10 Tips to Get in on Historic Workforce Funding Right Now

Assessing the Current Moment

Unprecedented investments in infrastructure, the onshoring of semiconductor technology, the climate agenda, and artificial intelligence (AI) have fundamentally shifted the world of work. Funding is flowing into communities for everything from building bridges to cleaning coastlines, but investments in talent development remain unpredictable. New skills and occupations are emerging at a pace not seen since the Industrial Revolution, creating expansive opportunities. But labor market analytics, training providers and supportive services models have not yet caught up.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) emphasize equitable access, worker protections, and quality jobs. They pressure workforce agencies to better predict market needs, analyze program outcomes, and guide workers to good jobs. At the same time, the Department of Labor has taken transformational steps to elevate job quality through the Good Jobs Initiative, partnering with other agencies, such as the Department of Commerce, along the way. Leaders in the field have also coalesced around job quality strategies from the Good Jobs Champions Statement from the Aspen Institute and Families and Workers Fund to Jobs for the Future’s (JFF’s) Quality Jobs Framework or Results for America’s Job Quality Playbook. And the creation of entirely new industries and occupations has provided a ripe opportunity for public leaders to reset expectations about the protections, pathways, and pay expected from employers, much of which is unfolding in concert with the community through Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs), sector strategies, and Project Labor Agreements (PLA). This is truly a new day.

But while much has been accomplished, much more must be done. The pace of change, while inspiring, risks leaving behind those who are most disconnected, overlooked, or disproportionately affected by systems—opportunity youth (young people ages 16 to 24 who are not working nor in school), Black and Indigenous communities, immigrants, people with records, anyone who has interacted with the criminal justice system as a defendant, and many more.

To create a wide, inclusive path to infrastructure, semiconductor production, and climate jobs, workforce agencies and their partners will need to stay flexible and adapt.

And thinking differently about existing work is crucial. While many funding opportunities create space for workforce development—through workforce partnerships, apprenticeship, and pre-apprenticeship programs—the funding flows through different channels. Using data to demonstrate what programs work as well as gain clear insight into which jobs are good jobs has never been more important.

This guide walks through 10 shifts workforce agencies can make to position themselves better for the journey.

Views From the Field

To shepherd in this new era of workforce development, capacity building for the system itself is crucial. Based on these economic conditions, the federal government is starting to see the value of talent development and new ways of educating and preparing the nation’s workforce. As a result, the lines have blurred on the role of workforce development, education, employers, and labor enforcement agencies, creating a much broader scope of impact. Yet workforce development practitioners are still grappling with underinvestment and insufficient budgets to meet deep community needs.

• Robust cross-sectoral collaboration, deep industry knowledge, and agile yet holistic program approaches have never been more important. The number and type of workforce players have also exploded, with workforce centers of excellence coming online in departments of energy and transportation, the White House launching workforce hubs, states establishing task forces on infrastructure and climate, and new entrants in communities, from entire sectors to individual employers.
• Earn-and-learn models are becoming the gold standard for skill development but require time to create robust employer partnerships that work for adults, young people, and employers. At the same time, supportive services have never been more crucial, especially for learners and workers who experience barriers to employment. Innovative funding models to pay for such services—ranging from braided funding to Lifelong Learning Accounts (LiLas), tax incentives, outcomes-based funds, or employer contributions—are nascent in light of the tremendous need for supportive services.
• People are improving and expanding their skills in entire sectors as we transition from fossil fuels to clean energy and as AI and other technological advancements fundamentally shift work performance in every field, from customer service to construction. However, the mechanisms to re-credential incumbent workers are still early, and the quality of many new jobs remains untested. Technology will play a crucial role in skills training, but it is not yet widely adopted, and digital literacy and access to broadband are often low in the areas most in need.
• Worker power is critical to program development, implementation, and evaluation, but efforts to infuse worker voice into data collection and performance evaluation are still in the early stages. Stronger partnerships between workforce and enforcement agencies to educate workers on their rights and businesses on their responsibilities are also crucial.
• Youth disconnection rates from school and work remain high, but many service delivery models have not evolved to meet opportunity youth where they are. Young people’s views and expectations of the workplace have shifted as they consider the economic realities of today’s labor market, job security, the labor market, and the social climate, among other factors.

