Bill Kerr: The U.S. labor market has struggled to connect workers from diverse backgrounds with good jobs in areas like software development, skilled trades, and advanced manufacturing. Workforce boards—state and local groups set up under federal workforce legislation—are tasked with facilitating those connections. Can these boards, working with employers, schools, community groups, and others, keep pace with the changes in the economy while also addressing long-term needs?

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. My guest today is Brad Turner-Little, president and CEO of the National Association of Workforce Boards [NAWB]. We’ll talk about how workforce boards function and what’s at stake in the reauthorization of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, and we’ll consider the impact of AI, skills-based hiring, and more. We’ll also look at some of the local successes and systemic challenges. Brad, welcome to the podcast.

Brad Turner-Little: Great. Thanks so much, Bill. It’s a pleasure to be with you guys.

Kerr: So, Brad, tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to become passionate about workforce development.

Turner-Little: When I was an undergrad, I was a sociology and economics person, and so I was really intrigued about, how do you look at societal systemic issues from multiple perspectives. I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and I spent a lot of time in Downtown Nashville in the ’70s and ’80s. There was a high transient population, a lot of people experiencing homelessness. There was a lot of poverty. The root of it comes from, quite candidly, from a faith perspective about how important work was for people to feel like they had a place in society to be able to contribute not only for themselves and for their families, but to the broader community. There was a real importance around dignity in work, all types of work. I did postgraduate work, actually, at a seminary around social ministry issues. That led me to an opportunity to begin my professional career with Goodwill Industries, where they’re providing training services in the community. That led me to my first introduction with the public workforce system.

Kerr: Obviously, it’s very important for you about workforce development. I think many of our listeners will have heard of workforce boards, but it’s kind of vague. They don’t really know what a workforce board does, so I’d love for you to share a little bit about your member organizations. Then also, at the association level, your national association, how you help them out. But let’s start at the ground level. What does a workforce board do?

Turner-Little: So a workforce board, it’s in every community across the country, but a workforce board, at its core, is a gathering place, is a convening body where business—so the private sector, the training community, education, whatever that looks like, federal, state agencies or programs, community-based organizations—all gather together to understand what’s happening in our local or regional economy and then discern what are the mechanisms that, from a growth perspective, if things are changing in our economy, what are the right opportunities for people in our area, all people, all of our neighbors in that community to be able to build the right competency sets to participate. So in a lot of ways, the public workforce system really is the infrastructure. So if you think about right now in the 2023, 2022, and all the federal legislative investment in public infrastructure—roads, bridges, digital access, all those kinds of things—this is the nation’s public workforce. It’s the job training infrastructure for the country.

Kerr: And Brad, how much of the time is typically spent on structural issues—very long-term, it’s going to be here for decades, and we’re in the Dallas area trying to make it better—versus this responsiveness that you described. So new things come to the forefront that the workforce needs, and you’re trying to tackle those specific moment-of-time issues.

Turner-Little: We’ve got in certain markets, based on the assets in that market, the economic projections in that area, you see a workforce board that’s really leaning heavily into population-oriented programs, where they really lean into, “How do we help kids that are in school be exposed to the kinds of jobs that are in our area so we can keep talent at home? And how do we bridge them into training opportunities offered by a community college or a four-year system or a private training provider so that they can build the skills to be a part of our economy in Tulsa?” wherever it might be, right? Then in other communities, they really lean into what in our system is called “basic services.” So there are roughly 3,000 what we call America’s “job centers,” and they’re branded in different states. So in Florida they’re called “CareerSource.” In Michigan, they’re called “Michigan Works!” But they’re the places where anybody in the community can come in and find supports, whether it’s to build a resume or to do a job search or brush up on interviewing tips, where they can come and get those kinds of services. There are more intensive services for people that may be facing challenges. There’s a need to think about upskilling or reskilling that are in that quick response area. The other thing that I would note here, Bill, is that one of the things that the public workforce system has a lot of expertise in—and unfortunately, has had to do a lot of work in this space in communities—is when a company is getting ready to downsize or having layoffs. We call it “rapid response” in our system. But they’re the entity in a community where, if you’re getting ready to lay off 500 people, you can contact the workforce board, and they’ve got supports and mechanisms to come in and help all those employees think about: Where are they going to go? How are they going to change skills? Where do they go for training? Can they just go to work somewhere else? So it’s an interesting mix.

Kerr: Yeah. All three functions are obviously critically important. You have a podcast, it’s called Workforce Central, and I’ll give a plug for it here.

Turner-Little: Thank you.

Kerr: And what it does is, it talks about the activities of individual boards and what they’re up to. So let’s take a moment and just pick out a couple of examples, some of the ones you want to point to, and tell us a little bit about what’s happening on the ground in this city or in that city.

Turner-Little: So one of those podcasts was with Pam Nabors, who’s with CareerSource Central Florida in Orlando. One of the areas, the geographic areas that they serve within their board’s territory or their local area is Osceola County. Osceola County had received an investment as a part of the Innovation Hubs related to the CHIPS [and Science] Act. So you’ve got boards at the forefront of innovation, supporting, building the right workforce to be able to leverage those kinds of investments and fill those kinds of jobs.

Kerr: Brad, maybe I can unfortunately take us to one of the other sides, which is one of the times where there needs to be a layoff, and maybe you can describe a board that has been very effective in those kinds of dire situations.

Turner-Little: Yeah, so those happen, unfortunately, frequently. So there’s lots of examples where a company will, for layoff diversion, reach out. I know I’ve already mentioned Florida, but I was down in Tallahassee with the workforce board there within the last couple of months. And they actually had a company, I won’t say the name of it, but who gave testimony about how wonderful it was that the workforce board there in Tallahassee had an individual who was dedicated, who came on site, spent two weeks with their employees and helped every one of the employees who was going to be laid off understand all the different resources that were available to them in the community, both through the board and through partner organizations, community-based organizations where they could bridge income, if they needed assistance with food, assistance with housing, transportation. She was able to bridge every single one of those employees into whatever their next step was going to be, whether that was employment or whether that was going to be reskilling for a different opportunity in that economy. So it’s hands-on.

Kerr: Yeah. And tell me a little bit also about your national association. So a lot of this is on the ground. It has to be bespoke to any particular city or county where the work is happening. What does the NAWB do?

Turner-Little: Our mission is to serve, support and represent those 590 workforce boards all across the country and in all the territories. What that turns into is, we spend a lot of time really listening to local workforce boards. What are their challenges? What are their opportunities? Then figuring out, how do we help the workforce board in Tulsa, as an example, learn from what CareerSource Central Florida has done so that when that investment or that sort of a need shows up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that workforce board can leverage the other board’s experience and more quickly respond to need. So we do a lot of brokering, of information sharing, convening. We build toolkits, we build playbooks to support local workforce boards as they’re fulfilling their missions. We also represent all of them with Congress and the administration, because oftentimes the local experience gets lost in the bureaucracy. It’s important that local experience be able to inform policymakers as well as policy implementers so that they can really understand, if you do this, then the ripple effect is going to be that, based on local experience. So in a nutshell, that are the types of services and supports that we provide to association members.

Kerr: Yeah. I think I want to take each of these in turn. So let’s start with the best practice sharing, and then we’ll maybe a little bit later come back and talk about Washington. On the best-practice sharing, skills are rapidly moving. If there’s a way that you think the boards best identify the gaps that are opening up and work to address them, describe what that best-in-class playbook can look like.

Turner-Little: Yeah, so a couple of things. Number one, it’s got to be informed by both qualitative and quantitative data. There are all kinds of systems out there—from Burning Glass as a private provider that does analysis and state and federal labor statistics entities, Bureau of Labor Statistics at the federal level, state departments of labor provide labor market information. So really being able to look at what’s happening—Lightcast, another provider in this space—what’s happening on the ground from a data perspective and what can you learn from it? Really interesting intersections, particularly like with Dun & Bradstreet analysis. You look at trajectory of certain companies and how they’re trending up or trending down, and then how the workforce board can use that data to then think about, “All right, how do we engage and reach out to help support growth or help with layoff diversion, those sorts of things, right?” That’s where the qualitative data comes in, right, because the numbers only give you a certain lens into a community. It’s really then being able to use the numbers to ask better questions on the ground of the business community to say, “The numbers seem to tell us this. What’s behind that? What’s driving those things?” So then once you understand, and the workforce boards do this every day. They use that labor market information to engage with the business community, ask important questions about where things are going, and then what are the competency sets that are needed.

