When the System Works at Scale: Alyssa Alvarado on Real Jobs Rhode Island

Scott Jensen: Roughly over 6,000 companies have gotten training programs done through Real Jobs. At the last count, 68,699 people have been trained through Real Jobs.

Alyssa Alvarado: It's not just a platform, but a strategy. It's really an approach to this work.

Scott Jensen: So what in your mind is a workforce intermediary, and what makes a good one?

Alyssa Alvarado: This is really the bridge between the employers and the government or your workforce system coordinators.

Scott Jensen: Hi, I'm Scott Jensen. In my time in state government and with the feds, I've been lucky enough to get to know a lot of people who, like me, are committed to solving some of the trickiest workforce challenges we have in our nation. So now I'm leading the Future of Work practice at Infosys Public Services, and we started this podcast. We're going to check in with some of the best practitioners in the business for casual conversations to see how things are going in the field and how we're doing preparing for the future of work. I'm excited personally because Real Jobs Rhode Island, which is a sector-based workforce development program, it’s 10 years old. But there's a lot of innovative work going on in Rhode Island to braid funding streams and track data and make it feasible to really invest the state's resources and federal resources into the effort. So today, our guest is Alyssa Alvarado, who is the executive director of the Rhode Island Governor's Workforce Board, which is where Real Jobs Rhode Island lives. She has an MPA from the University of Rhode Island, and she's been working at Real Jobs Rhode Island from the very beginning. So since Real Jobs Rhode Island has launched 10 years ago, there have been about 48 partnerships who together have executed thousands of individual training programs.

Alyssa Alvarado: What I don't want people to think is Real Jobs Rhode Island is a training program. It's not. It's a platform where thousands of programs are going. Roughly over 6,000 companies have gotten training programs done through Real Jobs. Yep. At the last count, which you gave me recently, 68,699 people have been trained through Real Jobs. That's correct. For scale, folks, Rhode Island has a 500,000-person workforce. Roughly half of those trainings are for new jobs. About 40% of those trainings are for incumbent workers. And the 10% leftover is entrepreneur training, which is really cool. Small business training. You have people launch companies.

Scott Jensen: When you look at the new hire people, Alyssa, 70% of the completers got the job.

Alyssa Alvarado: Right. That's remarkable. A recent analysis that you share on your website says that there's a 36% salary bump for people who have completed new hire training, got a new job. So can you tell us just a little bit about how the Real Jobs program works and how you become a Real Jobs partnership, and what is the pitch process in Rhode Island? It's not just a platform, but a strategy, and not just a program as a funding mechanism, but it's really an approach to this work. So, we're looking at investing in workforce intermediaries that can help aggregate the demand within a particular sector, and then propose, my favorite word of all time, Scott Jensen word of all time, is perspicuous. Proposing a perspicuous plan, a well-thought-out plan to meet that need, in partnership with training providers, with the employers that have a need and are committed to hire. So if you think about it as a grant program, what we do is we have every so often a solicitation goes out, and what we're looking for is two things. We're looking for a strong partnership, a group of individuals who are coalescing around a need or an idea and are looking to work together to solve that problem. We establish a partnership through a cooperative agreement, and then from there, they can request funding to implement workforce solutions. So, cooperative agreement model, partnership is at the heart of it, and it's always got to be driven by the needs of the employers.

Scott Jensen: So what if I came to you, and I'm a partner, and I have an apprenticeship program that I want to do, and I want $5 million. As the leader of this program, what's your first thought when you hear something like that?

Alyssa Alvarado: Yeah. So, well, one, we're looking at what industry is this coming from? What's the occupation? Do we have any folks in this space who are doing aligned work, right? Do we have an industry association that's got a cooperative agreement with us that we can work with to get some money out to support this concept? So we'll take a look at that. If we don't, we'll look to make some connections so that we can bring these folks into the fold and work to help meet their needs.

Scott Jensen: What about the plan itself? What's this pitch thing about?

