Randy Tillery: --their education and workforce development at WestEd. Along with Kathy Booth, I supervise a tiny team of about 20 people focused on, really, on issues around economic mobility, equity, equitable access to higher education, areas like transition from secondary to post-secondary education, from adult education to college and post-secondary education. We do a lot of work in Guided Pathways. And we do a lot of work with data tools for those of you who have followed our journey in building the launch board over the years.

So we are very excited to be here today. My job is basically to say that, introduce my team, show you the agenda, and then exit stage left. So if we could go to the team slide?

And instead of having everyone introduce themselves, we agreed I was going to introduce them. Yes, it is true if your name is Alexandra or Alexandria, and if you've met Alexandra Balillo, who was also on her team, you can get a job at WestEd. So if you have one of those names, please feel free to contact me immediately. It's like clearly I have a preference for that name.

So Blaire Willson Toso, who has-- literally has a doctorate in adult education. I didn't know such a thing existed until I met Blaire. She has 20 years experience in adult education, family literacy, career pathways.

Blaire is part of a team that is actually working on the new toolkit, the new OCTE toolkit for IETs for English language learners, that's a big federal project that we're a part of. And she also supports a lot of work, a lot of research work in adult education. We have IES grants and other Mathematics Instruction grants as well. Alexandra Lozanoff, who is-- her primary core expertise in the team is professional development. So she works across all of our projects and is a savant in both professional development and human-centered design. And mostly recently helped lead a three-year project with a bunch of four-year universities, helping them build career development processes and models to implement at their campuses.

And then, finally, the newest member of our team, Alexandria Wright, who just came up to us from Ventura. And some you may know her because she actually worked in adult education down in Southern California, as a part of CAEP there. Alexandria is an expert, and she she's an economist, and a labor market expert, and a data savant. And we're very, very excited to have her here today as well. Next.

So this is the agenda. It is packed. So we will talk too fast and tell you too much. And then expect you to also have great dialogue.

We're going to do all that in 90 minutes. We're going to talk about the kinds-- what the evaluation process is you should be going through as you get ready to do your three-year plan, how you evaluate the needs of your community, how you evaluate your programs and your services, to really think honestly and be courageous about areas where you think you can really do more, be better. We'll talk about approaches to evaluation. And then, we'll talk about the consortium and program evaluation process.

You basically three different lenses. So the fact sheets that you have access to as of today include customized demographic & information pulled from the American Community Survey data for your consortium region. And they also include equity views.

We're trying to double down a little bit on equity this year. And really just ask in an exploratory way, what does equity mean in adult education, when pretty much most of the people you serve actually would be described as equity populations? We have selected data, we've have pooled about the CAEP student populations. And so there's actually a view in the fact sheets for that.

And then Alexandria is going to talk about labor market information and the way we've also displayed that for your region. All of this is customized for you, for your consortium to really kind of look collectively together to ask questions about what you want to be focusing on in the next three years. And then we're going to talk-- we're going to do a little data equity walk that, Alexandra, I'm sure we'll be leading.

We'll talk about asset mapping and really how to put it all together in the process. And then we'll have some time at the end for questions. And with that, I'm going to pass it over to Blaire.

Blaire Willson Toso: Super! Thank you, Randy. Hi, everyone. I'm delighted to be here. I know that you all are participating and have it available to you several different presentations on evaluation.

So this is meant to be a complimentary piece to that, really to introduce an overview some of the tools you can use for your evaluation and how they might fit into that evaluation. As Randy said, it's going to be fast. We've been really developing some tools and information that we're very, very excited about.

So I'd like to say upfront, this is more of a sampler presentation, and we will be happy to respond to any requests for more in-depth training. We'll be doing some additional follow-up webinars on smaller topics. But this is really the overview of what we're about.

So to set the stage, we're going to talk about data uses. And just as a reminder, there's three, what we consider three kinds of data. And there's the interesting, the useful, and the actionable data. And that will-- they will come into play in your evaluation and as you conduct your needs assessment for your three-year plan.

