Sergio Galeano

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome from across the country. Welcome to today’s Connecting Communities webinar titled, “How Fed Data Tools Can Inform Economic Mobility.” This is our first Connecting Communities webinar of the year. We’re just as excited about the content today as we are grateful for your time and presence here with us today. For today’s Connecting Communities webinar, we’re going to be discussing two data tools that have been created across three Federal Reserve banks, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. These two tools were designed and created to improve the conversation and inform communities to better talk about career advancement and skills. First, we’ll be talking about the Occupation Mobility Explorer worked with together from Cleveland and Philadelphia. This tool was designed to help visualize and quantify and talk better about career pathways and skills and skills-based hiring. Next, we have the Career Ladder Identifier and Financial Forecaster, or CLIFF for short, designed to have a better conversation to be more informed on benefit CLIFFs and the financial implications of job opportunities among workers.

Today’s webinar is going to be structured in two parts. First, we’ll have two of my colleagues in the Federal Reserve System talk about the tools that they help design and share and preach to good word on with communities. And second, we’ll switch from research to practice where we’ve invited three workforce practitioners and experts from across the country to talk about the value of these tools and how they’ve used them to better serve their workers and the communities and their regions. Please join me, I have the honor of introducing our five panelists and speakers.

We have with us, Jill Avery-Stoss, who serves as president and CEO of The Institute, a nonprofit organization providing community-based research and analytics in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Since joining in 2018, she has risen through executive leadership positions, culminating in her current dual role, effective as I believe January, while also serving as an Aspen Institute Workforce Leadership fellow. Jill, congratulations on your promotion and thanks for joining us.

We have Tracey Everett, who serves as director on the field implementation team at Jobs for the Future, where she leads career navigation work for the Rework America Alliance since December ’23. With extensive experience in workforce development from her previous roles at the Markle Foundation and Conexus, Indiana, she brings valuable insights on connecting job seekers with meaningful career pathways.

We have my colleague from Cleveland, Kyle Fee. Kyle Fee is a policy advisor in the Community Development Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. In that role, he conducts applied research and outreach related to economic development, workforce development, and economic geography in the Cleveland’s Fourth District.

Going from the Midwest to usually warm, but a little cold central Florida, we have with us Mayra Nunez, who serves as program and compliance manager with CareerSource Central Florida, a workforce board there, where she oversees policy, planning, and operations for the SNAP, TANF programs to ensure federal compliance. With over 20 years in public service, she brings extensive experience in helping families and individuals overcome employment barriers and achieve self-sufficiency through the many workforce programs that they create and support in Central Florida.

And finally, back home here in Atlanta where I’m based, my colleague, John Rees, who serves as senior advisor on the Atlanta Fed’s community and economic development team. He’s engaged in research and partnerships to identify barriers to economic mobility and mitigation strategies that can improve economic security for families and meet the talent needs of businesses for a healthy and prosperous economy. Now, a few housekeeping items that we’ll cover in the next slide.

First, views expressed during the session are those of the speakers and are intended for informational purposes only. They do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Fed Communities or the Federal Reserve System. Now, as for logistics, we’re going to have microphones muted, but please engage with us starting now through the end of this webinar.

You can use the Q&A feature and you don’t have to wait until the Q&A portion. If you woke up today and had coffee and realized, “Oh, I have this webinar today,” and you came with a burning question, please put it in the chat now. We’ll do our best to answer all the questions we can, both live with our panelists and in the Q&A feature. And wherever you get your news and entertainment on social media is another way to engage with us online during this event and after.

You can use the hashtag #connectingcommunities or visit our platform and website fedcommunities.org. On that same website, you can find content from past Fed Communities webinars and also within a two-week timeframe, you’ll have the recording for this session. And that’s my last point as a reminder, this session will be recorded and you’ll have access to that, the video, the notes, and the podcast within two weeks.

Now, let’s kick this off. I have the pleasure of introducing Kyle Fee and John Rees. We’re going to start with Kyle. Each of them is going to explain this tool over 15 minutes and then we’ll switch to the panel. As Kyle comes on camera, welcome, Kyle. We’d like to engage you as the audience and kick things off in our chat with a polling question that should be coming up for you right now. And the question is, are you familiar with skills-based hiring? With that said, everyone, thanks again for being here. Kyle and John, the floor is yours.

Kyle Fee

Thank you, Sergio. And as we’re compiling these results for the first poll, I just also want to recognize the Fed Community staff for the platform, I really appreciate your professionalism for making this happen. It’s been a great experience. And I would also like to thank our panelists. I look forward to the conversation later with them. As Sergio mentioned, my name is Kyle Fee, and good afternoon everybody. I appreciate your attention and interest this afternoon. Before I get started, I wanted to mention quickly, a few brief things. If the OME and our usual talk was a movie, this will generally be a trailer for the OME. I’m going to hit the highlights and briefly cover a few examples to set the conversation and the table up. We are relatively early on in sharing this suite of tools together. We’ve had some success individually with each tool, but I think when you really bring them together, you really recognize how powerful they can be and how impactful they can be. I hope you all feel the same after this presentation today.

And then lastly, I think both tools are excellent examples of how community development work, both outreach and research can combine to help inform and support the Federal Reserve System’s mandate for maximum employment. I think it’s something that a lot of people don’t appreciate about community development work and its impact on maximum employment, but here we are today to celebrate that. This work has been a longtime collaborative work with Philadelphia. As Sergio mentioned, I want to give a brief shout out to Kyle DeMaria and Keith Wardrip, who are foundational in development of the tool. And I’d also like to recognize Theresa Dunne at the Philadelphia Fed, who’s my current partner in this work, and she will be monitoring the chat for any specific questions that come up or people are interested in, she will take care of those.

Okay. So this work began with a lot of simple work, simple conversations in the community, and it really centered around one main question. How can I find a job that pays me a livable wage and provides me a decent way to make a living in this economy? Now, while most of today’s conversations focused on the job seeker, I will recognize that there’s an employer angle to this as well, and inability for employers to meet their workforce needs and talent needs is really the same side of this coin. And I like to think about it as a dual workforce problem that is a challenge because of information and a lack of exchanging of information on what’s needed for underlying jobs.

Now, having done some research on this, I strongly believe skills-based hiring and skills-based approaches hold great promise for employers or for individual economic mobility as well as employers. And my excitement for this work really originally began when we wrote a paper called Exploring a Skills-Based Approach to Occupational Mobility. And in that report, we found that just over half of lower-wage jobs have at least one occupation with very similar skills that provides a 10% pay bump.