Alyssa Alvarado: So what we'd like to know, for example, is what is the need? Quantify the need. If you are a company that needs to hire 50 welders, for example, what is your timeline to bring those folks on board? Are there any specializations that you're going to need with those trainees? What training provider can we partner with to get that program built or modified to meet the needs? And then what's the timeline? What's it going to cost? Put a budget together, and then we performance monitor that initiative. If you were to guess, how many cohorts is the typical new hire pitch that you guys approve? Do you guys approve six years' worth of work or three cohorts, or what are you doing? Well, for programs that have been running for a while now and where there's still a continued need, the partnership will typically propose to do maybe two to three cohorts a year. It's entirely based on what the demand is. Demand can change, right? Skills can change. The needs of an industry can change. And so by having these partnerships in place with these cooperative agreements, we have the ability to be flexible and to move at the speed of business. And if there's no longer a need in one area, but there's a new area of need emerging, we can quickly pivot and respond to that need as well. Well, that means it kind of sounds like there's a lot going on at one time in your program. A lot of people, a lot of partners getting paid by all kinds of different funds. How do you keep track of all of that? Tell me about your data system. The program is about 10 years old now, and where we started, which was a much smaller bucket of state funds, to where we are now is very different. And so we've had to evolve with the growth of the program. We've had to put data systems in place that ensure accountability, that help us be able to meet federal reporting requirements when there are federal grant funds in the mix. And so there's a couple of systems involved. One, contract management software, right? Essentially taking all of the things we've negotiated and agreed on and converting those things into data elements that we can easily monitor and track performance on. Another is our participant enrollment system. So, especially in cases where we're dealing with federal funds, the partnerships are helping us recruit individuals, and then what we're doing is ensuring that federal funds, if appropriate, can be utilized to pay for the tuition or cost for training for an individual. And if not, we can look at whether there are other appropriate funding sources we can braid in so we can make that happen. But that means that we have to be able to safely and securely accept that enrollment data, just as if someone were doing a financial aid application for college. We've got to treat that similarly and ensure that that information is protected, and then we can also track outcomes and ensure that these investments are working because at the end of the day, these are all taxpayer dollars. So if you and me are in the same cohort of a training program, but I am, for whatever reason, eligible for federal funds, but you're not, when we enroll, I tell the system all about me, you tell them all about you, and then the federal funds are braided in by, I'm eligible for one. You can log that expense to that fund, and you're eligible for another one, and you can log yours in there. Is that right? In many cases, that is true. There are a handful of cases where perhaps all of the funding for a particular type of programming is coming from a specific discretionary grant or source where maybe we don't have as much flexibility around that. But quite often we do braid funds in order to assure that we can serve folks. Tell us the EB story, if you don't mind. Sure. So General Dynamics Electric Boat is an anchor institution for us here in Rhode Island. A major player in the defense industry here in New England. And as a submarine manufacturer, they had massive hiring demand in various trades. And each of those trades also required a certain level of customization for the position. So we worked really closely with General Dynamics Electric Boat, beginning in, it was late 2015, early 2016, to really understand their growth needs and their hiring needs and build out training program infrastructure so we could meet those needs. They were such incredible partners because what they came to the table with was an arrangement where we could get folks who had no prior experience trained. We would cover the cost of the tuition for these programs we were building, and then they would pay the wages for those folks during the period that they were in training. We had a very high success rate on that model, sort of a post-employment or conditional employment, I should say, training model. And over 95% success rate on folks who were going through the program were completing it successfully and retaining that employment. Their growth continued to increase as they brought new contracts into Rhode Island. And so we were fortunate that we were able to kind of take this model and say, “Hey, look, this is what we've been doing. This is what has been working.” And we were able to secure additional federal resources to help keep up with that rate of growth as they've continued to get one contract after another. Everybody in workforce talks about workforce intermediaries, and it's gotten to the point, I think, where it's a little nerve-wracking that the word means anything at all anymore.

Scott Jensen: So what in your mind is a workforce intermediary, and what makes a good one?

