Debi Pezzuto: Thank you, Holly. I appreciate it. And Thank you all for joining us for the Data-Driven Collaboration-- Leveraging Data Systems to Strengthen Partnerships and Outcomes webinar. This is the final webinar in our three-webinar series. We had one last week. We had one a few weeks before that. And they are in the process of being remediated. So once we have them, Holly and the folks over at SCOE and CAEP TAP will be able to share them with you all.

Now let's jump right into it. So as I said, I am Debi Pezzuto. I'm the senior program associate for adult education, postsecondary education and workforce development at WestEd. And I'm joined by the always lovely John Brauer, who's the director of Workforce and Economic Development Projects. Wave, John.

And then I'm also joined by Meghan McBride, the director of Adult Education Projects. She's on the road, so she's joining us just to listen in and maybe answer some questions in the chat if we really need it.

This webinar is a part of a series provided by the CAEP Professional Development project. And this lovely little graphic explains all of the things that will be included in this contract here. We've got the professional development trainings. That's for regional events. We've got virtual professional development events and webinars, including employer engagement. And then later in the fall, we're going to have a virtual session that's an innovative showcase, so looking at employer engagement that you all are actually doing.

We have quite a few tools and resources that we're developing this year for you. We've got a three-year plan and annual plan dashboard, a noncredit inventory dashboard. CAEP fact sheets are getting refreshed as we speak, and they are beautiful. And an employer engagement toolkit that we're putting together that will include these webinars, as well as some other tools that you can use.

We have ongoing technical assistance. So if you need anything at any time, some one-on-one assistance, maybe bounce some ideas around with us, you can reach out to myself, and I'll connect you with our whole team, so that may be John. That may be Megan. That may just be me. Or maybe Greg, who's our dashboard guy. And then we also are a part of the Data and Accountability Work Group as a part of this contract as well.

For today's session, we are talking all about labor market information and how to use and present data when you are making connections with employers and engaging with employers. We've already talked in the first two webinars about how to find employers, how to engage with employers. And this is just another layer in that cake.

Today we'll be looking at what we can provide to you using Lightcast, as well as a little touch on the Center of Excellence data that's available to you and is free, and then how to use that market data to design your programming, connect with your workforce boards, and ultimately build workforce relationships that are lasting.

We're going to identify some key data sources, interpret the regional labor market data, and then apply those data insights to strengthen industry partnerships and your student outcomes, which are always important. That's what we're here for.

Why does data matter in adult education? Why is this such a great place for data and workforce development to live? Data is important to help us build our credibility with employers. It positions our programs to be a strategic partner and not just a service provider. So we're not walking in the door just saying we have classes. We can teach your students. We're actually building programs with employers to make it advantageous for them and to help our students be more successful in the long term.

We can better design these programs so that they're growing and adapting to the changing skills of our workforce and the changing skills of our industry in the area. We've seen just with AI use that skills are changing daily. And it's our job to respond to that and really will help our students in the long term if we can. It's finding the training gaps that exist and then filling that need.

It helps us drive better outcomes. When we're simply providing English classes or English as a-- for English language learners, or high school equivalency classes, or putting them into short-term CTE programs that we think are best, we may not be preparing our students for long-term success in economic mobility.

But when we're working with employers, we can demonstrate the impact that we're having on the community. We can potentially secure funding. We know that our funding may, may be changing to Department of Labor when it comes to Title II WIOA. And we need to be leaning more into those policy changes to help benefit our students and keep us relevant.

So when we're talking data, we need to know what we have. Let's start with internal data. Enrollment, completion, employment outcomes, wages, and demographics-- this is the data that we're already collecting on our students when we complete those surveys, those second quarter after exit, the fourth quarter after exit surveys where we're finding out, where did they go? What are they doing? How much are they making? And I know that it's really difficult.

In my past life, I was a student services coordinator for an adult education program out in Reno, Nevada. And I ran the team that called the students, and it was so painful. Every quarter, it was painful. But it's necessary, because when I had the outcomes from my students, then I could find out more about what they need. And I could find out more about what to do in the future, how to change the programs, the IET transitions programs that I was designing. I had the data that I needed.

Know your region. Layer in external data. Look at your labor market information, your industry projections, your wage data, your employer surveys, looking at the whole picture. So today we're going to talk about the data that we have available to us, but then also some strategies like maybe communicating with your employers, going to the workforce boards to find out what they actually need.

And then connect the dots, align your program completers to real job openings and career pathways using labor market information, making sure that what you're providing is actually in high demand. And when we have this data, we can actually tell the story about our students. We can translate it into narratives that resonate with employers and workforce boards and funders to impact our funding in the future and impact the programs that we're designing.

I also saw in my previous job that when I understood and could tell the story about what the data meant to our employers, I could explain it to the students. And when the students understood it, they could explain it to employers and job interviews. So it has this ripple effect through the whole program.

And again, the whole picture-- we want to look at this whole picture. And John did a great job in the first two webinars talking about little pieces of employment, connections, and building those relationships. And now we're looking at that entire picture-- the student outcome data, the program performance data.

If we can speak to how our programs perform and our student outcomes overall, we can show the employers and the workforce boards our validity. We can prove that we are here and a member of-- part of the community that's designing this training and that we have the training available. What do they need to do their internal training for? We have it.

Partnership data-- we're talking about employer contacts, creating MOUs, advisory board, being on the advisory boards, and finding out what our employer-partners-- who in our community are actually participating in programming with us, what employers are working with us.

Community data, like our demographics, our poverty rates, our educational attainment rates, our digital access in our service area, really understanding what our student needs are and where our students are. Meghan and I talked about this in our regional trainings last spring. If you came to any of them, great. If you haven't, we're going to have some in the fall. You should come again.

But we talked a lot about community data and trying to identify where our student populations are. And you might be interested and see that your student populations are near the employers that are looking for work. Or they may be separate, and then you have other issues to identify like transportation issues. So you need to really look at the community data. And we can do that through some of these data resources.

Labor market data like job postings, industry growth, wage levels, occupational demand-- we can look at these in Lightcast for you, or you can also look at some of this information in COE. Back in my coordinator days, I just pulled up Indeed. I looked at Craigslist. I looked at Career Builder just to get a taste of what was happening in my area, also comparing things like the names of job postings, so kind of doing my own rough research. But then there's deeper levels that we can go into to find out more about what's really happening and what the employers are actually looking for.

We have questions that we have to ask, and here are some just a few to help you figure out where you are in this like labor market journey, this informational journey. When we're talking about labor supply, who is in your region, demographics, education level, literacy needs, and unemployment or underemployment of adult education students served.

So it's not always the students who are unemployed, but especially now it's underemployment. Sometimes that means our students have to have two or three jobs, or all of us have to have two or three jobs.

Then labor demand-- what positions are employers hiring for? Which sectors are growing? What credentials and skills do they actually require? And where are the wage entry points and advancement paths? So when we're talking like, what credentials and skills do they require? Do they actually require a state certification, or for a certified nursing assistant they require a state certification, but for a home health aide? They might not.

For specifically in the area that I live in, adult ed programs like to have forklift certification courses because we have a lot of manufacturing out in Reno. But if you go to any manufacturing site, they will tell you we're still going to train them on forklifts and get them forklift certified in-house.

So instead of relying on a forklift certification to give them upward mobility in their job, maybe we should focus on the entry-level job that they're going to be doing, so really honing in on what is that credential that the employer is actually looking for.

And then system capacity-- what training programs exist? Where are the gaps? What partnerships are active or possible? What funding is available to support aligned programming? We talk a lot about supply and demand. Where are the students? Where are the jobs? Who is hiring? Where can we get our students into those jobs? This data that we're going to talk about goes a little bit deeper than that, because we want to look at more specific information.

We want to use data to align programs with employer needs. I feel like a broken record, but it's always good to say it over and over again. We are identifying high-demand occupations. Then ultimately, we want students to be in family-sustaining wages.

So high-demand occupations that have low wages might not be the best route. We want to make sure that we give them enough training so that they can move up in those positions. They may be entry-level positions they're getting into, but let's support them in programming so that they can develop and grow over time.

