Case Study: Washington

Whereas Indiana’s Next Level Jobs initiative is a relatively recent development, Washington’s state-funded workforce training initiatives have existed for decades. In 1983, the Washington State legislature enacted the Job Skills Program (JSP) with a declaration that cooperative skills training partnerships between industry and educational institutions—and their engagement with residents who could benefit—were a matter of public interest worthy of government support.¹ And though JSP focuses primarily on short-term training aimed at addressing immediate skills needs, additional state training initiatives now coalesce in a unified workforce strategy that centers on Washington workers’ longer-term educational goals and economic success.

The Job Skills Program and the more recent and much larger Worker Retraining program support workforce training for new or incumbent employees and dislocated or unemployed job seekers, respectively. Though both programs function as provider-focused supports and are both overseen by the State Board of Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC), important employer-focused and participant-focused features emerge in their actual operation.

Job Skills Program funds are administered by community and technical colleges, which contract with employers in need of job training. JSP contracts cover up to half of employers’ training. Though employers can contribute their 50 percent share in cash payments for training, many fulfill a part of the matching requirement by paying wages of trainees’ supervisors; even more commonly, businesses fulfill the requirement by paying wages for trainees while they are in training and thus doing less productive work.² Private businesses in any industry sector, as well as public or nonprofit hospitals, are eligible to enter contracts. They may pursue three types of training project: training for new employees; training to avert layoffs; and “upgrade” training to secure raises or promotions for trainees.³

Though the Worker Retraining (WRT) program receives about four times as much money from the state as the Job Skills Program, the two programs share important similarities.⁴ As with JSP, training providers apply for WRT grants that may be used for training programs in any sector.⁵ Both programs allow for non-credit coursework, although they both prioritize credit-bearing training. Both programs are overseen by a single workforce training advisory committee made up of college, business, and labor representatives.⁶ And both grants require colleges to plan out curricula that will secure well-paid jobs for learners. But while JSP functions as a provider-focused skills fund with employer-focused features—channeling public funds for customized training through public institutions—WRT helps training providers build career pathways and adds a participant-focused financial aid component to help lower-income learners complete their programs.

The Worker Retraining program was established in 1999 as an expansion of an earlier skills fund, the Employment and Training Trust Fund, and preserves the earlier fund’s focus on dislocated workers.⁷ WRT funding is allocated on a formula basis that takes into account both a college’s previous-year full-time equivalent enrollment in WRT programs and the college service area’s share of statewide unemployment.⁸ Each year, colleges submit WRT applications detailing their planned uses of the funding, which can be a mix of different program and staff expenditures, capital expenses, and financial aid to cover student tuition. Colleges also use WRT funds to provide Training Completion Aid, a special type of student grant that can cover non-tuition living expenses for eligible students, as well as training stipends for work-based learning.

Enrollment across Washington’s community and technical college system has declined each year since 2010, shedding about 28 percent of the total student head count.⁹ But Worker Retraining and the Job Skills Program have bucked this trend, with overall enrollments for JSP growing each reporting period since 2013, and WRT remaining steady at around 7,000 annual participants since 2015.¹⁰ Though WRT and JSP students make up only a fraction of students system-wide, says Peter Guzman, a workforce education policy associate at SBCTC, the programs are an important vehicle for recruiting new students and demonstrating the system’s commitment to employer relevance.

When it comes to workers and learners, SBCTC workforce program administrator Danny Marshall says that the system’s focus on individuals is critical: “everything we do goes back to how we get a person onto a career pathway, focus on their needs, and build the economy.” To do so, SBCTC keeps tabs on many different points of access and advising—including college student services, American Job Centers, and the state’s Department of Social and Health Services—where eligible learners might hear about their local college’s Worker Retraining programs. As for the jobs learners can train for, SBCTC tempers its openness to funding WRT and Job Skills Program projects in a variety of industries with a steadfast emphasis on upward mobility. WRT guidelines set out living wage requirements for eligible occupations, and SBCTC’s Centers for Excellence make recommendations about in-demand occupations and competencies within an industry sector.¹¹ Before funding commercial driver’s license training for jobs in the state’s large sand and gravel industry, for example, SBCTC will work to understand what the next steps beyond those driving jobs might be for students.

Washington State’s individualized approach to workforce program design applies to partner employers as well as to students. Annual Worker Retraining allocations help to maintain existing retraining programs and to develop new ones as regional economic needs change. Job Skills Program contracts are even more personalized. With individual employer contracts sometimes running in the hundreds of trainees,¹² many employers will contract with colleges to deliver several different short-term curricula to separate groups of employees. On the other hand, for more advanced professional credentials like Six Sigma manufacturing process certifications, colleges may work to identify a consortium of employers with similar skills needs, pooling demand for programs that would not be cost-effective otherwise. These multiple-employer training agreements resemble sector strategies in their structure.

Crucially, both the Worker Retraining program and Job Skills Program are able to respond to regional as well as national economic changes. Mike Nielsen, the director of corporate and continuing education at Green River College, manages at least 20 JSP contracts per year, the largest number of any college in the system. When employer partners are expanding, he says, about three-quarters of trainees will be new employees. When growth slows, as it has during the pandemic, an employer or consortium’s trainees might be 90 percent incumbent workers. Though JSP prioritizes new hires, Nielsen says, “at the end of the day, businesses make that decision. We give employers a menu, and the scope of training expands quickly.” As for the Worker Retraining Program, which is not intended for incumbent workers, Training Completion Aid funds allow colleges to provide more extensive training to program participants during prolonged economic slumps.

Nielsen says interest among learners and employers in short-term training is likely to drive increased investments in the Job Skills Program, whose biennial state budget allocation was recently increased from $5.4 million to $15.4 million. But along with JSP’s focus on immediate employment, says Peter Guzman of the SBCTC, a key strength of Washington’s state-funded workforce policies is its equal emphasis on longer-term economic and educational goals. The Worker Retraining program is not just intended as short-term training, says Becky Wood, another program administrator with SBCTC, but also as a pathway to college credit and industry credentials that can stack into an associate degree, an apprenticeship, or an applied baccalaureate.¹³ Washington’s workforce training investments in its community colleges take various forms, both shorter-term and longer-term—JSP, WRT, and apprenticeship funding, among others—but all contribute to building colleges’ capacity to deliver lasting economic returns for learners.

As in Indiana, Washington State’s college system practitioners continue to seek out possible improvements to their workforce training policies. Green River College’s Mike Nielsen argues that the current system overlooks some non-credit opportunities. Because Job Skills Program trainees do not generate full-time equivalent student funding, colleges receive less funding for their contracted training programs. Nielsen points to North Carolina’s state funding formula for non-credit coursework, which reimburses some high-demand programs at the same level as credit-bearing courses, as an enviable example.¹⁴ “If the state was supporting that at some level, it would make a huge difference,” he says. Nielsen also acknowledges that both Worker Retraining and JSP require detailed record-keeping that some colleges struggle with. But though these reporting procedures take time, rigorous eligibility requirements and intensive accountability for Washington’s JSP and WRT help ensure the programs pay off for workers and learners alike.¹⁵