“The evidence is very sparse when it comes to effective practice in the workforce development field,” says Brent Orrell of The American Enterprise Institute. This concerning conclusion comes from the Workforce Futures Initiative, a collaborative project between AEI, the Brookings Institution and the Harvard Kennedy School Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy. But it’s not all bad news. The strong exception is sector-based training. “That is one of the rare gems where we can say with relative certainty that if workforce development practitioners do this approach in the right way, they can get good results.” As Orrell explains to Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan, the strength of this model derives from integrating technical skills training with instruction in so-called “soft skills” which are essential to being able to succeed in the workplace. The result is dramatic and continued increases in wages that lead to family-sustaining incomes. Orrell also credits these programs with doing a better job at keeping trainees engaged through to completion than is typically the case at community colleges which, he says, badly need a boost in the number of educational and career advising staff. Be sure to check out this thoughtful discussion on what works in workforce development, the extra responsibility Americans have to put their skills to work at the highest level, and why we shouldn’t be afraid of generative AI.