The Workforce Supply Chain Initiative
The Workforce Supply Chain Initiative
As we emerge from the pandemic, we are faced with a complex set of workforce challenges:
- Employers in almost every sector are grappling with worker recruitment and retention challenges.
- Advancements in and increased adoption of technologies such as cloud computing, robotics, 3D printing, and 5G are driving the need for new skills in the workforce.
- Historic levels of federal investment in high-potential sectors—from advanced manufacturing to infrastructure building to clean energy production—need policy and programmatic solutions to grow a workforce that can bring these investments to fruition.
The Workforce Supply Chain (WSC) Initiative at the Block Center for Technology and Society is developing data-driven tools, assessments, and policy guidance to help workers, employers, and policy makers navigate these new challenges and opportunities.
Components of the Initiative:
- Situational Awareness: Build an open-access tool that informs decision-makers which jobs are declining and increasing in demand, given an industry sector, geography, and time period. Show what skills are associated with these jobs and what the available supply of workers is.
- Worker Decision Support: Using an individual worker’s skills, wages, interests, and an assessment of nearby job growth (gathered from the Situational Awareness tool), provide recommendations for new job roles and what new skills the worker would need to acquire to qualify. Provide information about the costs and time required for upskilling, the wage premium the worker is likely to gain, and whether others have successfully converted the upskilling into career and wage growth.
- Employer Decision Support: Take stock of an individual employer’s objectives and associated tasks to perform, their existing job roles, and the skill sets associated with each role. Assess whether skills for job roles can be disaggregated and reaggregated into new skill sets to effectively create new roles. (For example, the nurse practitioner role was created to incorporate both the skills of a nurse and of a physician.) Assess the economic implications of these new roles for the organization (cost and quality) and for the worker (wages and career growth). Provide decision support to the employer on how to recruit, upskill and retain workers in the presence of these new roles.
- Deploying the Decision Support System: Impart skills to workers to prepare them for new roles, making use of the latest learning science and engineering tools. As an example, Carnegie Mellon’s SAIL() Platform offers job-aligned curricula for cloud computing technicians, cybersecurity managers, and data scientists. SAIL() uses AI to provide immediate feedback to students and to help educators (typically in community colleges where SAIL() is deployed) understand where their students encounter skill acquisition problems.
Outputs of the Initiative:
- A data-driven hub for policy makers, employers and workers in emerging sectors, with:
- An open-access labor market data visualization tool
- An open-access worker decision support tool, which may build on the ARM Institute’s Roboticscareer.org career exploration tool
- Simulations and What-if tools to measure quality/cost performance of current skill aggregations—for Employer decision support
- Detailed case studies on pilot deployments of decision support
- Informational briefs of required job roles and associated skill sets
- A map of training and certification programs that will develop the skills required by these roles
- Policy memos and white papers, including analyses of supply/demand gaps, policy toolkits and best practices
- Expansion of the SAIL() Platform to more community and technical colleges around the country