Map skills to training gaps, figuring out-- reviewing the employer job postings for required skills, and then actually comparing those to the current curriculum, and where do those gaps exist? Reviewing wage data by pathways. This helps us to contextualize program value for students.

And then also demonstrate the ROI to the potential employer-partners so that they can see an ounce of effort on their part to get their employees trained or to reach out to us for hiring is valuable, that they're getting students who are more dedicated and better trained and more fully developed students, because we support their numeracy. We support their literacy.

Identifying underrepresented populations or underserved populations. We're looking for occupations where adult education students and underrepresented students can work, and we can bridge some of those equity gaps in our community as well, maybe positions that traditionally they are not hired for. We can identify those and then train them and help them get into those jobs.

Using data to continuously improve. We're going to track participant outcomes against the regional benchmarks, looking at the state benchmarks, use the comparison to then refine our programming even more and strengthen our partnerships and the conversations that we're having with those employers.

So let's talk about labor market information. This is information that tells us who is hiring, for what jobs, what wages, and where. It includes both real-time projected data about employment trends in a region. And it helps us maintain those strong ongoing relationships for the long term with employers between cohorts, not just during their hiring periods. So we are trying to make sure they're thinking about us all the time, not just when they need employees.

We can use all of these resources like the Center of Excellence, Employment Development Department, so EDD, Bureau of Labor Statistics, California Employment Development Department. And for best practices, we are using multiple data sources, not just one data source.

We're using labor market information alongside our own program information to reach out to employers and provide the best students that we can. I'm now going to turn it over to the always lovely John Brauer to talk a little bit about what Lightcast is and how we use it at WestEd to provide information to you.

John Brauer: Thanks, Debi. So Lightcast is essentially an application that utilizes Bureau of Labor Statistics, labor market information from EDD, as well as other sources. So it is something that Center of Excellence WestEd, other institutions use, really, to aggregate data. Lightcast gathers and integrates. You can go to the next slide, Debi. I will do it.

So Lightcast gathers and integrates economic, labor market, demographic, educational data, worker profiles, job posting data from dozens of government and private sector sources. And it then creates this kind of both comprehensive but frankly, fairly current database that has both from published data and detailed estimates within the United States.

You can get industry, occupational, demographic, job postings, and profile data at a national, state, metropolitan area, even a county level. And they even have code estimates that are available for things like employment, earnings, job change, demographic data, that kind of stuff.

Some of the more interesting things that you can pull are profiles. So they've got data sets that contain profiles of individual people in the workforce. And the profile contains kind of fairly unique information around job titles, companies, skills and education information. The profiles that they've got are like 100 million distinct individuals. So it's pretty large.

And they get that from publicly available information. So they're not-- it's the web. There's third-party resume database entities and institutions and job boards, the recruiting industry out there, opt-in data from employers, applicant tracking systems, frankly CRMs around sales and marketing, and consumer and identity databases.

So it's pretty big and broad. As we know, it seems like all of our private information gets captured. But it's there to give you a picture of what may be happening locally or regionally-- has very good industry data, which is the backbone of it's LMI data. So you can get industry data about businesses, categorization of types.

So if you wanted to-- thinking of looking at hospitals or grocery stores or oil refineries or some other kind of institution in your area, and a lot of those are pulled from Bureau of Labor Statistics census. It's called CQ, which is the Census of Employment and Wages data set. So it's got information on about 95% of those who are employed in the workforce, and you can break that out by industry.

The other thing that we find it really useful for, too, at WestEd-- and I suspect Center of Excellence and others-- is around job postings that they pull. The job posting data by-- they scrape a couple 100,000 websites, the Indeeds and the other folks of the world, including company career sites. They may be looking at a national and local job boards, job posting aggregations. So from those they can help get you job titles and company standardizations when you're doing research.

There's also a really good ability to do skill extraction and kind of identifying in an industry, employers, and what they're needing. The Lightcast also enables you to look at SOC codes, the Standard Occupational Codes, as well as NAICS codes, which are the industry classification system, and education and experience documentation. So there's a lot that you can kind of pull from them, in addition to the items that are up on the slide as well around it. Next slide, Debi.