The interesting data is-- really alert you to something that's going on, which a lot of what you already use is what is happening. And these useful data is that which makes you go, hmm, look at that. I think something's going on there. And it looks-- it calls out sort of the structural aspects of your work. And that's one of the reasons why we're focusing on equity, and maybe some of the gaps that appear in there, or at least it will signal to think about those.

And then, the actionable data helps you answer questions that you're asking and offer you guidance as to what you might want to do to resolve or to respond to the question and the answer. So we'll just briefly cover some of the components of the elements that your primarily-- to your activities that you're going to want to conduct in evaluating your program and services. We'll introduce them here and then address some of the concepts more in-depth as we continue through this webinar.

So key to your program evaluation, obviously, is digging deeper than identifying just the activities of your individual programs. You're going to want to learn about your current learners, your community members, your labor market information, and asking questions in regards to all of those, are you meeting the local populations needs and accelerating their academic career and life goals? And sussing out, who are your prospective learners? Not just who you're serving, but who are your learners in your community or consortium?

Who are they? What are their goals? And identify some of their barriers.

And you can see there's a slew of questions. And all the questions that you see are prompt questions, they're not a full list. And certainly, you will be able to think of more questions and have-- many of you already have experience with this process. So these are some of ours and we encourage you to take a look at them and throughout once you get the PowerPoint.

I do want to note that while we're presenting this in a linear fashion, that this is an iterative process. As many of you'll collect some data then you'll think, mhm here, that begs more questions when we go on throughout that. So, well, these are structured, this is not necessarily the flow of how you will conduct your evaluation and needs assessment.

So you're going to be moving into that, you're going to want to gather data for informed decisions. So yeah, because the data lets you know that something's going on, it can help you uncover root causes. And root out, identify trends, structural issues, such as equity gaps. And again, that actionable data as you continue digging into your data, the useful data, it they will begin to tell you things. And then you dig further into that data to inform your decisions so that you can take action.

We'll guide you to developing a well-informed plan that's responsive to your learner's needs. And just as a note, of the other reasons why we gather data is because we oftentimes come to these planning sessions thinking that we know things, we rely on what we think we know, or what we've observed, or what we've heard, or what somebody else brings it to us. But what is gathering data and allowing that data to inform the decisions? As it says on the slide, it provides you with evidence to what's really going on, and it might move us out of the space of just thinking about what is important to us or our programming and allows you to have a larger context to understanding your setting.

You want to identify some of those relevant data sources. We'll talk about some quantitative data that you can access, we'll talk about focus groups and interviews, and then also looking at pathways and best practices such as literature surveys and other notable programs. And we always like to call out colleagues are really helpful in sharing and gathering data.

Lastly, there's or part of this is your asset mapping and your gap analysis. We'll go over that briefly. I was delighted to hear Veronica say that you all will have a more in-depth presentation on asset mapping and gap analysis because we're really looking at it as to how it fits into this process. It's a key activity for your program evaluation as it helps identify opportunities as well as prompt deeper questions as to what's available to whom, and what those-- and what might be missing and how do you fill those gaps.

And then your last component would be planning. And as you all know-- well, some of you talk about this as program evaluation. It's also about how do you fit into a consortium and the interplay among members in your consortium, excuse me, in your consortium.

So you want to identify feasible and relevant courses of action. And as you do this, collaboratively based on all the data you've given, you've gathered, as well as some of the activities that you've engaged in. And you'll be able to identify your-- what we call your equity tactics. As I said, we really got portion looking at those gaps in your consortium because many of you are doing a really good job of serving some of the population, but maybe there are populations that you might want to target a little bit more.

So and then, once you've identified those gaps and you've set-- you can set your goals and your targets and always identifying new member roles. So briefly, some of the key resources were going to highlight today: there's the CAEP fact sheets, which are brand new. They went live last night. We're very excited about them. --the Adult Education Pipeline dashboard, which most of you are familiar with. We'll just briefly talk about the California Regional Education and Workforce dashboard.