And coming out of that paper, we also recognized that we had a lot of data sitting on the sidelines. So we thought a tool with the same methodological concepts and approaches would be a great way to produce an actual, tangible, real piece of craftsmanship that hopefully individuals can use in the world to explore skills-based approaches in their daily lives. Now, I didn’t see the outcome of the poll, so I’m going to assume most of us have some familiarity with the poll, but my goals here today are to hopefully give you a little bit more comfortable experience with skills-based hiring, as well as to show you how the OME tool can be used to facilitate conversations across a wide variety of audiences.

Great, there’s our poll. So yes, aligns with my goals today, and I look forward to doing it throughout this. So now, I’ll be the first to admit that skills-based approaches to be fully realized and fully implemented requires a great deal of work. That includes assessing and validating individual skills and competency levels, reexamining job descriptions, standardizing credentials, and generally facilitating better connections between educators and employers. But before we get to all that work, I want to describe a few foundational concepts to skills-based approaches, and hopefully leave you a little bit more comfortable with overall concept and idea of it.

The first concept comes from economics, and it consists of a job as a bundle of tasks that require a set of skills to complete. Now, on a personal level, you can think about this in terms of your underlying skillsets are also an amalgamation of the skills that you’ve acquired throughout your career, as well as educational experiences. And I like to think about, if I have more time, I like to ask the audience to say, think about that first job you had or a job early on in your career and some of the skills that you’ve learned in that career or occupation, and how those still remain with you today and how you continue to develop and hone those skills to ultimately lead to better outcomes for yourself.

For me, that was cutting grass on the golf course, hence the picture of the gentleman on the right there. And while I did learn a lot in that role, I think one of the big things that I learned was self-motivation and discipline, two things that I carry with me throughout my daily life and professional life as well. The other key concept, and this seems to be a pretty generally accepted concept, is that better information leads to better outcomes. In my instance on the golf course, I quickly learned that while I really enjoyed being on the golf course, I would much rather play golf than actually work on the golf course. I also learned about the long days, early mornings, and limited growth opportunities. So obviously, managing golf course was not in my future, but I’m glad it brought me here today to be with everyone else.

Next slide, please. So what is the Occupational Mobility Explorer? It is a tool that we develop that allows users to explore how overlapping skillsets can help facilitate upward mobility in 500 US locations and across 600 job titles. Those 500 US locations include metro and non-metropolitan areas, so we definitely have information for those folks in rural locations out there as well. Forbes Magazine called the OME, a career navigation system that combines public and proprietary labor market data, and that data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, mostly from the occupational employment and wage survey, but we also leverage information on employment projections in the tool as well. The other key part of the tool is the skills information, and that consists of the top 25 skills requested by employers and online job ads for each occupation at the state level. We include over 2,300 unique skills that represent employer demand, and this information comes from Lightcast.

Now, some of the occupational connections that you uncover in the OME are pretty obvious, such as the LPN to RN in the healthcare space, but others are less so. For example, in Ohio, motorboat mechanics has a lot of skill overlap with industrial engineering technologists. And despite my best interests and best wishes for having boating season in Ohio be an all-year-round activity, that it’s not something that’s a reality, and we often result in an underuse of motorboat mechanics in the winter. So how can those individuals continue to reinvest in their skills and move forward economically? Next slide, please.

So how does the OME work? In the tool, we produce a similarity score for each occupational pair in each metro or each non-metropolitan area, and that similarity score is based on the overlap of skills and skill intensity for those top 25 skills. We classify scores in terms of high, medium, and low with high skill similarity scores having more than 15 skills in common. Medium is 10 to 15 skills and low is less than 10. And in the tool, when you select an occupation, the next 10 higher paying or lower paying occupations with the highest skill similarity scores are populated for each occupation. And the screenshot to the right is a quick example of some of the information that’s included in the tool that I’ll further talk about later. Next slide, please.

Today we’re here to talk about job seekers and workers, but there are other audiences in the tool. And one of them, as I mentioned previously, is also employers, and we’ve done a great deal of effort to produce information and resources for all of these audiences. So for employers, I wrote a paper early last year around using the tool to identify and create pathways for in demand occupations. For workforce organizations, Theresa Dunne at the Philadelphia Fed has produced a toolkit that walks individuals step-by-step through that, how they can use that tool as well. And then also for workers and job seekers, we’ve done some analysis of the data within the tool to pull out the top or most requested skills by employers. And from that work, quick spoiler alert, we find that a great deal of soft and social skills or durable skills or 21st century skills, whatever you’d like to call them, tend to be the ones most requested and also help to facilitate transitions across occupations. And then lastly, we’ve created some curriculums for teachers to use in the classroom to help students explore career pathways. Next slide, please.

So this is the landing page for the Occupational Mobility Explorer. It’s philadelphiafed.org/ome. I want to highlight a few things before I jump into the actual tool itself. On the upper right-hand corner, you noticed a couple links to several resources about the data, the explorer and the practitioner’s toolkit. I encourage you to check those out as well. This is also a mobile-friendly resource. While it does have capabilities to be seen on a cell phone, I encourage you to look at it on your computer as it involves quite a bit of scrolling. So again, normally I do a live demo for these things, but given the technology, I decided to do some screenshots, so bear with me if you can’t see anything, but we’ll be glad to come out and do a live demo if you’re interested.

The first step in using the tool is picking out a location. You can see there’s a series of dropdown menus. You can select the metropolitan or non-metropolitan area or the state that you’re interested in. If you’re not exactly sure where you should be looking, you’re not exactly sure if you’re in the Northeast central location of Oklahoma as opposed to the northwest central location of Oklahoma. You can enter your zip code in and it’ll self-populate to the nearest metropolitan area.

Next slide, please. So for this first example, I’m going to choose Cleveland, Ohio. We’re going to come from a relatively common low-wage occupation of customer service representatives. I would also highlight the little socket feature that we have included there. A lot of job titles don’t always correspond with occupational titles. So if you’re looking for a pizza maker in this dropdown menu, you’re likely not going to find it. You’ll likely find it under a fast food operator or a fast food chef using the socket tool. And because we are going to start at the lower end of the wage distribution and workup, we’re going to start with this current occupation in this example, and we will show you what it looks like. Next slide, please.

Oh, I should also mention in this example, this individual, while starting from a customer service representative, also has an aunt or uncle that’s really interested in banking and has done pretty well for themselves in banking. So this individual is really thinking about, how can I pursue a career path in banking? Now, the tool allows you to link up to three different occupations at once, and the far left side of the screen is that first step. So we’re going to select an occupation from this list of six. Again, with an interest in banking, we’re going to select that credit counselor as an option. And then on the right-hand side of the screen, you can see that we’ve selected that. And then the next 10 occupations with the highest skill similarity scores to credit counselors line up, and you can select from there. In this situation, we’re going to select a loan officer, and then you can go to the next slide, please.

