Training Americans for Better Jobs and Higher Wages to Grow the Economy

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Category: National News

Washington, DC - Today, President Obama is traveling to Louisville, KY to discuss the Administration’s continued efforts to grow the economy, expand opportunity, and widen the pathway to the middle class to ensure that all Americans can contribute to and benefit from our American resurgence.

Louisville is leading the way through the TechHire Initiative, a multi-sector effort and call to action to give Americans pathways to well-paying technology jobs and meet employer talent needs. Louisville is one of 21 regions across the country– with over 120,000 open technology jobs – where local leaders are working with employers on new ways to recruit and place applicants based on their actual skills and to create and expand training that teaches tech skills in a fraction of the time and cost.

At the same time, the President has put forward an ambitious agenda – building on progress we’ve made – that would train and employ more people by scaling up proven training and employment approaches, including apprenticeships, competency-based training that allows workers to get credit based on mastery, accelerated training programs through traditional institutions like community colleges and new innovative models like coding bootcamps, and hiring approaches that allow people who can do the job to get the job.  That includes new proposed rules on workforce reforms that are being put out today.

In contrast, the House and Senate Republicans’ budgets rely on the same, failed top-down economics as in previous years and makes significant cuts to investments in training workers for today and tomorrow’s jobs.  Compared to the President’s Budget, the Republican budgets would mean more than 2 million fewer people in 2016 alone would receive job training and employment services, including help finding jobs and skills training1. In Kentucky, it would mean 28,800 fewer people receiving training and employment services.  At the same time, the Republican budget would set us back in our efforts to make our training system more “job-driven”: closing off ramps to opportunity and making it harder for employers to build their businesses.

President Obama’s TechHire Initiative:

With over half a million jobs open in technology today, and so many companies in need of skilled workers, we need to expand innovative training programs and continue to create new options to get more people into the talent pipeline—in months, not years.  TechHire is a bold multi-sector effort and call to action to empower Americans with the skills they need, through universities and community colleges but also innovative nontraditional approaches like “coding bootcamps,” and high-quality online courses that can rapidly train workers for technology jobs that pay 50 percent more than the average private-sector American job. Many TechHire communities like Louisville are using federal workforce training dollars to fund these innovative training strategies.

How the President’s Budget Would Invest in Innovative Training that Leads to Jobs:

The President’s budget invests in programs that will lead to more success stories and facilitate innovation in places across the country like Louisville. This is in stark contrast to the budget proposals put forward by Congressional Republicans, which would deeply cut the investments we need to prepare workers for the jobs employers are hiring for.

Two years ago, when sequestration effects took effect, 1.3 million people lost access to Department of Labor job training and employment services. In 2016, the funding levels proposed by Congressional Republicans would mean that more than 2 million fewer people would receive training and employment services – including 28,800 in Kentucky. (For a full state-by-state breakdown, see below.) By 2018, the cuts to non-defense discretionary spending proposed by House Republicans would result in more than 4 million workers losing such services. The President’s Budget can invest in employment services, job training, and innovative apprenticeship programs because it reverses sequestration, while the Republican budgets double down on austerity, robbing the nation of the ability to invest in our people and economy. 

While the Republican budgets would undermine workforce efforts, the President has presented a bold vision for strengthening our training system. Last year, the Vice President’s review of job training programs introduced a job-driven checklist that is guiding all federal investments. The Departments of Labor (DOL) and Education (ED) are working to implement the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, which the President signed last July with reforms that embed the President’s ideas for making our training programs more job-driven. Today, DOL and ED are releasing a proposed rules on these reforms, including:

Just as the budget cuts proposed by Congressional Republicans would hamper efforts to implement these changes, they would also prevent investments in new models that have shown success.  Congressional Republicans’ proposed decreased job training funding levels will impede our ability to scale innovative workforce practices, like the ones supported by the grant competition that helped fund Code Louisville, and identify new promising approaches. For example, the President’s Budget includes innovative new proposals like: