I spent most of my childhood in Texas. And besides the age-old refrain of “everything is bigger in Texas,” most of my primary school lessons about square miles were then followed by the question: “How many Rhode Islands would fit in Texas?”
The answer: 173.
But, while a small state, I have come to discover that in the area of new initiatives around getting citizens back to work, Rhode Island is leading in big ways in workforce development and job training. I first learned about Back to Work Rhode Island, a hyper-focused, data driven jobs program touted by Governor Gina Raimondo (and current Secretary-elect for the U.S. Department of Commerce) as a way to aid displaced workers who are searching for a new career. Back to Work Rhode Island is involved with companies such as Bank of America, Microsoft and Salesforce to create job opportunities for workers displaced by the pandemic.
In addition to the state-led Back to Work Rhode Island program, the state has also been an exemplar of effective implementation of federal education and workforce programs: its TechHire program, stemming from an Obama administration initiative, brought together public agencies with pioneering training providers like General Assembly to create pathways to fast-growing tech careers.
Rhode Island’s response to the pandemic was twofold: the state had to do better at preparing people … [+]
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I had the opportunity to visit with Scott Jensen, Director of the Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training about all of these initiatives that are ensuring Rhode Islanders can get back to work and contribute to a growing economy.
Alison Griffin: Can you talk about the impetus that led to the launch of Back to Work Rhode Island? Is there an overarching education-to-work force philosophy that sparked the development of the program?
Scott Jensen: There is an overarching philosophy to the program. We started this effort right at the beginning of the administration by launching Real Jobs Rhode Island with the goal to do sector-based workforce development at scale. The idea was to start with demand and work backwards by bringing together funding that can allow a network to fulfill the roles that they’re strong at in order to have participants get well-paying jobs. Turning around the state’s economy and making it competitive in the 21st century was already requiring enormous change and adaptation before the pandemic, and now we are doing it through the lens of getting people back to work who had been impacted by COVID-19.
Alison: In what ways did the program change over the course of the last year as a result of the pandemic?
Scott: The pandemic motivated us to supercharge the Real Jobs RI effort in two central ways. As I mentioned previously, our economy was already going to have to change, but the pandemic made the change more urgent. Industries like retail desperately needed to transition into a new model. Working remotely provided a lot of efficiency. Companies had to make a switch that they were destined to make but much faster as a response to the pandemic. Our response was twofold: we had to do better at preparing people mentally for a career change, and providing tangible support to help their transition.
To help people in their career change, we used technology. We’re building the first AI-driven career discovery bot with a group called Research Improving People’s Lives (RIPL), a tech impact nonprofit that was incubated out of Brown University. This allows us to focus on the whole person and make suggestions for them so we can guide them through the process of career change. At the same time, Google is building the state a virtual career center which is connected to a bot we call “Skipper,” which acts as a sort of job coach to give people guidance on career next steps.
Those are the technological pieces, but we also increased our investments in tangible supportive services with funding from the CARES Act. For every single person that enrolls in one of our Back to Work RI training programs and has a line of sight into a job, it’s a good idea then to invest strategically and generously for someone who has shown the wherewithal to make a career switch.
To achieve this goal, we get in touch with everybody who’s going through the program. We have a team who asks people what they need to support their career search. About 10% of our participants are receiving some sort of supportive supplement. A lot of our participants need groceries. We’re also buying things like laptops and WIFI access. If someone is worried about these things, there’s no way they’ll be able to focus on job training. If there is someone who could be great at a work-from-home job and it’s in demand, I think that paying three months of their WiFi bill and set up costs is a great use of funds. These two things have characterized our approach: supporting people with options for career switches with technology, and paying for tangible supportive services.
We worked for five years to get the administrative pieces right first. Contracting, granting, performance management, invoicing — all of the real government work and details were finalized ahead of time. When the COVID crisis came and the CARES Act became available, we had a structure ready that can very transparently scale up to contract $45 million in two months.
Alison: As the state sought to build the new job training program, who were the partners that were most interested in Back to Work Rhode Island and what did they each bring to the table?