So once we’ve created this career path, we can see three main things. One, we see a large wage increase from the customer service representative to the loan officer. We also see that we’re taking an individual from an occupation that’s projected to decline over the next 10 years into two occupations that have solid growth opportunities moving forward. And then lastly, if you’re interested in comparing the underlying skills of customer service representatives and credit counselors, you can click the compare skills tab and up pops a new screen that will allow you to compare those skills. So next slide, please.

On the left-hand side, we’ve got the skill comparison for the customer service rep and credit counselors. As you can see under the shared skills, there are several of these commonly held communication, detail-oriented writing, computer literacy, some of these soft and social and durable skills. These are things that I would play up in a resume if I were trying to make the move from a customer service representative to a credit counselor. And then the other requested skills for credit counselors, if I were trying to pursue an occupation and employment and credit counseling, I would think about how ways to develop these skills, as well as use them to guide my training and development plans that I may have. And the same information is on the other right-hand side of the screen for the other two occupations as well. Next slide, please.

My second example is going to be working backwards across the wage distribution. And in this instance, we have a job seeker that’s interested in construction management careers, is based in the Atlanta area, and they’re just not sure how to start or where they might have some skill overlaps with some of these careers. So we’re going to choose construction managers in that dropdown menu and select the destination occupation to work backwards to uncover different occupations that lead into this particular role. Next slide, please. And through the magic of online webinars, we’ve created this career pathway for you that includes construction building inspectors, as well as production planning and expediting clerks. If you’re not sure exactly what a production planning and expediting clerk does. All of the occupation titles in the tool have hyperlinks to the ONET database. So that database can provide you with much more information as it relates to the daily activities of these specific roles, as well as underlying education needs and things like that.

I would also draw your attention to the view job listing portion. If you’re interested in pursuing or looking for jobs in each of these roles, this review job listings link takes you to the National Labor Exchange, which again, allows you to view and look for different opportunities in your area. Lastly, I would point out that interestingly enough, if we could connect one more occupation to this, we would be connecting, or you can find out, you can connect that there’s high skill overlaps between secretaries and admins, as well as production planning and expediting clerks. So to me, that tells me we’ve effectively created or resurfaced a pathway that can take individuals from a female dominated roles and secretaries and administrative assistants, provide them a career pathway to eventually hopefully get into roles in the construction management space, in which is a largely male dominated industry and sector for people then to engage in.

So if that’s a social goal for those in this area, the tool can be helpful to pursue those options as well. And then taking you to our last slide, I’m going to set this up for John and allow this to be the example that he’s going to work with in his time today. But it comes from our friends in Tulsa, Oklahoma and the Northeast Oklahoma Regional Alliance and some time I’ve spent out there mapping out different pathways for folks in their business parks. And one of the things that we found about this is this is actually also a real-world example that they often encounter trying to get folks off the shop floor into management and managerial roles. And oftentimes, they’re reluctant to do so because they’re not sure if the skill investment and the time in developing some managerial skills was worth it, and how it might ultimately play off. And I’ll let John talk more about that with his time here. Next slide, please.

So again, thank you again for the interest in the brief time. Some key takeaways are that the skills-based approaches hold promise for individual outcome mobility. The OME can be used to facilitate conversations across wide audiences as it relates to skills-based hiring. And then lastly, the OME can be a resource to use for local labor market analysis. And with that, I’ll turn it over to John.

John Rees

Good afternoon, everyone. Give me one second and see if I can share my screen here. It’s said, I need to submit a request. All right, wonderful. Well, again, my name is John Rees. I am a senior advisor here with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, and very excited today to share not only our CLIFF tools and specifically our CLIFF dashboard tool, but also to elevate how this tool can be used in coordination with the Occupational Mobility Explorer. Now, before I sort of dive in, I’ve also got a polling question that I’d like to see, share just so we can get a sense of how familiar everyone is with this issue of the Benefits CLIFF. And so the polling question is, how familiar are you with the term benefits CLIFF? Very familiar, somewhat familiar, or not familiar. And we’ll come back to that in a second.

I’ll leave that open as I share a little bit more information about our entity. So here at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Advancing Career for Low-Income Families Initiative, we are largely focused on efforts to improve economic mobility and resiliency by exploring and better understanding and advancing policies that address structural barriers that create financial distances to career investment such as the benefits CLIFF. And in support of that, we conduct research, we’ve developed a variety of tools and analyzed solutions and connecting community partners with one another to elevate again and highlight community and state efforts to improve economic mobility by addressing this issue of the Benefits CLIFF. So again, that’s the Advancing Careers for Low Income Families Initiative. And before I sort of move on and level set for our purposes today, how we define a Benefits CLIFF, let’s see what the polling results are.

So how familiar? All right, wonderful. So it sounds like about half of everyone here is quite familiar with the CLIFF. We’ve got about 20% that are somewhat familiar, and about a third of you aren’t familiar at all. So hopefully if we were not going to do it, but if we did this poll at the end, all those figures would be much, much higher. So, for our purposes today, we define a barrier as growth as a barrier that a low-income family may face when pursuing economic mobility.

And this occurs because of the CLIFF effect in which sort of career advancement may lead to an increase in wages, putting an individual or family just beyond the threshold for receiving public assistance, and thereby losing that assistance and making them worse off, right? So we can imagine someone who gets a promotion, makes an extra three or $400 a year, and that causes them to lose SNAP benefits, which are, let’s say, evaluated five or $600 a month for their family. And so they’re actually worse off even though, again, they’re pursuing economic mobility and career advancement. So it can really serve as a pretty significant obstacle to those goals.

And so sort of to address that, and one of the reasons this issue has historically existed, and I apologize, it doesn’t seem to be advancing as far or as fast as mine. So we’ll go again. Let’s see here. Let’s try this again. So in support of that, we have developed three tools, our CLIFF snapshot, our CLIFF dashboard, and our CLIFF Planner, and these are sort of positioned on a survive to thrive continuum. So for someone who is really focused on immediate financial stability, our snapshot provides a very straightforward tool on helping them understand how an increase in wages or hours worked, and how that increase in income might impact their overall levels of financial assistance.

So we get very straightforward on sort of immediately identifying financial stability. Whereas our planner tool takes a much more comprehensive and longer term approach looking at how a career advancement over time might impact their benefits. And we sort of encase that in a very granular and detailed financial planning tool. So very granular, very comprehensive, also very thorough. And then our dashboard sort of sits in the middle of that and says, all right, how can we just explore two potential trajectories of wages that would be incurred on separate occupational paths?