So I just kind of wanted to show you from another project that I'm involved in. We are working with the Chancellor's Office and United Domestic Workers and their nonprofit for their home care and childcare workers that we are getting back into about 20 community colleges, primarily down South, but starting to move around the rest of the state.

A lot of them are English language learners from different countries coming around. They are all, though, folks who by and large, found themselves as home care workers, in particular, weren't necessarily planning on it, that there was something relative to their family or friends or somebody, that they became home care workers in their county, and are now looking to go back to school. A lot of them are 30s and 40s, as I said, and really trying to re-engage.

So we started to engage the community colleges with their programs by starting to look at both where folks are enrolling in, in terms of programs and then what may be available and accessible to them and starting to build an identity of entry pathways and maybe even career pathways, moving forward.

So we took health care, for instance, in Orange County, which is various programs at about eight of the community colleges were enrolling in either in a vessel program or in a CNA or some other program to start. And we just started to identify those programs that could be offered to UDW members, starting with what was being offered at the 8, and categorizing those using Lightcast and LMI to different areas.

So administrative clerical that could go across a number of these other categories, the caregiving of what they're already doing right now, and then other pathways, say, related to emergency medicine, that paramedic EMS, can go all the way up to firefighting and our other health care occupations, identifying those maybe in allied health, whether that was clinical, as well as various lab tech pieces around here. Yes, Nancy, United Domestic Workers, I just saw in there. Next slide, Debi.

And then what we started to do with the community colleges is to be able to show them some of-- for some of the specific occupations that their programs are related to the, number of annual postings, unduplicated during a recent time period so that they knew that there are quite a few annualized home health and personal care aides--

How many medical assistants in the county are being posted during the year, what the average advertised salary is, and the number of employers so you have an idea of how big your employment base employer base is relative to that for each of those categories as you start to go down. Next slide, Debi.

And then as Debi said, people are doing demographics on where your students are and where they live and maybe even where they're going. We kind of also then did some basic analysis, for one, like in this instance, medical assistants. Where are those job postings and how long have they been posted for? So these are some of the bigger cities within Orange County, for instance.

And are there going to be issues for folks to get from one side to the other, particularly Irvine, which is actually in the middle of it versus Anaheim or Mission Viejo and elsewhere? So that's also something to think about, where you may be going within your CAEP region. Are those employers located near you or within your region? Debi.

And then the other thing that we use Lightcast for, and this list is, we identified, frankly, the top 50 companies posting for medical assistance in the county. So it's not even just these five. We took-- but we wanted to show it that we could generate a full list. And then from here, this is how you can go and have that conversation with industry associations, with individual employers, with your local workforce board and their business service folks.

Are they engaging these folks? Are you engaging them? And to be able to start to identify who they are and maybe prioritizing your time building partnership and relationships with employers who actually are looking to hire coming forward out of it.

So we did this. And I think this kind of thing is really valuable with something like Lightcast or other equivalent apps to really give you a point in time. And again, the purpose of this is to then build yourself out not just to rely on the database and whatever, but to start the conversation and relationships, if you haven't already, and see who you're missing, frankly. And I don't remember if the next one is back to you or me, if I have something else in there, Debi. I think that's it. There we go.

Debi Pezzuto: Now, I appreciate that what you were saying there, John, too, because Meghan and I and John are also providing technical assistance for the ELL Health Care Pathways grant and have found that it's really important to understand which employers you're working with, the size of employer that you're working with, and really making those connections so that you can actually develop programs with them.

But you might find some missing pieces in there, and I'm going to show you an example of that in just a second. Using that labor market information to conduct a little mini needs assessment for yourself, looking at the current job openings, the pathways to see where the jobs actually lead to, the skills and competency requirements for the targeted jobs that you are training, building programs for, the industry sector snapshots--

Oh, we've got a weird little figure in there, sorry about that. And barriers to fulfilling the demand and also the equity gaps, whether it's for their workforce or just for our students. So now I want to actually walk through-- because Meghan and I were really inspired by what John and his team were doing with Lightcast for the UDW project.