And then, we'll introduce another couple of resources that Lexi will present on the low-income policy map which-- and the American Community Survey, their County commuting patterns. These are just pieces to help you refine and dig in and demonstrate that there are a few other resources. And as we go along, we hope that as we touch on different topics that you'll be sharing some of the resources that you have found particularly helpful in creating a three-year plan or your yearly plan and exploring the demographics and the needs of your consortium.

Before we move on, we wanted to talk about-- there are two main approaches that you can take to doing a needs assessment or your program evaluation. One is you start with a question. You come to it already knowing what you want to ask, then you explore the data and refine your questions based on that data, and then you collect and store more data.

The other way is to actually start with the data, explore the data, and then let the data lead you to the questions and then you can collect and explore more data. We suggest that you follow that second where we start with the data. Again, because sometimes when you start with a question, it might not be the correct question, it might be based on what I was talking about earlier that we have-- we think we know what's going on.

And if we-- but start with the data, then you can really push on what we know and move into what do we really need to address. And later in this session Alex is going to lead us through a data equity walk, which will really help you understand the concept of starting with the data and offer you a way to do this within your organization, your institution, or within your consortium.

And we all know this, but I wanted to make sure that before we move forward that as we go through these, looking at this data as you conduct your needs assessment that really it needs, you want to keep that learner in mind. They're central to the process, they are one of our primary clients. And we'll even suggest that when we're talking about the asset mapping that you bring them into the process. Or alternatively, you could also try a learner walk where you put yourself in the shoes of a learner accessing and experiencing adult education programming to give a more humanized look at the data that you're collecting and the asset mapping, so putting yourself into that from a different perspective than how you generally will go into this process.

And now we're going to talk a little bit about the program evaluation, exploring the data, and the data tools. So first, we would recommend that you explore consortium demographics. Undoubtedly you all have already done this. But you want to do this because it provides a background for determining if your services are reaching the intended audience.

And it will offer you insights into questions such as the demographic makeup, where do underserved populations live, and who's in need of Adult Education Services. And we always want to go back to that, how do we know they're in need of services? --which takes you back to that-- the use of data and how you need to provide evidence for the information that you're gathering or the questions that you're answering. And feel free to put in the chat any other questions that you have asked about your consortium demographics or that you think we should ask and share those out with your colleagues who might be building a question bank of those.

And note to the team, if you could read out any questions that come up, I can't see the chat right now. I'm going to pause before we go on. Anything? Anybody want to say anything? All right, thank you.

So we are excited to go and see the CAEP fact sheets. We'll be introducing them here. They said, they went live last night. We've had a whole team of people updating the data and we gathered some input and some feedback on how these could be used and what needed to change from the last time they were revised and. So let me-- they are my new share.

And there they are. This are our new fact sheets. You'll see up along, up the top, that there are four tabs. And we'll start off with the population demographics.

So we've got the demographics. These are the ACS survey from 2015-2019. As a note, of course, once we were finished doing the analysis so that we could use the ACS for consortium boundaries, then the census released their new data.

So we will be updating this to the newest census data. So by the end of October, this page will be refreshed with that information. So thanks for your patience while we get that. But it's very-- will give you a good look at what's going on in the consortium already.

So a couple of key features as you can select your consortium through this dropdown menu. They should all be there. If you notice you're not there, then we let us know immediately. So we can make sure you are there. But we have reviewed that, and there should be-- everyone should be there.

I'd like to draw attention to your question mark here. This is where you can get additional resources. But what I particularly like to draw attention to is that they're-- we did develop a CAEP Fact Sheet how-to guide of-- some of the information we're presenting here in this webinar is cataloged in there, but it also offers you a walk-through, will give you a their screenshots that will really walk you through the different features of this and talk a little bit about where the data comes from, and how you might want to use this data to inform your processes.

So at a glance, so if you look here, currently, this is all the-- it's the overall population. And as noted here, we did take the WIOA definition because we know many of you have. Are WIOA II-funded. And so we have the 16, it is from 16 forward. So there is that.