And that’s the one we’re going to look at today because it really does dovetail quite nicely with the occupational mobility explorer. Like Kyle, I’m going to show some screenshots from our tool. If you go to our website and I encourage anybody to reach out to me directly, I can sort of give you an individual a demo, go into a little bit more depth on these shows some of our other tools, but also provide a link to our tool. You would see on the landing page these three options, again, the snapshot, dashboard, and planner. And again, the dashboard is what we’re going to show today because it dovetails so nicely with Kyle’s tool. And so for this example today, we’re going to look at an industrial tractor and our truck and tractor operator in Tulsa, Oklahoma, right? And so if you look at the Occupational Mobility Explorer, you would sort of see, all right, well, that sort of provides pathways to potentially a first line supervisor of transportation and material moving workers.

And then beyond that, a facilities manager. And in each of those transitions, we see a pretty significant jump in wages, right? So that industrial truck and tractor operator makes about $22 an hour. If we can transition into that first line supervisor position, they’d make close to $30 an hour. And then beyond that, if they can make it to a facilities manager, they’d be earning typically in excess of $45 an hour. So sort of first boost, this seems to be a tremendous opportunity for significant wage increases over time, which would hopefully benefit not only this individual, but this household. But if that household is also receiving public assistance, the path forward may not be that straightforward. There might be some additional nuance. That’s where our tool comes in. And so for our purposes today, we’re going to look at this first transition, this industrial truck and tractor operator to that first line supervisor position.

This again is a screenshot of our tool. On the left, you’re going to see a bunch of fields that largely focus on three items. One is sort of the overall household characteristics, right? How many people, how old they are, how many adults, how many children? That second piece of information that we’re going to ask for is the specific public assistant benefits that this individual or household might be participating in. And then finally, that occupational comparison, again, that trip operator to first-line supervisor. So for this example, I remember we’re in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Our tool works at the county level, but again, can be used very closely with the Occupational Mobility Explorer. So again, we’re in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We’re going to say we have an adult with one kid, age 27 for the adult and age seven for the child, and that nobody in the household has a disability. Again, just to make things a bit straightforward.

And then for public assistance, we have about a dozen or so programs in our tool. For today, we’re going to say that this household is eligible for the child tax credit, the earned income tax credit, and receives free and reduced price school and lunch meals, Medicaid for children’s CHIP, and the SNAP benefits or food stamps for this household. We could also, like I said, we also have about a dozen or half a dozen additional programs on our tool, whether it’s Head Start or state funded Pre-K. But again, for today, we’re just going to focus on these six. And then finally, the occupational pathway. The target occupation is the occupation that you’re interested in pursuing. So in this example, it would be that first line supervisor position. And then the occupation for comparison would be that industrial truck and tractor operator. So again, those are all our inputs.

This again goes back to the screenshot. We’ve put all the information here on the left. We’re going to go down to that button where it says recalculate, enter that in, and we’re going to get a series of charts that shows us the anticipated trajectory of those two occupations and how they interact with overall levels of public assistance. This first chart is going to show income before taxes, right? I think this is traditionally what we’ve looked at when comparing to occupations. But as we’re going to see, once you take into account public assistance, you’re going to see a much more sort of, again, nuanced portion of the trajectory. You can see here, much like the wage levels highlighted by the occupational mobility explorer is that first-line supervisor position in our figures are annual is going to represent a pretty significant pay bump of approximately $10,000 a year.

Additionally, our charts, we’ve basically looked at wage trajectories within specific counties and certain occupations basically get a experienced premium, right? And so the longer you work in some jobs, the more you tend to make. And the wage experience premium for a first-line supervisor is actually greater than industrial truck or tractor operator. So not only are you going to make more initially, but over time sort of the gap between those two is going to increase. So at first blush, again, this would seem to be a really potentially wonderful move for this individual in their household. The second chart though brings a little bit more information to it. And we were looking at the take-home pay after taxes, and we’re going to put that in the broader context of what we call the minimum household budget, which is basically a sort of slightly modified version of the United For Alice data. That’s an organization for anybody not familiar, affiliated with the United Way.

And they’ve basically developed a minimum household budget, what they call a survival budget for a variety of household types for every county in the country. So our charts, for example, are going to show the estimated minimum household budget for an adult with one child living in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If we did this for a different household composition or another part of the country, this line might be very different. The reason it declines over time, you can sort of see it falls starting in around 2030 and falls again in 2037 is that it assumes over time that certain household cost decline, specifically in this case, childcare, right? That as your child ages, your childcare costs tend to also fall until… The model assumes when they turn 18, they’re no longer in the house and then you don’t have any cost associated with supporting that child. Again, in this example, and this is not including any consideration of public assistance. You can see in the first maybe year or two as a first-line supervisor, there may be some difficulty meeting that household expense.

Whereas if you remain as an industrial truck or tractor operator, it’s going to be quite difficult to make ends meet for sort of 5 to 7 years. But again, this is without public assistance. If you like, in our tool, you can also drill down and see what’s driving these actual cost components, whether it’s childcare, healthcare, food, or rent.

The next set of charts are going to show under these two scenarios, what is the value of public assistance for the programs that you selected, right? And so we can see on the left that first line supervisor of transportation material moving worker position. Again, you’re making more money and you’re really only going to be eligible for a couple of tax credits. And even then, one of those is going to phase out pretty quickly. So basically, you’re going to be eligible for the earned income tax credit for a number of years. For a couple, you’re going to be eligible for a child tax credit. You compare that to the industrial truck or tractor operator, which again, wage is not quite as high, but it’s going to position you to be eligible for much more public assistance, whether that’s the tax credits or free and reduced price school meals, Medicaid, or the SNAP benefits, right? You can see they do phase out over time, but in general, they’re much more greater value under that industrial truck or tractor operator.

And then finally, we’re going to bring that all together. We’re going to combine overall levels of income with levels of public assistance and put that in comparison with the household budget to sort of see are you going to be able to make ends meet with all of those considerations combined? So anything above that dotted line would suggest that you are going to have sufficient resources to meet all your basic expenses, anything below would suggest you’re not. Now, as you can see here, basically after year one, as a first-line supervisor of transportation and material moving workers, you really are going to be in a position to meet all those household expenses. Whereas if you remain as an industrial truck or tractor operator, even with that increased level of public assistance that you would be receiving, it’s really going to be a struggle for the first six or so years to make ends meet.

What’s also notable though, unlike that sort of first chart we saw where it was sort of a straight line-up for both career trajectories. You can see that once you take into account your household expenses and levels of public assistance, that even when you’re making progress, it’s not a linear progression, right? That there are bumps along the way. With that said, this transition does seem over time to put you in your family or household in a much stronger financial position. And you can sort of see that with the final chart in our tool. It shows over time the financial gains from Career Advancement. And the first couple years, it’s relatively modest, but over time, those gains compound. And so over the life of a typical career, we anticipate in this scenario that making that transition from a truck operator to a first-line supervisor, you would enjoy in excess of $400,000 and additional sort earnings because of that transition, which again, would be great for both you and your family.

