental health professionals, and showed how necessary it is to reexamine our long term care. Care is a core supportive service in workforce development programs.
- “Taking action today for the future of work.” While it’s impossible to fully foresee the future workforce needs of our nation, federal funding investments can help prepare communities and industries about where the ball might be going with the labor market.
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Biden Administration Initiatives in Economic Development
- The America Rescue Plan, with its six respective programs and $3 billion in overall allocated funds, has a core focus on jobs, place-based economic development and building resilient regional economies for the future.
- With the $1 billion Build Back Better Program, Fisher believes that this initiative is about making transformational, once-in-a-generation, investments in 20-30 regions across the country, with projects ranging from infrastructure to entrepreneurial ecosystems to workforce development, to bring about change in a span of 5 years that would otherwise take a generation to do. All 60 finalists have specified workforce developments programs as part of them, including 15 manufacturing coalitions and 5 transportation, distribution and logistics coalitions. Winners will be announced by the end of September.
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Recipients of the $500 million Good Jobs Challenge funding were announced on August 2nd. Out of 509 applications, 32 projects were awarded funding with 9 pertaining to manufacturing and 7 to transportation, distribution and logistics. Per Fisher, the overall goal of the program was to provide a broad range of American workers access to good jobs by strengthening or establishing regional workforce development systems. Across 15 industries, 824 employer letters of commitment were submitted and these programs are projected to lead into 50,000+ job placements over the next 3-4 years.
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Military Program Using MSSC: U.S. Army Logistics Training
Leslie Kruse, Senior Manager of Operations, Military
Programs Liaison, Manufacturing Skill Standards Council
- The MSSC CLT program offers a way for a Military Candidate to obtain a credential online through our two course program: The Foundational-Level Certified Logistics Associate (CLA) certification and the Mid-Level technical Certified Logistics Technician (CLT) certification. The Military Candidate must test in person at an Authorized MSSC Assessment Center or through our online testing Vendor, ProctorU. Since 2014, 4000+ Military Candidates have tested with a pass rate of 85%.
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Military Program Using MSSC: Heroes Make America
- The Manufacturing Institute is the 501(c)3 nonprofit workforce development and education partner for the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), which represents 14,000 manufacturers across all sectors in the U.S., and has a focus on veterans, women, youth and skills training.
- Heroes Make America is focused on building connections between the military community and the manufacturing industry, and MSSC’s CPT and CLT certifications are incorporated into their training programs, based out of 5 in-person locations and a virtual alternative.
- With no out-of-pocket costs for participants, the Heroes Make America program currently has a 90% placement rate and a 2021 average salary of about $71,000.
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Questions submitted to the speakers will be provided to their respective offices and answers will be dispersed when available. To inquire about session transcripts or presentations used by speakers, please reach out to Vincent Klingmeyer, MSSC Marketing Coordinator, vklingmeyer@msscusa.org
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