But each of these icons, we have Adults with Disabilities, Foreign-born, Limited English, Near-poverty or Less, which is at 150% whether someone has their high school diploma, whether they are unemployed. And we also included disconnected youth, which is youth that are 16 to 24. And we added that category because we think it's important. It's a key demographic for many of us.

And it is one that we anticipate might be needing some extra services due to COVID, the pandemic and implications of the pandemic. But each of these, once you click on them, will refresh to give you a view of exactly only that population. So it refines down to these populations.

And so that is that primary, that's the way that fact sheet uses. So we've designed it so that the information is provided in a format to help you easily explore the dense census data provided by the ACS. And we'll look at each one of those tabs a little bit more thoroughly as we walk through, and it aligns with some of the pieces that we think are part of an evaluation.

All right, now, I'm going to turn it over the screen to Lexi, and she will take you through some of the Labor Market Information.

Alexandria Wright: Good afternoon, everyone. All right, I think at this point-- let's see here. I'm going to share my screen.

And Blaire, are we going directly into labor market information, or are we hitting the low-income policy map?

Blaire Willson Toso: Yes, it is the low-income policy map. So we have it categorized as LMI data. So I always call it LMI data. Apologies, yes.

Alexandria Wright: No problem. No problem whatsoever. I just wanted to share with you a resource when it comes to adult education planning.

One of our primary objectives is to increase access to low-income communities. And to that end, there's actually a new resource out there as an effect of the latest coronavirus pandemic. And so this is a policy map that identifies low-income communities by census tract.

And so when you open up this link that we've provided you in the toolkit, you'll end up with a map of the entire United States. And then from there, you can kind of start to zero in on your area. The purple areas being low-income community tracks, you can also stick in specific addresses, you can stick in the addresses of your adult schools to really check out what's going on there.

And again, the purpose of this is to really stimulate questions and facilitate discussion on increasing access to adult education and further identifying those populations in need. Just to give you a little background, this map was created by the US Small Business Administration for the purpose of identifying low-income communities that housed small businesses that were eligible for economic aid. So hey, let's-- why not use it for adults education planning and to better familiarize ourselves with our territories?

One of those things, like, I said, you could do is probably stick your addresses in of all your satellite campuses or your adult schools, see where they're located. And this might assist in targeting those underserved populations. All right, I'll hand it back over to Blaire.

Blaire Willson Toso: Sorry, I should have said upfront, we're doing a lot of navigating between different screens and different resources. So it's not my forte. So please be patient.

I was trying to answer a couple of the questions in the chat. The American Community Survey the demographic data that is from the Census Bureau, their survey data set. That was-- yes, it was taken out of there. I'm sure they cleaned it up once they publish it. But that was configured by our a team of data analysts and data scientists on at WestEd.

And on the Cathy, you were asking, Kathy Curie, you're asking about a way to drill down on these categories. And so the drill-down is only in that we can separate them out by these distinct categories, and then look at them through the lens of here. If you do hover over on-- I'm acting like you can see. Let me share my screen. Apologies.

If you hover over here, they will give you a little more information about the numbers and the percentages. But that is the depth that you can get through is it gets broken down through these pieces. And then, for example, there is not a way to find out whether they are that ethnicity, how it cross walks over onto gender.

Yeah, did that make sense? Hopefully. Feel free to keep posting, and when I'm off-screen I will be sure to check the chat. Oh, great. Thank you, Kathy.

All right, let me go ahead and share. Go back. Oh, apologies. You see I get--

So the link, Lexi did post the link in the chat, but when the PowerPoint is, by the way, compliant, it will come out in all of these links will be live. And as I said in that how-to guide on the American Community-- on the fact sheets, you can navigate to that, and there are these links are in there as well.

All right, so you document your CAEP demographics and outcomes. And so you're asking questions like, what are the rates of, sorry-- let me make that a smoother transition. You have now done it. You have charted the demographics, you've explored the demographics of your consortium. Then the next step we would suggest is to document your CAEP demographics and outcomes, which you all do on a regular basis through your different reports.

And you're asking for these-- now I'm not asking, particularly, about the group of your learners that you are serving. And you are asking about, what's going on there? What are rates for retention? What CAEP programs are most enrolled, rates of EFL?