So again, this is a sort of whirlwind tour. I do sort of in-depth demos on several of our tools generally on a monthly basis, but I’m happy to set up something individually if anybody has any sort of specific questions or would like to run through some additional scenarios. But with that, I’d like to turn it back over to Sergio to introduce the panel.

Sergio Galeano

Thank you, John. And thank you both of you for that really excellent discussion. I never get tired of relearning the content and the functioning of these two tools. Here at the Atlanta Fed and our community development team, we talk a lot about engagement and outreach-informed research, and I think we just saw that really well where there’s an issue out in the community and it informs the kinds of tools and the origin story of why we create them and why they’re valuable. And this alone could have been its own webinar, but like I said earlier, it’s so much more powerful, I think, to combine both research and the design, but with the practice. So with that, I’m happy to start the second part of this webinar and welcome to our virtual stage, our three panelists. Welcome, Jill, Tracey, and Mayra.

Thanks again for joining. Well, once again, a reminder for the audience. While Mayra comes and joins us, we have Jill from The Institute and Analytics and Database Nonprofit, Tracey from Jobs for the Future, a national tie in workforce intermediary that works on a lot of niches and corners of workforce development. And we have Mayra Nunes who works for a workforce board, a unique and pivotal role, and the most local presence that I think we can say on behalf of a federal labor system. So the three of you have different roles, but all have in common this love of workforce and community development, whether it’s talking to workers, employers, or the stakeholders in your communities, you’re seeking to increase economic mobility and understanding. So as we kick off this panel, I’d really like to ask a open-ended question on economic mobility and the value of this tool.

So we think a lot about at the Federal Reserve and Community Development on economic mobility, right? The ability of workers to increase not just their income and job prospects, but their job quality and their stability to weather both the risks and threats, but the opportunities that come with the economy. So I’d like to ask each of you, and we’ll start with Jill, from your organization’s perspective, what’s been the most significant barrier or barriers that you see to economic mobility, and how do these tools that we’re talking about fit into that story and help address those gaps?

Jill Avery-Stoss

Thanks, Sergio. At the Institute, we learn about a number of barriers to economic mobility. There’s a few really that rise to the top. For us, housing security is a challenge, particularly among renters. We’re experiencing some population growth, and we’ve been for a few years now, and we have limited new housing development, so that exacerbates that issue. We also have some transportation barriers. Our biggest sectors are healthcare, warehousing, logistics, and manufacturing, which as you all know, are around the clock jobs. And our bus systems really don’t align with those types of off-hours needs. And like many communities all over the country, we’re looking at a pretty significant lack of safe and affordable childcare. So those are some significant barriers. We also hear about inequitable access to education. We do have a really robust network of higher end schools, certification programs, two-year, four-year degrees, really great things, but sometimes they’re not immediately accessible due to cost and things like limited English proficiency.

But beyond all of that, I think people, even if they are aware of the employment opportunities we have available, students and their families might not always understand the processes and the pathways that are needed to pursue those careers. So that navigation element can be pretty daunting and confusing. So where the tools come into play, and I guess I want to clarify too, my organization, we’re not directly serving job seekers. We serve the servers, so to speak. Our role is to provide community-based and workforce development organizations and other stakeholders with regional data and applied research so that they can make their own informed and strategic decisions that would potentially hopefully elevate quality of life throughout the area. So when we’re equipping providers with our research findings and our recommendations, the Federal Reserve tools have become part of our toolbox, so to speak, of recommendations that we will then share and walk them through and ensure that they’re aware of them so that they can pass that information forward.

Sergio Galeano

Oh, that’s really comprehensive. Thank you, Jill. Thank you for the clarification. Just a quick follow-up, how do you pair this with your education tool or conversations to have a more holistic conversation for both job seekers and the partners that you talk to, but also the learners in the education community in Pennsylvania?

Jill Avery-Stoss

I think they really establish a common ground actually for all of the different players in each sector because it’s a very tangible item. Each of the tools are pretty tangible. And so for us to be able to sit down and all look at the same thing and illuminate the ways that each party can make use of it, it’s a way to facilitate conversation and bring everyone to the table. It’s a nice package of information with some actionable substance there.

Sergio Galeano

Yeah, I can see that. Thank you. Tracey, going over to you. I know that your current role is a continuation of your work with the Markle Foundation and the Rework America Alliance that has really spread the good word on skills-based hiring and has tons of resources there. Now at JFF, what’s JFF’s, I guess, definition and perspective on economic mobility, and how does the Occupational Mobility Explorer fit into that?

Tracey Everett

Yeah, thanks so much. So I’ll speak a little bit. JFF really covers a large portfolio of work, but from the Rework America Alliance perspective, I would double down a little on what Jill said around access. And not only access to education, but access to quality jobs. And that really drives the North Star work for JFF is really helping people access quality jobs. And so for us, one of the things that were really why we focus so much on skills-based both talent management practices from the employer side and skills-based coaching from the job seeker side is that we really see a lot of the proxies that employers use for skills, things like adding four-year degrees or certain job title requirements or years of experience as being a really big barrier for people to access good jobs. People that may have the skills to be able to do those jobs, but don’t have maybe the exact education requirement, maybe they’ve gained those skills through non-traditional pathways.

And so it’s been a real focus for us to help people identify their unique skillsets and how those align with quality jobs. And also help employers understand how they can widen their talent pool by using a focus on skills. And so these tools are really helpful, especially in this specific instance, the Occupational Mobility Explorer, because it can really help an individual understand that skills alignment piece to future occupations, and specifically those that maybe non-linear occupations. So again, to Jill’s good point about career navigation and career exploration, that a lot of people don’t know where to go next or how to transfer their skills into a better job and ultimately maybe that target job. And so I love in the Occupational Mobility Explorer, the screen where it shows that skills comparison so that an individual can really dig into, this is my skillset, here’s how it’s maybe aligned to a job that I would never have considered an opportunity for me.

And then maybe if they can see those gaps too, where can I go to fill those gaps? What short-term training programs will provide me with those skills? Or maybe I have some of those skills from a prior role that I can build off of and share as I’m applying to jobs. So we just find those tools to be really helpful when we break down those skills conversations with individuals and help them think about their future career trajectory.

Sergio Galeano

Yeah, thank you. I’m hearing that certainly data and knowledge is power to really open up workers come in with maybe one view of the jobs they were exposed to in their communities, who they grew up with, did they go to college, were they more in the trades? So they might have a narrow view. And when you give them options through these pathways, they can really see what they didn’t know was translatable actually open up doors for them later on. That sounds phenomenal.

