The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s (Chamber Foundation) Center for Education and Workforce works to tackle the most pressing education and workforce issues facing America and mobilizes the business community to be more engaged partners, challenge the status quo, and move education and workforce initiatives forward to fuel economic success. The Chamber Foundation is invested in improving outcomes for all learners and workers and ensuring that America has a skilled workforce that aligns and keeps pace with the evolving needs of the talent marketplace. This companion paper accompanies a report published in September 2020, “Building a More Inclusive Talent Marketplace: Increasing Opportunity Through Community and Business-Led Initiatives”1 (the report), which introduces Chamber Foundation initiatives and how they might reach opportunity populations and the community-based organizations and nonprofits that serve them. The report discusses barriers to education, employment, and career advancement that opportunity populations face and presents a design approach for addressing these barriers, supplemented by use cases and recommendations across technology, partnership, processes, and governance. The proposed conceptual groundwork, if adopted, should turn ecosystem openness toward collaboration. The approach emphasizes a more user- and outcomes-focused holistic attitude toward technology. The framework is intended to foster buy-in, create new exemplars, and promote a more equitable, skills-based future.
The recommendations and guidance outlined in this paper are intended exclusively for the audience of the Chamber Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation as well as consultants working on the T3 Innovation Network (T3 Network) and Job Data Exchange (JDX) initiatives. Additionally, the “TPM Resource Guide: Connecting Opportunity Population Talent to Better Career Pathways” could be used in conjunction with this paper’s recommendation. The recommendations and guidance in this report dives deeper into avenues to orient the Chamber Foundation’s initiatives toward opportunity population outcomes. The information in this paper is intended for a more technical audience with a deeper knowledge of the Chamber Foundation’s workforce initiatives. This report outlines three cross-initiative ideas: increase opportunity population representation in the initiatives, concentrate on testing value propositions and usability, and encourage outcomes measurement. These can be actualized while creating community and guidance around JDX and continuing into the T3 Innovation Network’s third phase of work (a network of networks) with an eye to impact across the focus areas, including a study of learning and employment record (LER) adoption and implications. These recommendations should be treated as hypotheses to be tested in practice. We hope these developments will inspire fresh features, updates, guidance, resources, and/or tools for the broader community and the talent marketplace.
