This September Is Workforce Development Month: A Closer Look at What We Do

September is recognized across the public workforce system as Workforce Development Month, which makes it a useful time to look beyond individual training programs and consider the larger work the field is actually doing.

Workforce development is much broader than preparing someone for a particular job. It is about creating the conditions that allow people to build and sustain working lives as occupations and economies change. That requires education, public policy, and employer practice to function in some relationship to one another. For employers, it also affects whether they can build and sustain the workforce their organizations need. Worker and employer interests often overlap, but they are not always identical, and a credible workforce system has to recognize both.

The work itself is not new. The United States has a long history of vocational education, apprenticeship, employment services, and publicly supported job training. What changed during the 1990s was the growing use of "workforce development" as a way to think across those separate systems and connect education and employment more deliberately to regional economic conditions. The Workforce Investment Act of 1998 helped give that approach a more formal structure.

That history is useful because employers often talk about talent pipelines as though they sit outside workforce development. They do not. An employer trying to create a reliable path for people to enter the organization and continue developing once they are there is already doing workforce-development work. Those pipelines become more durable when they are connected to educational and workforce institutions rather than built entirely inside one organization.

Higher education has an important place in that work, and its contribution does not begin and end with the degree. Colleges and universities can create shorter forms of learning that respond to workforce needs while also building pathways that allow that learning to carry forward academically.

For employers, that creates an opportunity that is often hiding in plain sight. Many already invest in tuition assistance or reimbursement. Those dollars can become part of a larger workforce strategy when employers work with higher education to connect employee development to education that also carries value toward a credential or degree. Instead of treating education benefits as a reimbursement program sitting off to the side, employers can use an investment they are already making to support both workforce development and employee advancement.

Throughout September, we will be featuring colleagues across Instructional Excellence and the CSU Talent Hub whose work supports workforce development through higher education in different ways. Their work reflects the range of expertise and approaches within our broader team and the many ways a university can contribute to workforce development.