Tracey Everett

Absolutely. And I would say a lot of folks, we don’t use the language around low skill jobs, but if individuals feel like they come from a job that may be classified as lower skill, they don’t necessarily understand the wide variety of skills that they do have, right? So even just helping folks acknowledge that whatever job they have, they have gained super valuable skills, and that those skills can be transferable into another job. Being able to visualize that with tools like this helps make those conversations come to life for individuals.

Sergio Galeano

That’s wonderful. Thank you, Tracey. Mayra, going over to you in central Florida, I have a lot of love and support for workforce boards serving one myself here in DeKalb County in Atlanta and you all do so much. And there’s so much coordination from the federal level down to state and local, but also the presence that you represent in your region. I also know that you’ve been in workforce for a long time, at least 20 years, and you probably know it from when Benefit CLIFFs wasn’t probably even a term that was well-defined and was probably more a case by case thing where people realized, “Hey, I just got a 10, 20 cent increase, and then all of a sudden I’m losing these benefits.” But you also have a really great and wide role in working with SNAP and TANF. So you understand the CLIFFs and how they work.

So from your perspective, how do you in Central Florida think of economic mobility and the region that you serve, and how has the CLIFF tool helped improve your conversation and approach to workers?

Mayra Nunez

Okay. As you stated, Careers for Central Florida, we do help a wide variety of job seekers in general, not only TANF and SNAP. However, my focus is specifically in these two programs. I will say the CLIFF has been very instrumental, especially for this population. Most of them, they do have a public assistance and they are in need. They are very afraid to lose in their critical network support that they have throughout the different public assistance. So the CLIFF dashboard shows them the changes in income, employment, when the public benefits will disappear. So our career service consultants can proactively help them by planning, educating them, providing them with community resources, ensuring that this customer has a real understanding of how this is going to impact them, but in the long term, what benefits they will get. I think CLIFF has been a great tool for all my clients and has been instrumental for decision making.

Sergio Galeano

Thank you, Mayra. And a follow-up, I think most people on this call are probably in workforce or education, and if not in public policy, but I don’t know how many folks have actually walked into or benefited from the services of a workforce board. So could you actually walk us through a little bit of that? When a job seeker is referred to CareerSource Central Florida or comes in and has a sit-down, whether in a classroom setting for training or a one-on-one, what does that conversation look like? Are you, for example, scanning their resume and getting some personal information on their income, and then you figure out from that, okay, they’re in a low or moderate income position, they receive these benefits, and using this tool, I can tell that might be at risk. Like you said, many workers already know, and that fear, that hesitation of losing those benefits might make them feel a bit constrained. What does that conversation actually look like? And if they are at risk of losing their benefits, then what does that conversation and the resources look like?

Mayra Nunez

Okay. So for a regular job seeker that is not mandated to come to CareerSource for a particular program, we do have a career exploration. So when they come into CareerSource offices, what we do is we explore with them their needs, barriers, occupational skills, and what direction of career pathway they are interesting in going for. We do have a different tools that we use. However, CLIFF really provide additional layers for financial stability. So some of the majority of our customers benefit from the CLIFF tool. So at that point, once we identify whether they have the clear understanding and the knowledge or how much the job is going to pay, or they are afraid to see when they’re going to be earning the potential amount they need in order to satisfy their housing expenses. We implement the CLIFF Tool so they can get better understanding and make informative decisions to move forward.

Sergio Galeano

Yeah. And I’m sure this helps serve employers because whether they identified it or not, they might not have realized why people are not accepting promotions or leaving, or we talk about a workforce system of how do we bridge that gap from moderate to higher income if it means losing benefits. So, I hope that it’s helped change the narrative with employers.

Mayra Nunez

Of course. In workforce, we serve both job seekers and employers. So we also have conversations with our employers and partners to ensure that we all share common objectives. And the CLIFF allow us to align with training, hiring needs, advancements strategy to help this population and for employers to understand the need of a stable job and how this increase, like John mentioned, impact our customers. So we discuss in the training opportunities and job skill alignment and future careers advantages for our Floridians.

Sergio Galeano

Thank you, Mayra. Now, Tracey and Jill, you both hinted or just explicitly said how much you work with partners across the country and your regions. And you both already said a little bit, but I wanted to broaden this first question on workforce mobility and outcomes and talk more about the broader question of, well, one thing is one side of the coin is training and equipping workers with opportunity. The other is meeting employers and what they need, right? We have to align that.

So I’ll start with you, Tracey. You already talked about working with employers. From your perspective, I know you talked about the OME, but when it comes to the issue of Benefit CLIFFs and for employers that if because they’re small and don’t have a lot of backend support, so they really lean on quicker processes and scan resumes by just credentials and degrees, and you want to get them to talk more about skills. But a lot of employers, especially in the RAA framework at JFF, they’re targeting non-traditional workers who may not come with the pedigree that they expect or are used to, and may come from lower income positions than you said how you don’t frame it that way.

They may see it that way with the benefits. How does JFF change the narrative with employers and help them understand issues that maybe they don’t have top of mind, but that they can use to come up with better strategies together with workforce partners like yours, Jill’s and Mayra’s to bring in more workers from those backgrounds?

Tracey Everett

Yeah. So we do work with employers to the Rework American Alliance, and then we also work with community-based organizations, workforce boards. So we think it’s really important that both sides of the ecosystem are having these conversations and engaging together, right? We want employers to transition a little more to skills-based practices, but we also want the job seeker to be able to identify their skills and use a skills-based approach to be able to speak the same language as employers, right? But from that perspective, I think what’s really important when we’re talking with employers is that I tend to work more on the job seeker side. And so I see the benefit to the job seeker of how skills-based practices can help unlock new opportunities, can help people access different jobs and good jobs. But from an employer perspective, skills-based practices is not an altruistic practice, right? It’s not something that you do because it’s the right thing to do or it makes you feel good about your hiring practices, right?

There’s actually a very strong business case for skills-based practices, right? And one of the things that we hear is either employers can’t find talent, they can’t find people with the skills that they need to be successful in their roles. They have retention issues. Skills-based practices across the talent management system addresses those things. So while it feels like it’s a good thing to do to provide access to a larger group of individuals and get more people in those roles, it’s actually really great for expanding your talent pipeline. It’s really great for reducing time from hiring to actually being a productive employee without as much onboarding. It’s really good at retention because if you are using skills-based practices throughout your talent management practice, not just the hiring piece, but you’re thinking about skills-based talent progression within your organization, it can also really help with internal mobility and it can help folks stay around.