So we created our own little packets for the health care pathways. I wanted to show you what we did. This is something that we can do for any occupation, but right now, we'll specifically look at a health care occupation. Where is my thing? Here we go.

So as an example, we're going to look at Alameda County that we did for Northern Alameda Adult Education Collective back in February. And this was using Lightcast data from January '25 to December 2025. We pulled all of the occupations that were included in the Health Care Pathways project, but we could do this to compare different occupations across whatever you're trying to do.

We can look at annualized postings, the posting duration, advertised salary, and then the number of employers that are posting for these positions. So we can actually, at a quick glance, see what jobs are actually out there. We might hear a lot of rumors about community health workers, but ultimately, medical assistants are the top jobs that we're looking for in Alameda County.

And then we start to narrow it down by cities. So we're looking at Oakland has the highest demand, then Fremont, then Berkeley. If I'm trying to run a program in Alameda and I'm looking for an employer-partner, I need to know that it's going to be-- I'm going to have to be really specific and look for the employers that I want to connect with.

We're looking at top companies posting for medical assistants in Alameda County-- Sutter Health, pretty predictable; Sutter Bay Medical Foundation, maybe; University of California, really large. But when we took this information to the actual consortium, their specialists pointed out that they were trying to build a connection with a larger employer, and it wasn't coming together.

And then they found a smaller local employer that maybe on here showed that they only had a few job postings available, but that were more connected with the community. And this employment data actually helps them to see how many job postings they had available instead of being just looking at the larger companies.

John Brauer: It may also help you-- you could use Lightcast to aggregate a number of those smaller folks-- employers, for instance, to come together. And maybe collectively, you can help meet their needs in the aggregate. So if you lose one of them for whatever reason, and there obviously is a lot of change going on in the health sector, you haven't put all your eggs in one basket, but it may also be a way to pull, particularly for younger-- smaller institutions may find it a real value.

Debi Pezzuto: Absolutely. And we keep talking a lot about transitions and CTE, but I also want to emphasize that this labor market data is also really valuable for creating workplace literacy courses. So if you're working with English language learner students and you want to target students at a specific employer to, then, build programming for them, this information is extremely helpful and necessary, and great to have when you're first making that connection to ask the employers if they have internal training that they would like to do, or workplace literacy classes that they would do.

And it legitimately legitimizes our program from being "let's come to your site and teach English" to "let's come to your site and teach contextualized English based on what you actually need. And here's what I found about you. Does it align with what you were actually looking for?"

So in there, we've got specialized skills. Some of these were really predictable. Some of these weren't. And medical assistant common skills. What are some of the most soft skills that they need to have, some of those common skills, like communication, prioritization, customer service skills, very predictable, software skills.

Some of these are wild. We don't necessarily associate this many software skills with these entry-level positions. But when we talked with folks doing the work out in the field and with their employer-partners and their subject-matter experts that were teaching the courses, we were finding that they need to have all of these software skills for these entry-level positions so that they can advance to the next course.

So the Lightcast data was helping to point us in that right direction. And if I was building a program, I would make sure that the digital literacy side of my course was very strong, because I know it's going to impact their employment later on.

We also have distinguishing skills. So these are skills that stand out beyond what the necessary parts of the job are into the highest-- selected candidates are going to have these distinguishing skills. Some of these were really interesting. Like, we found empathy, compassion were in distinguishing skills.

I think it would be really interesting to look at other occupations and other workforce areas to see what their distinguishing skills are and if they also kind of lean into some of these things that, how do you capture that? How do you capture compassion? And how do we work with our students to build that into the courses and design our curriculum around that?

So this is just one example of something that we can do and what we've done for using labor market information from Lightcast. You could take this information to an employer. You can have this laid out in front of you when you're calling them so that you've got some that real quality background information about them.

Let me get my presentation back up here. Any questions about those packets and what we can do with that? I'm not looking at the chat. Do we have any questions in the chat, John?

John Brauer: No. Nothing. And you have-- the packet is still up. I don't know if you wanted to switch.

Debi Pezzuto: Oh is it?

John Brauer: Yeah.