The workforce development system is uniquely positioned to play a pivotal intermediary role—casting a vision, connecting partners, braiding funding, and aligning skill needs with program offerings and outcomes—but some significant shifts, as well as targeted capacity building, are necessary first. We simply can’t stand still, or the moment will pass us by.

10 Shifts to Meet the Moment

This new world means stakeholders don’t begin and end with service providers, community colleges, unions, and employers. State agencies, including transportation, energy, environmental protection, and commerce, should all be on the partnership radar, as they are responsible for administering most of the BIL, IRA, and CHIPS funding and charting industry-specific workforce plans to bring climate and infrastructure commitments to life. The space now includes energy companies, economic development agencies, environmental advocacy groups, and transportation agencies. Worker advocacy organizations, worker-led boards, and local enforcement agencies also play a crucial role in meeting many of the worker protections outlined in the legislation. For workforce agencies, deepening relationships with these groups can ensure worker awareness of existing resources.

To create momentum, workforce agencies must develop a targeted engagement strategy and workforce plan, elevating the talent components of each infrastructure, semiconductor production, and climate investment and highlighting their existing structures, community knowledge, and proven results. Workforce agencies can lower the cost, expand the reach, or increase the speed to market of proven training solutions before other agencies have even fully grappled with the scale and scope of the talent gap. Use your workforce knowledge to highlight what works, positioning populations who are often overlooked—such as opportunity youth and other individuals facing barriers to employment—as part of the solution to the talent gap.

Job quality is infused through PLAs, union partnerships, wage and local hiring requirements, worker rights resources, and apprenticeship requirements throughout BIL, IRA, and CHIPS funding solicitations, demonstrating the impact investments can have on people’s lives. And while PLAs or apprenticeships have traditionally been most common in union jobs, the solicitations demonstrate that job quality is relevant regardless of company, role, or location. Workforce leaders should prioritize their job quality commitments by using procurement processes, on-the-job training/customized training policies, and program designs to offer incentives for or require job quality. Workforce development can improve outcomes for workers and position themselves as ideal partners for operationalizing infrastructure, technology, and climate funding. Among infrastructure, technology, and climate stakeholders, workforce boards can raise awareness of how job quality moves equity into action, highlighting its impacts on adults and young people, many of whom contribute financially to their households or support themselves.

Infuse quality jobs into each aspect of your work. Track participants’ progress toward living wages, disaggregating trends by race, gender, and age. Collect data on transitions from part- to full-time employment. Analyze the number of positions covered by collective bargaining agreements, PLAs, or community benefits agreements and engage with employers around the benefits available to workers. Build evaluations into your service provider contracts to understand the impact of the work. Set wage and benefit standards for on-the-job or customized training and provide incentives for the collection of job quality data through your procurements. Build relationships with enforcement agencies to infuse worker rights training into your job readiness approach. Workforce agencies should partner with their city, county, or other various partners in their sector partnership agreements to create worker boards who are empowered to influence local policy and procurement. (Consider this case study on a worker board in Harris County, Texas.) Use changes to uniform guidance on local and target hires, misclassification, PLAs, CBAs, and preemption, coupled with new scoring mechanisms, to create a race to the top. Modernize your business services to include employee ownership, job quality measurement, business process transformation, and sector-specific strategies to help businesses attract and retain talent. Use your influence with local officials to encourage the incorporation of job quality into the full business life cycle, from business licensing to permitting to taxation. Every step forward strengthens workforce development’s impact on the community’s economic advancement and highlights your crucial role in the infrastructure, semiconductor, and climate movement.

BIL, IRA, and CHIPS investments are expected to directly and indirectly create millions of jobs, requiring a whole new set of workers. Building the workforce to meet this need will require reaching into untapped pockets of the community. Use your data to understand what outreach approaches, training programs, and co-enrollment strategies work and for whom. This is valuable input into your dialogues with infrastructure, semiconductor production, and climate partners who need access to talent. Go beyond standard performance metrics to lift up learner experiences, conduct interviews or surveys, and connect outcomes to economic realities, such as comparing earnings against living wage or capturing workers’ sense of empowerment and choice. Use data to advocate for policy shifts—like living wages, stable scheduling, or worker protections—as a requirement for infrastructure, semiconductor production, and climate investments to support a more equitable workforce.