Also, if you’re hiring someone with the right skills and they’re good at their job, they’re more likely to stay than if you’re hiring someone who maybe there’s a skills mismatch. So, I think the message that we always share with employers is it might take some time upfront and we understand that, because a practice change always does. But we think that the long-term benefit of transitioning to skills-based practices is ultimately a good business case. And you’ll end up having employees with a skills alignment and be better off financially and culture-wise, it’s a win-win sort of for both, both the job seeker and the employer. So I think it’s important to frame that, that there’s a really strong business case for implementing skills-based practices.

Sergio Galeano

Hear, hear, thank you for reemphasizing. The messaging is important that it is both a good thing for our economy, but that it is a very, I don’t want to say profitable, but it’s a very smart thing strategically for a business. I’d love to know in our vast audience online, if there are employers or folks from HR operations here on our call, welcome, hope that this resonates. And please engage with us in the chat. Let us know what you think if what Tracey just said on this business case for skills-based practices and increasing the strength and the variety of the workers that you can tap into in your communities resonates for you. Jill, I want to ask the same question on employers, but also bring up some context for the audience. Please correct me if I’m wrong, I believe you were first connected with the Federal Reserve of Philadelphia through the Anchors for Equity Initiative. And I know you all worked together on that, and that might have been one of several interactions. Could you tell us a bit about that initiative, how it ties into workforce strategy and your conversations with stakeholders?

Jill Avery-Stoss

Sure. Yes, through the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Northeastern Pennsylvania was one of two communities within the footprint to be selected to participate in their Anchors for Equity Initiative, which it’s a supported effort that helps foster partnerships among major anchor institutions and communities, so that meeting hospitals, healthcare systems, education such as universities, ultimately with the hope of strengthening local workforce systems. And in our area, it’s been about an 18-month-long process. It’s a research and action model, and we identified some high priority occupations that would allow us. We would like to hone in and really focus on opportunities to mitigate barriers, particularly for young populations and emergent populations who are entering the workforce for the first time, regardless of age. But we are looking at CNAs, dental assistants, peer support specialists. There’s a lot of need for techs in our area. And so we’re not quite yet at the point of program implementation, but through our conversations explored using the OME explored ways to help job seekers and employers.

We’ve actually looked at it with some of our healthcare employers to help them visualize transitions from workers current roles into other positions, and help them see the potential for upward mobility. And that could potentially allow them to design their own training and advancement policies and programs as well. That would be the hope.

Sergio Galeano

Thank you for that, Jill. I also wanted to hear perspective because I find The Institute really interesting. And just because your mission is so aligned with how we think about impact when it comes to data, that it’s part of the conversation, it can take us very far, but you also are on that other side of outreach and engagement, like helping foster this sort of action initiative. So there’s a really strong case and need for data tools. But one thing is to create something out of existing data. Another one is to identify authentic demand and also create something that’s translatable, that’s understandable by a wide audience, and that can actually point to some sort of actionable insight, right? So whether it’s convenings or partnerships, just in your experience in working on both sides of this coin, research and outreach and engagement, what other tools do you think are needed?

How could we strengthen the OME, strengthen the clips, or bring them together in different ways that’s been proposed here in the chat I saw, but what’s the value proposition and how can we identify the kinds of tools that communities need and can actually do something with?

Jill Avery-Stoss

Well, I think any sorts of tools that will give workers or communities clear insight into the labor market realities really have been just super essential. The pace of economic change is just so difficult to keep up with, with shifts in different industries and automation and different credentialing requirements and disparities across regions. I mean, I know AI is a whole entire, that’s a different probably series of webinars altogether, but all of these things really, they mean that we just can’t rely on any one type of tool, any sort of outdated assumptions or intuition or anything like that when making decisions. So it’s really echoed across workforce boards and training providers. It’s all a common challenge to really be able to rely on accurate and granular information that’s very forward-looking, and to use that stuff to design programs that mirror opportunity. So tools like these create value in a couple of different ways.

Workers maybe who don’t know which skills they already have that are transferable, it really highlights those. It helps them understand which occupations are actually growing and where those skills might fit in, what their wages might look like from one place to another. So it all just supports more competent career decisions. And then we all know that when people can see the really realistic pathways that are there and not just job titles that can be vague and nondescript, they’re more likely to pursue training and see their transitions pay off.

Sergio Galeano

Totally agree. Clarity and confidence. I very much like that. Thank you. Tracey, I want to go back to you. Jill, you brought up AI, automation, skills-based practices. Many of the topics that make up this umbrella term that we call, “The future of work,” right? Understanding now and in the coming future, how trends are evolving across technological, demographic and economic structural changes that’ll have big impacts on communities and the labor market. And the RA framework was really future-looking. And there was a very interesting conversation around the economic rebound coming out of the pandemic where employers across all regions and local labor markets were struggling in many industries to find workers. And you found them make a…again, Tracey a business decision to drop requirements, right? Uncheck the box, not ask for certain things, open up the door to nontraditional. And instead of a trend, this became the only success strategy, survival strategy for so many.

And now as we look to the future, even now in the media, there have been some really interesting articles, op-eds, and reports questioning if employers are still on that same wavelength of skills-based practices. If right now, because the economy has shifted a bit, have they returned to their more comfortable proxy of degrees and credentials? So there’s, I think, two things that I’m getting to ask is one is what’s the strategy now when that atmosphere is changing, but also just a future-looking question, what do you think is the future of skills-based practices, right? Tools and resources, but if you… JFF, you’re there 10 years from now on skills-based practices, what would that ideally look like and what do you think it’ll realistically be like?

Tracey Everett

Yeah, thanks for the easy question. What’s the future? So a couple of things, I do think to your point, there’s a big push for companies… Sorry, my dog wants to weigh in, if you can hear that. For companies to adopt skills-based practices to meet talent shortages. And I will, to be very candid, there is a distinction between dropping a degree requirement and fully implementing skills-based practices, right? Dropping a degree requirement may be the first step, but unless you’re doing other things, unless you’re creating a skills-based job posting, unless you’re interviewing and assessing for those skills, unless you’re onboarding people using skills-based practices and then continuing that through your employee retention, you’re going to have different levels of success, right? Than if you just keep your job description the same, but take that job degree off it. And so I think that’s one of the things that we’re learning is while it’s a really great initial step, just removing a degree requirement or a proxy on a job description isn’t going to necessarily give you the full benefits of what skills-based practices hold.

And I think we’ve seen that in some of the adoption of these practices in the real world. But thinking about the future, I think as we think about how AI is going to change jobs and how… A lot of the research we’ve seen is that it’s not like AI is just going to get rid of a whole bunch of jobs and then a whole bunch of other jobs will stay the same. It’s more that the majority of jobs will be augmented in some way by AI. And so what does that mean for individuals and individual skills? To me, and I think this might be my opinion, but also some folks at JFF too, that it becomes even more important that people are good at assessing their skills and that companies are good at assessing what skills are required for roles, because those are going to continue to change and evolve even more rapidly as we see more change from AI taking place.