Kerr: So, Brad, one of the trends we hear all the time about is skills-based hiring, but it’s never fully clear as to how widely it’s being practiced and where the state-of-the-art is. How do you and the member boards work to promote it, and how are you experiencing it?

Turner-Little: You look at the data from Lightcast or Burning Glass, you have all kinds of information out there about how a number of the jobs in communities all across the country don’t require a college degree but have that in the prerequisites in order to be able to apply. Well, that screens out a lot of people who have competencies that could fulfill that job. So the whole skills-first, skills-based hiring and advancement strategies are in this space of, how do you create a different paradigm for a business to find the talent it needs and the competencies it needs to be able to grow and be profitable? Walmart, [The] Home Depot, McDonald’s and even Accenture, like big business services companies are thinking about and have activated skills-first hiring strategies. So I think a workforce board is in this space of really working alongside and helping small businesses think about, “How do we shift the way, minimize the way we think about talent acquisition and we minimize the risk for that?” So one of the things that we’ve done, we’re actually producing a toolkit for local workforce boards to catalyze those conversations. The National Governors Association has things for state governments kind of in that space. You see other, SkillsFWD. There’s a bunch of different groups in this space. But we think that the way that we contribute to the evolution of the way talent gets acquired is, we need to prepare workforce boards to be able to engage in those conversations in local communities.

Kerr: That’s great. Brad, I’m going to swivel you 180 degrees. And you spend a lot of time, as we’ve learned, on the ground in Florida, and I’m sure all other 49 states working with the boards. But you also go to Washington quite a bit, and you spend time with Congress and so forth. Right now, in the legislative process is the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act update, the WIOA update. I think some parts are pending, some parts are being proposed or being worked through. Maybe at a higher level talk to us about, what are some of the pros and cons of the legislation right now? As the National Association of Workforce Boards, what do you hope to see in the final support that will be provided to the organizations?

Turner-Little: Oh, yeah. So the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, the current legislation was passed in 2014, and it had a five-year authorization period. Earlier this year, the House of Representatives and the Committee of Jurisdiction, which is the Education and Workforce Committee, proposed a bipartisan bill that received overwhelming committee support—44 to one, I think,I it passed out of committee—to reauthorize WIOA and had certain provisions in it that we were really supportive of. Then just like any policy that Congress does, there were other provisions that we had some real concerns about. But the bill then moved over to the Senate. Earlier this year in 2024, when it passed the house, again, by a pretty substantive majority vote, it went to the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, or the HELP committee. So the Senate has been in a process that there’s been a draft bill that’s been circulated. In terms of the things that are in proposals, we believe that the bill, the WIOA and the federal legislation, should really support and give increased flexibility for investment in local workforce boards, because they’ve got their fingers on the pulse of what’s happening on the ground, in communities all across the country and are best positioned to be responsive to local economic need—either from folks that are trying to find work or from businesses that are trying to find employees. A lot of the proposals that are in both the House Bill and the Senate Bill run counter to that—not all of them. So we’ve expressed our concern along with the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National League of Cities, National Association of Counties. We’ve joined together to make sure that Congress understands from a local perspective how important it is to continue to invest in local workforce boards and to ensure they have the authority and agility to be able to be responsive to what’s happening in communities.

Kerr: Brad, explain how they run counter to that. Is that because they’re being funded at the state level rather than the local level? Where’s the legislation aiming differently?