Debi Pezzuto: How about now?

John Brauer: Yes, you've got the right one now.

Debi Pezzuto: We also have at our fingertips the free resource of the Centers of Excellence. You can look at the supply and demand dashboard that they have to see what occupations are in high demand and compare it to what programs are being offered in your area.

We've done this a few times for different areas and find a pretty consistent theme. So when we're looking at medical assistance, we find a lot of private, for-profit institutions that are running the programming that are often $20,000/$30,000 for the students to complete programs.

And they're not getting anything that we couldn't provide to them. If we just look at what the employers need and build it into our coursework, making connections with employers. We already do this. We have this skill in adult education.

When you're looking at the Center of Excellence, you can review top occupations to look for roles that match your current or planned program offerings, and then note their wages and entry requirements, so right along the same lines as Lightcast.

You can use the Top Employers data to identify potential industry partners in your region. And this list can be a starting point for outreach. So if you just don't know who to call, if you don't know who to call outside of Kaiser, you can start looking at local mom and pop pharmacies to get your students connected as pharmacy assistants or pharmacy technicians.

You can share COE data with your advisory board or employer partners. As a conversation starter, you can ask, does this match what you're seeing on the ground? Does this match what you're actually looking for? How does this compare? If anything, it shows that you did your research, and it shows that you're interested in what they do differently, and gets them talking.

I've done this a lot with manufacturing companies that aren't sure how I can help them and help their students. And once I get the ball rolling with, well, this is what I know from other companies in the area, then they get really chatty and they want to tell me how they're different and what their employees need and what their struggles are. And then I can actually address that in my courses that I'm building.

We can reference COE reports in grant applications, program approval requests, and annual plans to demonstrate data-informed decision-making. We talk about that a lot. This is another way to use that for your annual reports, your three-year plans, et cetera.

Connecting with our workforce boards-- our workforce boards are regionally governed entities, as you probably already know. They oversee the workforce system, and they're critical partners for adult education programs when we're trying to connect for career pathways, when we're trying to connect for workplace literacy courses.

We're developing post-placement advancement strategies for our students so that they can actually continue after our programming. We never want to just kick them out of adult education and say goodbye, good luck. We want to make sure that they have employment. And that's our real focus here. We put the workforce and Workforce Opportunity and Innovation Act.

The local workforce-- we know we can find out what the local workforce board strategic plans are, so we can help them build their goals while we build our goals. And we can use our Lightcast and our Center of Excellence reports to serve as shared data resources across adult education and workforce development board staffs, so we can create some common ground for planning those conversations.

John Brauer: And Debi, can I add that the other place that folks should probably look is with California jobs first, which is the governor and GO-Bizs at the state level there are doing regional job and economic development plan.

So there's 13 regions in the state of California. They each have a regional plan with data and other kind of profiles of your region economically and job wise, too, that are really, like the workforce boards, I think, are really good place to partner with and add. I'll add the website here in the chat.

Debi Pezzuto: That's fantastic. Did you want to say something, Meghan?

Meghan McBride: Oh, no. I just accidentally unmuted. I'm sorry.

Debi Pezzuto: Nancy Miller in the chat asked if she could request for other industry sectors, specifically fire recovery in Los Angeles County comes to mind. Post fire data is needed. And absolutely, so we do have pretty well up to date-- how up to date is this data in Lightcast, John?

John Brauer: I think it's fairly within the-- probably a couple months old at that kind of thing. It's updated daily and quarterly, depending on the source. So it's probably as up to date as you'll get. It comes from a variety of sources, so it's not just dependent on LMI data being collected and posted, or BLS, or that kind of thing.

Debi Pezzuto: So it's been long enough, I think, Nancy, that would absolutely be possible. Meghan just mentioned in the chat, if you can send us the SOC code or the occupational title or the industry area, even, too, if you want us to look at top occupations, let us know. We can take a look for you. Absolutely.

We have to talk about how we're going to do this. How do we actually connect with these employer-partners? I keep saying it, and I'm going to say it again-- we've got to know our audience. We have to understand our regional labor market data so that when we reach out to them, we know what we're talking about at least a little bit.

