Workforce development…

it seems everyone is talking about it. New committees, commissions, taskforces, and reports abound. But what is workforce development? Once primarily an effort of the federal government to train unskilled adults, workforce development has morphed into a complicated array of public and private programs, projects, partners, and funders informing a vast swath of public policy.

With so much attention and so many resources, workforce development may be evolving into a sophisticated network befitting a modern interconnected economy—or it may be devolving into an alphabet soup of well-intentioned but disjointed projects working at cross-purposes. Does Alabama have a comprehensive workforce development strategy and, if so, do we have the systems in place to deliver?