And these questions are aligned with some of the metrics that you've been asked to report on for Nova. So and you want to dig in a little bit deeper because the evaluation of your program isn't simply about how effective your program is. It is. You may have excellent programming.

However, digging into some of these questions, you might identify that you're only serving a small group of people or a particular student demographic. And so which-- this will help prompt you to think, rethink aspects of your programming and then widen your impact. So I'm just going to take you all out. I think everyone is really familiar with the Adult Education Pipeline dashboard. But I just wanted to go into a couple of the ways that you can use the dashboard to drill down into some of these different-- disaggregated data and look at-- explore some of these equity gaps that might appear.

So this should look familiar to all of you. And so, for example, let's just go into-- you've got your tiles here. And if we will be doing webinars, and we have some great resources online.

If you are unfamiliar with the AAEP dashboard, please ping me and through my email or in the chat and will reach out and give you some of those resources and certainly alert you to when we're doing dashboard-specific presentations. Or if you're in the one to three years as a new consortium leader, then you can attend the webinar that's going on tomorrow, where we'll really dig into the dashboard with the history and how to use it in the different metrics. So let's go and see. So for example, if we go to successes, and then we can look at, take a peek at the GED, those who earned a high school diploma.

And when you first see it, it will set on your time trend, which is information. But it really doesn't tell you very much. It really resides in that first set of data. And then you want to drill down into it and say look at the race-ethnicity.

And here you'll be able to take a look at so what is going on in the program. I would like to note that when what you want to do is these, when we look at these bars, they are related to that particular, the success rate of that particular race or ethnicity. So you really would like to hover over on top of this and say, for example, here, you've got, while the Hispanic is really high-- when you look at the percentage, you're actually only 4% of those enrolled or achieving the high school equivalency or a GED adult diploma.

So that is a quick look of the other piece you can do. You can also look at whether they are first-time, what the rates are of first-time, or-- of students, or of returning or continuing students. Any questions about that?

Well, again, and then also obviously, you all know that you can also look at your TOPSpro, and your Enterprise data, and your MS data so to give a little bit more information about that. So one of the unique features that we have been able to do is we were able to drill down and ask some questions of the adult education pipeline data. And I'm going to share a little bit of a resource that was done for our own purposes, but we thought that the information excuse me was so interesting that we wanted to share some of the key data points that we recently dug into. And I will hop into that.

And this is really a very unique, very small dashboard that answers some of the questions. For example, what were the barriers to employment? And to what extent did the adults have them. And these you can look at by micro-region, they are not done by consortium. But you can look and see-- you can divide out and, you can pause out by different demographics as well as by your ethnicity and race to be able to determine what barriers might be one might be experiencing.

So, for example, we want to take race-ethnicity, and we wanted to say, what are the-- let's see, Hispanic students, what are some of their most, the barriers that they're most experiencing? Now, it won't much surprise you, as we know low income and some of these are really highlighted. However, I think it's interesting to be able to really drill down and look at some of those in detail and make a cogent argument for why you're going to focus on particular barriers or supporting learners in particular ways dependent on your region.

As a quick look, this was the last one, I just wanted to take a walk-through on some of the others.

So we looked at some of the annual earnings and wages, and then employment, and then participant award. And you can see that, again, you get to-- you can select a Locale and then you can also go by a Demographic. And then there are Participation Rates and things like that.

So this is a really deep resource that we wanted to offer you that has been insightful for us, answering some of our key questions and then being able to drill down into some of those pieces. Any other questions? All right, are you able to see my PowerPoint, or did it disappear?

Alexandra Lozanoff: We can see it, Blaire. And also, we had a question asking if this is on the AAEP site. So maybe you could clarify where this dashboard is available?

Blaire Willson Toso: No, this is not on the AAEP site. This is work that was done at WestEd And it was done as an alternative project.

So it is currently being hosted on a WestEd Tableau site. However, we're hoping to be able to move it into a space that has a little bit more pub-- is more public-facing, but for the moment, it's hosted by WestEd. Any other questions? OK.