Reviewing their recent job postings, their growth trajectory, their skills requirements, looking at what their mission is, finding out more about them. Leading with what the problem is-- so, for example, I saw that you posted 14 CNA openings this quarter. Our program has placed 28 CNAs in jobs in the past year. I'd love to talk to you about a potential partnership.

Dangling the fact that you have all of these students ready for jobs, and they have this number of occupations, or job postings that they've already put out there is a fantastic way to get their attention. Know your outcomes data. Share your programs outcomes data, your graduation rates, employment rates, average wages at placement, making the case for the return on investment for those employers to connect with you specifically.

We can find this outcomes data in TE or MIS. We're tracking our students. We're watching where they go after our program. So you can look at that internal data and find that information to share. We can reference regional data using Centers of Excellence, Lightcast, et cetera, to show projections for long-term demand. This positions partnerships like a strategic investment, not as a favor, not as English classes, not as just high school equivalency classes. We're really building a partnership.

Propose a small first step. Instead of asking for the whole thing and saying, well, let us come in here and teach these classes, hire all of my students after they complete this certification course, or the CTE course, let's ask for a site visit. Let's start with a mock interview session or ask them for a guest speaker.

I can't tell you how many employers I had-- when I was the coordinator, folks would just love to come into my classes to just talk about what they did. It also checks off the box for people in HR for companies. So it's a pretty easy ask to say, could you just come down to my classes and talk about what you do at this company and what you do in this occupation and how they can grow?

You can build a relationships incrementally before asking them for a hiring commitment. I always felt like it was harder to get them to commit to hiring my students because they would say, well, I don't know who your people are. I don't know what's going to come out of your programming.

But I could always get an HR person to come visit. I could usually get mock interviews because that would maybe require one person. And we didn't really have too many problems with site visits. Employers seemed really interested to have folks come out.

Days before the pandemic, I was able to get a site visit to a place that makes dental implants. So they had patient information out. They were designing implants right in front of us. I thought for sure they were never going to let us come back there. But they were very welcoming to our students. They were interested in sharing how they got into that occupation.

People are generally really excited to share their jobs and what they do. And that is a way for you to have your students shine, to build that relationship even further, and just a really cool way for them to learn about an occupation.

Start with sharing the picture-- bringing that labor market data to your first meeting with the workforce board or the employer, it signals that you understand their world, and not just your own. It shows that you've done some research into what their problems are, what their struggles are, in addition to also knowing what your students' needs are.

And your students are probably also their employees. They have the same kinds of struggles. They're from the same communities. They have the same barriers. But you have the ability and means to support those students.

Use data to diagnose challenges in real time. We're talking about low enrollment, poor completion, weak placement, talking about how you can fix those issues. Work with your partners to agree on the goals. What are their goals? Are they looking for higher employment rates? Are they looking to promote their students? Are you looking for wage gain and they're looking to promote their employees?

Are they having issues with retention? One of the largest problems that I faced with employers was they just couldn't get people to show up. They had such a problem with attendance that if I could show my students had 85% attendance or better in my programs, that was getting some buy-in from my students and from my program and from the employer.

Use data to ask for resources. When you can show that your graduates are filling high-demand, well-paying roles, you, again, have that evidence to advocate for co-investment, expanding support, working with the employers even closer. You've got the evidence.

Now we're talking about more data. Employment and completion data-- let's ask ourselves these questions before we meet with employers, before we sit down to have those conversations. Excuse me. What employment and completion data do you currently track and report? We have it in TE. We have it in MIS. We should be tracking our students. We're contacting them. We know what they're up to after they leave.

Have you seen employment and wage outcome data? Have you already seen it? Do you need help finding it? We're the people to help you. Regional knowledge-- can you name the top three industries in your region by employment size? You might already be able to or have kind of a gut feeling about it. John came off mute. Do you have a comment?

John Brauer: No. Next one.

Debi Pezzuto: Workforce development board priorities-- do you know what your local workforce development board's priority sectors are?

John Brauer: Thank you. So I think part of this is, employers, too, get bombarded by entities, stakeholders, educational partners, others. So they're looking to just have a narrow or one or several points of contact, if you will.