Explore data-sharing agreements with human services, justice, or children’s services agencies or those who work with unhoused populations to not only improve the experience of those you serve but also expand the impact of your work. Interconnected data systems, whether through memorandums of understanding, data lakes, or even cross-training agreements, will equip you with the data to serve adults and youth holistically. At the same time, you will gain insights into community needs and can employ predictive analytics using AI to anticipate and inform the talent needs of infrastructure and climate investments.

Community engagement is enshrined in BIL, IRA, and CHIPS through tools such as the Justice 40 initiative, CBAs, and local hire requirements. Meanwhile, workforce agencies are well equipped to help cities and state agencies meet their local engagement goals by using their long history as trusted community spaces. Workforce agencies are crucial community convenors with the knowledge, relationships, and infrastructure to mobilize targeted engagement work quickly.

Use your position to amplify the voices of those who have faced systemic barriers preventing them from joining the conversation. Gather diverse stakeholders around the table and spearhead outreach on careers in emerging fields to meet infrastructure, semiconductor production, and climate goals. Raise awareness of how your existing systems, staff knowledge, and programs can help agencies access the communities they want to reach in trauma-informed and culturally and linguistically appropriate ways. Champion opportunity youth, helping agencies and employers understand ways to reach young people that will prevent disconnection or facilitate reconnection. Use your space as a community meeting point for work on CBAs to increase representation around the table in tangible, meaningful ways.

Apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship are the preferred training pathways for the BIL, CHIPS, and IRA investments. Harness this moment to bring additional employers along. Partner with other agencies to offer employers incentives to start or expand earn-and-learn on-ramps to attract a diverse set of talent. Use the current transformation of entire sectors and occupations to partner with the departments of energy, transportation, and environmental protection, alongside employers, to build transferable skill-based pathways in construction, manufacturing, and green energy. Compensate people for their time and value prior learning. Consider how funding flows and which companies in your community could benefit.

Personalized, responsive supportive services are well-known tools to workforce practitioners, and your knowledge of how to structure and deliver them is invaluable. While new sources of funding from federal agencies to impact investors add complexity to the mix, they also provide incredible opportunity. Be the voice at the infrastructure, semiconductor production, and climate tables who knows how to use existing systems to deliver responsive supportive services. Encourage employing BIL, IRA, CHIPS, and private-sector dollars to explore innovative funding models to sustain supportive services costs. Champion flexible models, such as dedicated economic mobility funds that can be drawn down based on need, and outcomes-based allocations that increase as programs demonstrate success.

Infrastructure, semiconductor production, and climate jobs are rolling out in phases. Many new occupations will not appear in communities for several years. Today’s crucial work encompasses foundational activities such as building manufacturing equipment, factories, and even the infrastructure to get to them. Tomorrow’s workers, currently in middle or high school, will fill many emerging roles.

Meeting talent demand requires thinking long term. To achieve this, workforce boards should partner with educators to expand services into the K-12 system, equipping teachers with knowledge of emerging careers and providing hands-on exposure to kids. Career exploration is crucial and will require virtual reality classrooms, live show and tell, pre-apprenticeships, and other experiences to expose young people to these high-demand careers. Partner with employers, agency leadership, and other system stakeholders to direct a portion of infrastructure and climate funds to youth-focused early-career exposure. Think creatively about structuring hybrid infrastructure, semiconductor production, climate, and workforce funding to allow youth to experiment with different fields before selecting a course of study, such as shadowing, short paid internships, or virtual mentoring sessions.

While youth are the future workforce, many infrastructure, technology, and climate investments are largely silent on how to use funding to create opportunity youth-friendly pathways into these jobs. Youth are often mentioned as a potential population, but for the most part, the NOFOs are not youth centered. Whether funding can compensate young people for their voice as researchers is often unclear, sending mixed messages about whose time is valued. Apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeships are highlighted and will certainly play important roles, but they are only one piece of the puzzle. Career navigation, near-peer and adult mentoring, identity and leadership development, and social capital are also crucial elements and must sit alongside creating youth-friendly work cultures. At the same time, related federal investments, such as the American Climate Corps, are beginning to provide entry points for young people but will not alone be sufficient to meet youth needs at a national scale. CHIPS directs a portion of funding to STEM education and research, allowing more young people to acquire the skills needed for semiconductor industry careers. Foundational skills such as creative, expansive thinking are also needed to ensure the inclusion of youth with records, youth who have otherwise interacted with the criminal justice system as a defendant, immigrant youth, or youth experiencing homelessness or other significant barriers to employment.

Workforce agencies can use their experience with programs serving youth who aren’t working or enrolled in school to showcase lessons, highlight gaps, and offer solutions around how infrastructure, semiconductor, and climate programming can provide truly accessible career pathways for all young people. Bring youth development experts, community-based organizations, and youth participants to the table early and often, encouraging agencies to create space to incorporate youth voice on what they need and how they want to be served. Prioritize the need to compensate young people for their contributions, signaling their value. Move leadership meetings into youth-friendly spaces to invite youth partnership and co-design of programs. Provide a clear vision of careers and potential careers of the future by using technology, such as texting, social media, gamification, and short-format videos, to bring emerging careers to life. Rebrand traditional fields like construction or manufacturing as opportunities to exercise robotics, data visualization, programming, and AI query development skills. Equip the business and the young person for success by implementing new business services offerings, from post-placement support to business training on communication styles, trauma-informed youth development, or unconscious bias.

Workforce professionals increasingly advise employers to improve their hiring, retention, advancement, and compensation practices. They guide politicians’ and government leaders’ investments and navigate increasingly complex economic, social, and political environments. Addressing policy, funding, and systems issues in the workforce field requires expert input to ensure sustainable job quality improvements. Yet workforce development and its funders undervalue and underinvest in professional development, consulting, peer-to-peer learning, and mentorship programs that so many other industries invest in and prioritize. The workforce development sector couches these investments in “technical assistance” or “coaching” and regularly brings networks of grantees together to learn but often with inadequate resources to account for their time, energy, or specialized expertise. In part, and despite federal efforts to adopt a “systems-level” view and increase investments across various departments, this is why workforce development might seem to be standing still.

Workforce agencies should proactively dialogue with infrastructure, semiconductor production, and climate stakeholders about the importance and urgency of building high-functioning intermediaries and the necessary investment into the people who run them to connect communities to careers. Have open conversations with funders about the full costs of operating successful programs and retaining qualified staff. Retention is crucial in all businesses, but in workforce development, turnover has a double impact, creating gaps and the need to restart relationships for participants as well as inefficiencies for organizations.

BIL, IRA, and CHIPS include a variety of resources for businesses, from tax credits to procurement opportunities to loans. As funding and business opportunities enter communities, this presents a unique opportunity to examine which businesses are currently at the table and use the federal funding to diversify vendors and partners meaningfully.

At the same time, workforce agencies can use the significant shifts in local industries to rethink rapid response and layoff aversion funding use and explore opportunities to braid or match these funds with infrastructure and climate dollars. For example, workforce agencies might support employee ownership transitions, process improvement evaluations, pooled health care or child care benefits, and other job quality investments. Partner with the city, county, and small business administration to help businesses understand how changes to business licensing, procurement requirements, and local policies drive job quality changes at scale. Provide insights to the investment and finance community on job quality’s crucial role in supporting talent, which ultimately de-risks their investments.

While BIL, IRA, and CHIPS did not direct funding to the Department of Labor or local workforce agencies, many of the NOFOs and their corresponding awards outline a commitment to workforce development, good jobs, and worker protections, as well as supporting populations that have not received equitable investments from the government or private-sector institutions, referred to as “underserved” populations in the NOFOs and corresponding awards. A subset of the NOFOs specifically call out workforce development as an allowable activity, require collaboration with the workforce development board, or strongly encourage using apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeships as training pathways. Others require PLAs, CBAs, or local hires, which all advance job quality.

Workforce agencies should proactively engage with their state and local agencies to better understand the NOFOs they pursue. Become familiar with the guidelines, incentives, and requirements outlined within the corresponding NOFOs to level up your knowledge and think collaboratively with partner agencies around how the existing system can accelerate training and placement, meet Justice 40 goals, and create new apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship models for emerging fields. Encourage the braiding or sequencing of BIL, IRA, or CHIPS funding with existing Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Community Development Block Grant programs, and other social service or philanthropic funds to create a robust set of integrated offerings transitioning individuals from public assistance into high-quality jobs.

Conclusion

By making these shifts, workforce development can position itself to take a seat at the infrastructure, semiconductor, and climate tables. This will strategically connect federal, state, and local investments, use deep knowledge and community relationships, and accelerate the work, meeting the evolving needs of the labor market and contributing to equitable and quality job opportunities for all.