All right, I'm going to take you back and also show you another feature that we added to the CAEP Fact Sheets. We said you have your Population Demographics. And then, we wanted to give a little bit more of a look at some of the transitions, which we think is a very important piece for all of us to be attentive to. And I'm going to scroll up a little bit.

And it's just a look at what's going on in your programs. And you can see that these are broken out. And you can see them all in one space, where you can look at race/ethnicity by gender and then by age category as well.

And again you're going to want to select your consortium. And let me see. I had one pulled up. Let's look, right there.

And you can see where your transitions are occurring, that they are working, you can see the overall transitions to Post-secondary, than they're broken up into two categories as you would see them on the AAEP. But that was just another little preview, a view of what you can expect from the CAEP Fact Sheets. It haven't disappeared.

So now that you've looked at some of your CAEP outcomes and you've looked at your demographics, one of the things that now what you want to do is compare your community demographics, versus your CAEP adult served. And this will help you. If you overlay them, they will help you identify pockets of opportunity where you might want to expand or bolster your services. And if you are actively engaging this data work, if you've already done the community demographics, and you've looked at your case, outcomes and demographics, you'll probably already have an idea about what you're going to see. But as you begin to make those conclusions, make sure you go back to it, overlay them and have the data to back them up.

And we did add this to a feature of the CAEP Fact Sheets to provide you with a quick look at some side-by-side data from the ACS to your Adult Education Pipeline demographic data.

Alexandra Lozanoff: Blaire, a question about the transition, data in particular, is transition to post-secondary, does that mean to a post-secondary institution, a college even if it's to a non-credit course or a college-level credit course? So I guess could you speak to the what transition is defined as in the dashboard edition?

Blaire Willson Toso: Yeah, transition is defined the same way it is on Adult Education Pipeline, and that would be transitioned to-- and it's actually a really good question. I have always thought it was to any non-credit to a credit-bearing course or a CTE course. So that is my understanding. But can you--

If you give me a SEC, I will verify that by the end of our presentation. So hang on. I'll come back to that. Thank you for that question. And for adding to reinforcing what my knowledge.

So I'm digging into that. But right now, we just wanted to-- for this moment let's take a look at how you can look at the comparison of total population of your consortium using that ACS data to the adult education pipeline demographic data. And again, you're going to want to select your consortium. And here you'll have your overall.

And then down here, you get, you can filter by different demographic groups, for example, this is showing all total individual served. However, you may want to look at just ABE participants. Click on that, it will refresh down to just representing the demographics for that group. When we have them by the three categories of Age, Gender, and Race/Ethnicity.

And it could also go into Participants with total contact hours. So these are a really easy way to be able to just look at who's the population in your demographic in your consortium, and then look at your demographics by the group and then thinking about how those overlay and what that means. Questions about that? All right.

Oops, there's my slide. I got so involved in screen changing. I forgot to show this slide. But there's that. I did want to point out that on the ACS only does binary categories of gender.

So at times, on the adult education pipeline side, you will see that we have the non-binary that we've included in our representation. So we may have-- at times you may have three categories. ACES will only ever have two categories. So that is one of the differences.

So then we're going to-- will then after you've done your comparison, you know your demographics, you know your CAEP demographics and outcomes, and you're going to want to turn your view to the labor market information. I'm going to turn it over to our labor market expert, Lexi.

Alexandria Wright: Thank you so much, Blaire. All right, so now we can dig into everybody's favorite section of three-year planning process, which is how do your educational services reflect your local economy. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen.

Just so you know, we'll see what happens here. You should all be able to see the tablet says labor market information. As most of you have noticed, as the links have been flowing through the chat box, that when you first hit the fact sheets, it's going to default to the first tab on Population Demographics.

So you're going to have to come over here to Labor Market Information and click this little tab right here. And again, the purpose of this section is to help you complete the assessment portion of three-year planning process. The guidance document, the PDF guidance document, actually provides some research questions that should help stimulate exactly what you should be looking for on this Labor Market Information page.