So understanding who else, starting with the workforce board, may be engaging employers is really good to know, because they will get turned off by the fact of 30 different folks coming to them and requesting, whatever, time or employment opportunities or whatever. So that's part of why you want to do this. As well as if somebody's already created that pathway, being part of that may make some sense than starting from scratch.

Debi Pezzuto: That is such a good point, making sure you've got that one point of contact. I forget about that, John, because I was that one point of contact. It was just me, party of one-- so typical in adult education. But if you have a team or if you're doing this from the consortium level, who's going to be that person? And key data gaps-- what data gap, if filled, would most change how you design programs or talk to those partners? Keeping track of what data gaps do you have in your programming.

Next steps. Here are our action items. What you can do today to impact tomorrow? So this week, right now, you guys can start with obtaining some labor market reports for your region, identifying the top three high-demand sectors. Of course, if you all email me, it's going to take maybe more than a week, but I'll get it to you.

This month, you can review a sector snapshot of one of your target industries. Narrow it down to one target industry. Gather your information together for a quick snapshot. Then over the quarter, bring that data snapshot to your workforce board meetings, take it with you places.

Ongoing for this is to work with your CAEP professional development team, that's us, to explore how to use both internal outcomes and labor market information data to assess your program relevance and your partnership priorities.

Then, by the year end, present a data-informed annual impact report to your employer and workforce board partners. That's really key to show them the outcomes, the demand and your shared impact. Making sure that you're proving to them on a regular basis what, again, that ROI is for investing with you, their time with you. Even if they haven't invested money, they're investing time.

I also found that it was really preferable to have some collateral to give them so that they could share with their stakeholders or their leadership why they were spending time on this workplace literacy course, or why they were spending time helping me build an IET program that was contextualized with the college CTE programming.

So giving them something to show-- this is how many people you hired. This is the number of people that went into your apprenticeship or whatever it may be-- something that they can take with them to prove to their staff or their leadership or their administrators or whatever it looks like to them why this is worthwhile.

So we already know we have very valuable data at our fingertips. We have our internal student information. We have some free data that we can look at through the Centers of Excellence, but then you also have us that can help you find some information and start organizing it to tell your program story.

Remember that data is the bridge between adult education programs and workforce partners. It creates a common language for all of us and shows that we have shared priorities. Instead of just walking in the door and saying, I have English classes, take my students, or I have high school equivalency students, take them, we are bringing something to the table.

Understanding your regional labor market helps you to design programs that are responsive, equitable, and fundable. The face of adult education is changing. We know that it's shifting towards potentially the Department of Labor. Let's prepare for it now and move our students into some maybe more fundable programming that's focused around workforce.

Strong partnerships are built on demonstrated value. Use your data to show employers and workforce development boards why your program is a strategic investment in their workforce. This is really high-value training that these students, these employees can get. Maybe they are incumbent workers. They're already there. We've got the power. We've got the knowledge to train them.

So now we've got all these tools, and you have lots of questions. We're the folks to reach out to. You can email me at dpezzuto@wested.org. If you have questions for John, I'll shoot you over to John. If you've got questions for Meghan and I, we can sit down and chat with you.

We are your CAEP technical assistance team. I'm not technical assistance. You're technical assistance. We're your CAEP professional development team. I've got Health Care Pathways on the mind. So we're your professional development team. This is what we can help you with. And we're always here. I'll let Holly share. She's got some evaluation in the chat, and then she's also got some upcoming events in the chat.

Holly Clark: Yes, Thank you, Debi. I did post the link for the evaluation. And as I mentioned earlier in this, not only does the WestEd team value your feedback. They read all the comments. They want to hear your feedback. We get it. We use it to plan our professional development going forward. We send it to them.

We also report out monthly to the state, and we send everything that is said to the state. And I did miss a chance earlier in the intros. And we have Diana Batista from the Department of Education with us today. She's been here. She's been active. She's listening. I know that her and Mayra read everyone's comments and evaluations. So please take a moment to send us your feedback on this topic. So thank you, Diana, for being present with us today.