Alyssa Alvarado: This is really the bridge between the employers and the government or sort of your workforce system coordinators, right? So in my current role, I represent the State Workforce Investment Board. And these partners, these partnerships, which have lead applicants and conveners as part of them, they are the ones who are really able to be a true partner to the state and to the employers in understanding what the demand is, understanding how industry is evolving, and putting together these plans and proposals to address the needs in our economy. So that's really what we're talking about. A great example, if someone were to invite me to come into another state and help them set up a workforce pipeline for a particular industry, I would probably start by asking, who are the industry associations that are working with the employers with this need? Let's maybe start there. We've had a lot of success with industry associations serving as intermediaries. There are other models that can also work. But again, you've got to have a coalition of the willing, and there has to be constant communication in play. There has to be performance monitoring. There has to be constant planning, not just how is the current program going, but what are we going to do next? What do we need to do to improve? So really that’s what we are looking for.

Scott Jensen: How is performance management going with the workforce intermediaries, and has there been an evolution there?

Alyssa Alvarado: Yeah. I mean, I think everybody recognizes the need for performance management, right? We all want to do what's best for our employers and for our workers here in the state. So it's very important to all of the stakeholders involved that to the extent we're using taxpayer dollars, we're making sure that those dollars and those investments are working. So it's actually been, I think, a value add and a real asset for them to be able to meet with us and see performance numbers that we can discuss together, address any challenges that may be happening. Maybe there's something in a training program that's not structured quite the way it needs to be, and it's either resulting in drops from the program or something just might be a little off with the model, and we need to work together to fix it. Do you have an example off the top of your head of some course corrections that you've done with using data and performance management? Because I think people think of data, and everybody thinks of it differently. There's how much money did we spend and how many people did we do? That's important impact data. But when Real Jobs has the ability to collect, like, hey, no, how many people graduated from this cohort? How many of them got jobs? Why didn't the ones that get jobs, get jobs? Speak to that a little bit if you could think of an example. Yeah. In general, I would say that if we have started to see targets, performance targets not met as we anticipated, we're able to very quickly detect that and to intervene, in some cases, before it's too late, right? Before we've completely lost the individual who maybe was looking to get on this career journey. Again, sometimes it's a matter of a plan being in place, and then maybe there are some shifts in employer's HR team and/or timeline that we have to work together to mitigate or to manage so that we can still try to achieve the outcomes that we were hoping for. But again, these things are all about constant communication, and data sure helps enable constant communication.

Scott Jensen: What'd we miss? It's funny that this program is now 10 years old when it feels like it was just yesterday that we were building it and getting it off the ground.

Alyssa Alvarado: This model has helped us not only do incredible adult workforce development work, but we've also used this model in the youth space, and we've been able to launch programs in the youth space that are similarly modeled, and that are being utilized to help facilitate work-based learning experiences for youth, that are able to help youth get their first jobs, that are able to help young adults with career exploration, et cetera. And so, it's really been a remarkable journey, and I'm glad that we have been able to apply this work and these strategies in other spaces, too.

Scott Jensen: That's awesome. How about AI? AI is a controversial topic. You love it, you hate it, you're afraid of it, whatever it is. But we know it's here. It's affecting our daily lives already.

Alyssa Alvarado: And so I think what we can do is do our very best to be prepared for any type of AI task augmentation that comes into play in our economy. Be prepared to help folks not only be AI literate, but AI empowered to the extent that this technology could be used to help fuel job creation. And certainly, in the small business space, we've started to see interest. How can I utilize some of these tools that are out there to grow my business or expand my reach, and maybe do a little bit better than I was doing before? So folks are definitely paying attention to it, and what we're trying to do is just see what the needs are within our companies, what the needs are within our small business communities, and what the people of the state need in order to be safe with AI technologies and empowered by AI technologies.

Scott Jensen: Well, thanks, Alyssa. This has been amazing.

Alyssa Alvarado: Thanks for having me.

Scott Jensen: Oh, a pleasure. For the folks back at home, you can find more details, shownotes, and transcripts in the podcast section at Infosys.com/IKI. That's the Infosys Knowledge Institute. Speaking of the Infosys Knowledge Institute, want to thank our producers, Christine Calhoun and Yulia De Bari, and our audio engineer, Dode Bigley, for making Alyssa and I comprehensible to you all. I'm Scott Jensen, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Thanks.