So what are your top industries? What types of certificates or non-degree awards are they accepting, et cetera? So once we get to this tab, the first thing we're going to do is you can see, it's going to default to this kind of aggregate for all consortiums. Oops, see, it just popped back. OK, good.

It's going to default to the aggregate. So the first thing you have to do is look over at your geographic region, and you're going to have to filter by location. So please note, we have macro-regions. So if you click on this, you can see all of the different macro-regions you should be familiar with. Then we also have the state of California's micro-regions, some overlap with those macro-regions.

And then we actually pulled by county so that you can disaggregate based on your primary location, acknowledging that when it comes to serving those low-income populations, those underserved populations, sometimes you do need to drill down and narrow that analysis, so you're identifying exactly where those populations are, and what are the economic opportunities for them? What are those employment opportunities?

So let's just start. And you'll notice that you have to keep something checked on these little dropdown menus. So the minute you take away all, it's going to blank out the entire sheet. So because of my familiarity, I'm just going to click on South Central Coast, that will bring us back to the South Central Coast. I'm just going to leave the micro-region at All.

And then let's see, I'm going to further go down in, and I'm going to drill into, say-- let's just go ahead and go to Ventura. And they did see a couple of my prior colleagues on there. So hopefully, this is useful for you, some personalized education here.

So you're going to see here the unemployment rate. And mind you had I not chosen Ventura, had I just clicked on All, we provided you with your Bureau of Labor Statistics Unemployment rate here. But if you're looking at a macro-region or a micro-region, it's going to be an average of all of the counties engaged in that region.

So this is as of June 2021 because this is not a live data sheet. This is like a point in time. So we figured June is pretty good. And according to August numbers actually is pretty reflective of current labor market information on unemployment, is fairly reflective to me in June of earlier, we seem to be going up and down with this recovery here.

So I'm going to go back to Ventura. I'm going to choose that. And then I'm going to come over here to filter by education level.

So this is the other thing we want to do because the first thing that's going to pop up is everything under the sun in that region. But you want to be very specific to what you're doing in your adult education schools. So over here, we have several different options for you to choose. So I'm going to uncheck All, and then I'm going to check first of all post-secondary non-degree award.

So that's going to tell me what type of technical certifications are in demand in my region. You can see here when I popped in Ventura it disaggregated that unemployment rate, gave me a 6.4% for June of 2021. And you come down here, and you're going to see your 10 largest industry sectors. When you hover over the bars, you can see the same similar data in there, but just in a little bar tab, 49,975 jobs in health care and social assistance.

This is according to your two-digit NAICS codes, so your larger industry classification codes, figured that was ample for your three-year planning process. And then we're going to come over here, and you see the 10 fastest-growing occupations. Now note, these aren't your largest occupations these aren't the occupations with the vast majority of openings either, these are simply your fastest growing occupations looking at a five-year estimated change.

So when we come down here to the bottom of our LMI page, we're going to see our 2020 jobs, the 2020 to 2025 estimated projected change, you can see a nice percentage here, which is why you see Wind Turbine Service Technicians for those of us into alternative energy, we're excited to see that job growth. But then you look at the actual jobs, and you see, gee, there's only 11, and only three more are expected to come into this territory in the next five years. Then over here, you will see your median hourly earnings. And finally, in the last column, we have a new data point for you. It's you. It's your cost of living adjusted median hourly earnings.

So to give you a little background of cost of living. This is an index that's published by the Council for Community and Economic Research. It's recognized by the US Census Bureau and US Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the index comprises six primary categories for expenditures in a local area that includes food, housing, utilities, transportation, health care, and miscellaneous goods and services.

So what we did here for you, instead of giving you the cost of living for the region, we gave you the adjusted cost of living for your median hourly earnings. So this takes into consideration what the cost of living in is that region and if indeed this is the occupation that you should be focusing on, or this is the career pathway you should be focusing on for your students because these can highly vary. The other thing I want to note is that when you choose your entry-level education, or whatever other filter that you want, as you scroll down, this last table is already going to be aligned to this third column, the percent projected change.