Turner-Little: So Title I is the big title that supports and funds the workforce investment system. There was a mandate inside Title I that 50 percent of those funds would be spent on training. In some states, state lawmakers have added that as an expectation. Illinois has an expectation that 50 percent of those funds will be spent on training, but California has its own funding mechanism for training, for people who are receiving WIOA services, and the WIOA dollars support wraparound or some other support services. So people need help with transportation or housing or food or childcare or whatever else. You can use those WIOA dollars for that purpose, because, I mean, after nearly 30 years in this industry, Bill, I’ll tell you the thing that gets in the way, particularly for entry-level people that may not have worked before or have found staying in the workforce challenging, is life gets in the way. And you need those supports, resources, to pay for transportation, whether it’s bus passes or the Wheels to Work-type programs, whatever it might be. Another was, right now under current federal law, under WIOA now, a governor can keep 15 percent of those funds at the state level to do specific projects around workforce from a state perspective, which is fine, but it ups that amount. They keep an additional 10 percent of those dollars at the state level for a governor. So from a House perspective, you’re taking 50 percent and mandating that it be spent on training, and you’re allowing the governor to take up to 25 percent and retain it at the state level. Now you’re left with 25 percent of the funds to do all the things that a workforce board is supposed to do. Both bills mandate a process for a governor to go through reconfiguring a state from that way. We believe that local workforce boards ought to be the ones that, if they want to merge or consolidate with another board, they should be the ones to do that, make those decisions. And they can do that under current law now. But that’s one of those examples, another example, of undermining local authority.

Kerr: Yeah, I think it’s an amazing set, because it’s easy for us to conceptualize at a more abstract level what the workforce boards are doing. But then, when you get to this funding level and how use cases for the funds and so forth, a lot of different stakeholders play a role. Let me direct us to a couple of specific questions that I know would be on minds. We haven’t really fully nailed the funding of workforce boards, and some of it obviously is flowing from this legislation. But are there other sources of funds that are coming into the workforce boards? Also, what’s the role of public-private partnerships in how this activity takes shape?

Turner-Little: Though it is a federal structured program and operates underneath federal legislation, about 60 percent of those local workforce boards have actually spun off outside of government and spun off to be private 501(c)(3) nonprofits. So they have a nonprofit board and then they have their workforce board, and they’re accountable to both of those boards. What that does, Bill, it creates a mechanism by which those workforce boards can pursue and receive philanthropic investment, corporate investment as a 501(c)(3), and they can braid those funds together, the funds they receive from the Department of Labor with private philanthropy or foundation investment, to create additional resources to upskill and reskill people in their community. You also see a lot of workforce boards involved underneath the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Food Stamp Program has what’s called SNAP E&T, so the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Employment and Training funds. And they’re very, very flexible, and you can match those SNAP E&T dollars with your Title I dollars and braid them together to provide support to people as long as they meet ... there’s eligibility requirements. But you’re able to braid those funds together. So there are, actually, many of them, many local workforce boards are very sophisticated financial operations that have a lot of different funding mechanisms coming in. I was recently in a conversation with a board that talked about the fact that they have over 70 different funding streams coming into them that they have to manage and weave and braid, right? So they really do try to understand, “How do we optimize resources coming into our community to support the upskilling and reskilling of all of our neighbors to be able to participate in the economy?”

Kerr: Brad, as you think about success here, you’re trying to place a person into a job, and that could be within or without of their industry that they were in beforehand. From a geographic sense, maybe it’s two towns over that has the job, but you’re funding it in the local level. How do you consider the success of the placement?

Turner-Little: Yeah, so it’s an interesting question, and it’s something that’s a part of the reauthorization discussion and how it connects to performance data and the metrics that we to use to understand the value and impact of the system. To be fully transparent, Bill, it’s a problem within our system right now. Data quality is sometimes questionable. It certainly has lagged. Local workforce boards have to report on whether people enter employment, and then if they stay employed at two quarters, post placement, and a year, post placement. But they have to use Bureau of Labor Statistics data to report that. There’s sometimes an 18- to 24-month lag. So performance data, you won’t know the effectiveness of the programs that were offered in August of 2024 until August of 2026. Well, that’s really, really hard, both from a policymaking perspective and from a program implementation perspective, to understand what works. Some of the proposals connect. If somebody, did they get a job in what they were trained in? You only get credit if they get a job in what they’re trained in. But the reality is that, on one level, that can make some sense. But our reality is that, Bill, if you’re trying to figure out how you’re going to provide food for your kids, and you’re in a training program and a job comes available, and you take that job before you complete the training program, then the WIOA system doesn’t get credit for that, but yet you got a job and now you’re able to provide for your kids. So underneath it, I think, are some ideological differences about why the system exists. Is it an infrastructure system, or is it a training system? I believe, and I think that if you talk to local workforce board directors and local workforce board members, they’re an infrastructure system. They convene, they put things together, they create bridges and help pathways evolve, and they offer training as a part of that, but they are not a training system. Our community college system is a training system, we’re not. So I think that, when you begin to blur those performance metrics, it creates real problems on top of the problems that we already have as it relates to performance data within WIOA.