Scott: The business community of Rhode Island stepped up. The state leadership was able to reach out to anchor institutions to serve as partners, including CVS, General Dynamics, Citizens Bank, and Bank of America. We are also working with Salesforce to hire people for remote jobs.
The business involvement was important because it sent a message that the best thing to help the state recover from the pandemic is to hire folks. It can make a difference for companies to take a chance on people they wouldn’t normally consider without our training. We have 43 sector partnerships spending about $25 million a year, and so we have well-established pipelines with a lot of trade associations.
The sector partnerships we’ve built over the course of four or five years helped us get in the business community very quickly. Scores of midsize manufacturers are participating in Back to Work, most notably, Honeywell. Rhode Island has a couple of Honeywell facilities that switched over to manufacturing PPE during the pandemic. We also have great relationships with community colleges and other colleges. Nonprofits helped us with recruiting because they are so involved in the community. Skills for Rhode Island’s Future, which is the first expansion of Skills for Colorado’s Future, has played a large role in recruitment.
Alison: How many Rhode Islanders have sought support through Back to Work Rhode Island and what communities have really witnessed the greatest impact from the Program?
Scott: We have a line of sight into about 7,000 jobs contracted and thus far are making really good progress. We set goals at the beginning to make sure that there was a focus on equity with all of this investment in spending and activity, and we’re meeting our goals. Over a third of folks who are enrolled in our programs right now are people of color and half are women. It’s hard to meet these metrics when we’re seeking to fill positions for welders, for example, who work in typically male-dominated fields. We have a lot of health care jobs as well, in some of the hospitals, which skew more towards women. We can always do better, but we’re diligent about meeting our goals and improving.
Alison: Was Back to Work Rhode Island influenced by others, or do you find now that you are influencing what other states are doing in response to the pandemic?
Scott: Both, for sure. We always participate in the best practice groups. We have been sharing with the National Governors Association and our supportive services model I was describing was recently included as a model for workforce recovery. We were also invited by the U.S. Department of Labor to present about Back to Work RI.
In terms of influences, sector-based workforce development has been around for a long time. For myself personally, I was always inspired by the National Fund for Workforce Solutions. We also work with Next Generation Sector Partnerships and members of the team have come to Rhode Island to work with us. We’ve also had a lot of support from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Talent Pipeline Management initiative. I’ve spoken at their annual event with one of our partners — General Dynamics Electric Boat. We have even tapped expertise from as far away as Colorado. Before we built Real Jobs in Rhode Island, I was involved in the creation of EARN Maryland and tapped the expertise of Stephanie Veck, formerly the Managing Director of the Colorado Workforce Development Council. There’s so much great work being done, and I think we’ve been able to build on it by taking things to scale.
Alison: If you were to redesign any part of the Back to Work Rhode Island program knowing what you know now about going through a pandemic, what would you change to ensure that Rhode Island workers were successful?
Scott: With a workforce of 500,000 people and roughly 250,000 people who applied for unemployment insurance during the pandemic, we have a lot of data. We saw this as a tremendous opportunity that would allow us to know what was happening in the labor market and collect wage data as people moved through the economy. It allowed us to make personalized suggestions to people. However, we didn’t directly tie that ability into the Back to Work program itself from the beginning.
We are now working with Amazon Web Services and RIPL to have a seamless technological handoff from the kind of concierge, cloud-based system that we’re building with Amazon for unemployment insurance to Skipper and our AI-driven job search capacities. We’re hoping that it will be as easy as just clicking to allow someone to transfer their data to Skipper, or fill out FAFSA, or enroll in community college. Governor Raimondo started the Rhode Island Promise program so community college doesn’t cost students anything. The minute people are ready, we want to have these supportive services for them.
Alison: What gives you hope, beyond the work led through the Raimondo Administration, in Back to Work RI?
Scott: I think that we did the hard government work to build underlying systems that will make the change we brought stick. That work, and the team in Rhode Island, is really devoted to helping folks get jobs, and, as importantly, understand how to do that very effectively. There is no going back, because good public servants want to help people. Back to Work RI is the way to make that happen.