Now, if you wanted to take a look at just the largest quantity of jobs in the area, we can come over here and we press this filter. And you see this little arrow here, this will take us and align the entire table to largest quantity of jobs. So as we see here, in this area Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Driven Truck Drivers, that's a large portion of the jobs, and then we go on to Nursing Assistants, et cetera.

So just so you know, that's available in every column. You can go over to median hourly earnings, click that little dropdown arrow. And it's going to give us the highest median hourly earnings for your selected region, OK.

Now, if you call it cruise back up here, and you go over to typical entry-level education, again, say you're more interested in instead of finite degrees through adult education, IET, IELCE, which a great data point to reference that against post-secondary non-degree awards, is really the percent-- is your student surveys. The WASC surveys are some of them that ask those questions, why are you here? What are you interested in? If you have a large proportion that are there for ESL and a large proportion that are there for to get a job to get a better job or to get a pay raise, that's a good cross-reference of data points to let you know that an IELCE might be just up your alley, and it has additional funding attached to it.

So if we come up here and you're interested in instead of the more finite technical degrees, you want to look at career pathways, and you want to look at career pathways in association with your community colleges. So you're going to go ahead and click Associate Degree right here. And it's still going to give you similar variables here. But if we come up here, and we uncheck our Post-secondary Non-degree Awards, this is going to give us another advantage.

Now we see that our 10 fastest growing occupations are actually occupational therapy assistants. Vet techs, physical therapy assistants, and then we go into agriculture, food science, et cetera, aerospace and engineering. Once again, you're 10-- the table down here at the bottom is going to reflect your 10 fastest-growing occupations, and you can change that based on quantity of jobs. There we go. Education came right up to the top, OK.

And then, we also have these two other categories that you can further narrow your research to. If you are working closely with your workforce board, and you have a connectivity between their OJT program and your adult education program, you might want to check the box, something like less than five years work experience or you come over here to typical on the job training. And you can see. I'll just leave it at All there. You can see how this changed.

So now, if there's actual work experience required it's going to pull up those categories. And this knowledge this information is taken from a panacea of information on job postings. So it's a real time labor market information.

So you see here Magnetic Resonance, Imaging Technologists, and who knew, funeral home directors and managers, they needed some on-the-job training. And then over here, we can come back up to here and look at apprenticeships, internships, long-term OJT, moderate OJT, short-term OJT, whatever it is we choose, or we could just say None. We checked a short time OJT. There might be something there. They might not. If we check none, it'll scoot back to what we had before.

And we can also come back up here. If we check All again, it's going to go back to there. And then, we can reevaluate looking at our on-the-job training, is it an internship? is an apprenticeship? Let's see if there's anything that popped up. Nothing popped up.

So it looks like for this region that we were looking at, here we go, Moderate-term On-thee-job training, this might be a nice connectivity with your workforce board with regard to those OJT, dollars they have and connecting students, your adult education students to those OJT programs so they can acquire that on the job training that they'll need should you decide that you want to go ahead and implement an AAET program in this field. And as you can scroll down, you see down here at the bottom that changed again because remember, our parameters changed. So now we're looking at moderate on the job training with an associate degrees. We come up here with Chemical Technicians Ag and Food Techs, Medical Equipment, Repairs, et cetera.

And again, you can always change this based on hourly earnings, just click that little arrow down, and you'll go to the highest wage earnings there. All right, are there any questions on this? And I'm going to go ahead and look at the chart.

Blaire Willson Toso: Let's see. There is one that was, I think I got most of them. So Emma was asking, and I don't--

Alexandria Wright: I see.

Blaire Willson Toso: Do you see that one?

Alexandria Wright: I do see that. And I do know, yes.

[interposing voices]

Alexandria Wright: Yeah, thank you, Blaire. So Emma, yes, the Labor Market Information that strong workforce program uses is based on Center of Excellence research, as you know, but that research uses the same database that we did, which is Economic Modeling [inaudible] database. So these numbers, this data, and these data points will match any SEO report that's coming out on LMI data as long as they're referencing the same data points, same years, et cetera.