Kerr: And there’s another level where I’m sure you’re doing a lot of best-practice sharing across the many 500-plus organizations and helping them understand how to manage these processes.

Turner-Little: We do. We spend a lot of time in that space, particularly around fiscal management. But one of the things, and I know we haven’t really talked about it much yet, Bill, but it’s a bridge to a conversation about the role of AI, for me as I think about it.

Kerr: Which is top of mind for many of our listeners. So let’s go there and understand how AI features into your work.

Turner-Little: Oftentimes when you think about this space of workforce development and artificial intelligence and generative AI, it’s in the conversation around job matching, right? So how do we understand your skills and your interests, Bill, against what’s available in the community? Then how do you build a career pathway and access training or whatever, which is really, really important. There’s a lot of start-ups in that space that are thinking hard and really doing a lot of innovative, powerful things in that area. But if I go back to this one workforce board, it’s in Minnesota. This one workforce board has 70 funding streams coming in. Well, that’s all managed through a very, let’s call it “traditional” financial model. What does it mean to use bots and AI within financial modeling and financial operations to transform how all that braiding happens and income eligibility criteria gets assessed. Then you tap into this state thing, because right now, I mean, I know we’ve got workforce boards that they have a job seeker. So, Bill, you come in and you go fill out your application and whatever, right? Then the team sits down and says, “Okay, Bill lives in this neighborhood and he’s got this family dynamic and whatever. What’s he eligible for?” Well, that’s an important conversation, but it’s super inefficient. That can be done very, very differently, and AI can help us do that and AI can help increase the speed on the financial side, which can then create more resources within the public system to invest in the human side of workforce development, where somebody’s sitting with you and working with you as you’re thinking about where you want to go and how you want to change. If you’re changing jobs or changing industry, how do you access all that stuff, right? There’s opportunity within our system to transform its business operations, in addition to all the important stuff that’s happening in the job matching and the career building.

Kerr: There’s a lot of issues around equity and diversity and how those factor into workforce boards. Of course, over the last couple of years, there’s been a lot of tension around DEI-related initiatives. So how is that being expressed and experienced at the workforce board and their efforts?

Turner-Little: At a fundamental level, it’s math, right? I know there were some adjustments in the job numbers a couple of weeks ago from the Department of Labor, but still we’re operating in a, what, two-to-one, three-to-one environment, in terms of openings and people. So there’s opportunity for all of our neighbors. Whether you’re someone who has served time in a prison or jail and they’re coming back into a community, or whether you’re somebody that’s a dislocated worker, your job’s gone away, whether an individual has dropped out of high school, if they’ve been on public assistance, if they’ve been experienced homelessness, if they have language barriers, there is room for ... we need everybody participating in our economy. So workforce boards are in that space of, “How do we create bridges for as many of our neighbors as possible into the economic opportunity?” We’ve got, in the disability community, there are workforce boards that are in that world. The Social Security Administration has a program called the “Employment Network” through the Ticket to Work Program for people who are on SSI and SSDI who want to work—Social Security Disability Insurance or Supplemental Security Income—who want to work. We have workers’ boards that are employment networks that can help those individuals find work. So I think it varies from community to community, but the consistent thing is that the board is committed to finding ways for all of their neighbors and their communities to find their way into work.

Kerr: Brad, maybe as a final question here, what’s a big thing on your horizon? What’s big in the National Association of Workforce Board’s future here?

Turner-Little: Yeah. Well, I mean, the big thing on our radar, because it is the legislation that governs this entire thing, is the reauthorization of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. I would hope that the importance of the voice of the local experience, that your audience in conversation with local workforce boards would reach out to Congress and say, “Make sure that local workforce boards continue to have the authority and the agility and the investment to be able to be responsive to what’s happening in our community.”

Kerr: Brad Turner-Little is CEO and president of the National Association of Workforce Boards. Brad, thank you for joining us today.

Turner-Little: It’s been my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

Kerr: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.