So maybe your job, parts of it won’t change, but parts of it will change. And how do you ensure that people have the skillset to be able to step into those new roles, to be able to step into the new tasks or challenges associated with what was traditionally their roles? How are you ensuring that people have the skills to navigate AI and to navigate technology? So I think it becomes almost even more important that we keep that focus on skills for both individuals and for employers as they’re thinking about what their organizations need, especially as they continue to adopt AI and new technology. And also, are there short-term training opportunities? Are they going to do some of that training internally? Are they going to work with their local community colleges or workforce training partners to help upskill their workforce so they’re ready for what the next roles or what those changes to their roles look like as a result of adopting AI?

Sergio Galeano

Thanks, Tracey. One thing that came up while you were speaking, I was curious, how much does JFF work with community colleges on skills-based practices since so many of them by nature at the forefront of really being responsive to what employers needs as their training programs are meant to be more applicable and quicker than let’s say, a four-year degree. So what’s the role there, the partnership opportunity with community colleges?

Tracey Everett

Yeah, absolutely. From an RAA perspective, we’ve worked with a number of community colleges around skills-based practices, but as a whole, community colleges are a really important partner for JFF. Both just from an education and training perspective outside of what may be traditionally a focus on skills or skills-based practices. But JFF has been closely aligned to community colleges for a long time. And I think you’re absolutely right, they have the ability to be a little bit more responsive, whether that’s through their two-year degree programs or their short-term training programs or their employer partnerships, community colleges play a critical role in the ecosystem. And so I know I’m based in Indiana and we have a statewide community college system, which is a little unique, Ivy Tech Community College, but they have a huge focus right now on how they’re including AI skills in their training program so that if a person is going into not even just thinking about tech or the coding roles, but how are they accounting for how AI is going to augment every job that’s aligned to every training program?

So I think that community colleges are really well positioned to be adaptive to some of these changes and they’re really important partner of JFF.

Sergio Galeano

Thank you so much. Mayra, closing with you before we move to our Q&A, just wanted to ask, as you listened to Jill and Tracey reflect on their organizational view on this, again, at CareerSource Central Florida, you work with so many different partners, community colleges, chambers of commerce, employers themselves, schools, K to 12 system, building that sustainable talent pipeline. When it comes to outcomes from the CLIFF Tool and other tools that are necessary, I know that you have so much because you’ve got WIOA, you’ve got changes to Pell coming up and figuring that out and a unique funding grant environment right now. As far as data or partnerships, what do you think is needed more of at the local county level from a workforce board perspective to help increase economic mobility?

Mayra Nunez

At this time really is focused on what talent we need to fulfill our business needs. So we are working in three college. We do have offices, careers or offices inside the community college. We have a really strong partnership with Valencia and a lot of different community college here in Central Florida where we are trying to help our population to identify the needs in either a short-term credential or in a long-term career. As Jill and Tracey mentioned, nowadays, it’s more important than ever for customers to have skillsets to fulfill a job because it’s not only about knowing the job, it’s more be efficient in the job, utilizing all the tools that you have in order to fulfill the needs and provide to your employers why you need some. So we do have a lot of AI training implementing in our daily operations. We are focusing in the youth generation. We do summer youth camps. We do a lot of high school express where we are trying to teach this new generation of what is needed before they are actually ready to go into the workforce.

Sergio Galeano

Yeah, thank you for that. Again, going to that clarity and stability that Jill talked about so that they can get those good jobs, but actually keep them, and that employers can actually have sustainable talent. To the three of you, thank you so much for those insights, and I hope that you as the audience also enjoy that. I’d like to open it up to our Q&A, and my intention was to have John and Kyle on standby, but I’ll go ahead and call you gentlemen up. Let’s all six have a conversation because some of the questions actually ask questions of both user presenters and our panelists. So our first question I’ll go with you, Kyle, is from Katherine Ash. She’s asking about federal data sources and the lags across regional needs. So her question is, “Many of these tools rely on federal data sources which lag regional needs, especially in smaller and rural economies. So how are developers supplementing federal data sources to inform real-time decision-making and basically fill in that gap in these settings that typically don’t have as good data?”

Kyle Fee

Wonderful question, and it actually gets at the roots of some of the reasons why we did what we did with the Occupational Mobility Explorer. So yes, it is true that the employment and wage data does come from federal data sources. It is assigned to local geographies. However, where we really leverage the local information is the skills information, and that comes from employers that are based in that respective state. So the underlying skills data does have a local variation and local flavor to it. And then I would also say that we are in the process of updating the tool and evaluating some of the different inputs that we have for the tool. And one of those inputs is the national employment projections. Those are difficult things to produce in general, but we’re comparing how accurate the national employment projections can be to the state employment projections.

And early spoiler alert here, preliminary results show that the state employment projections actually perform better. So we’ll be incorporating those probably into the future updates.

Sergio Galeano

Yeah, thanks for getting at that. The updates, this tool will continue to evolve and improve over time, and hopefully data sources as well and the reliability. Wondering if any of our three panelists have anything to say on that because all of your organizations probably have a good combination of urban, commercial, more rural regions. Curious about the value here when you cut and slice data and the kind of strategies, if you have anything to say on that rural approach for lesser populated regions.

Kylee Fee

I’ll actually jump back in, Sergio, and talk about some of my experience in Northeast Oklahoma, which despite a few metropolitan areas is generally pretty rural. A lot of that work has been in and around large business parks report of authorities. So while it might on its surface be a rural location, they generally do have some large concentrations of employers that then can help create mass and create movements and interests around these types of approaches and tools.

Sergio Galeano

Thank you, Kyle. John, one of the first questions we got was from an individual, Lynette Fields, and she asked a short but I think really impactful question that I think would be great if you had a brief synopsis on the story of Advancing Careers, the initiative from which CLIFF was born. She asks, it was to the beginning, I think where you or Kyle were talking about who the audience was. And she says, “Wouldn’t the audience also be policymakers?” And CLIFF has been really impactful in that regard to not just change the conversation and the use case amongst our panelists, but it’s actually led to some legislative changes or impact. Could you talk about that?

John Rees

Absolutely. Yeah. I think there’s sort of almost a dual path and sometimes they actually dovetail quite nicely with one another. So as you’ve seen today, there’s clearly sort of a pathway and sort of ways to address this with deployment of the tool itself and sort of a client facing scenario. But on top of that, because of the capabilities of our tool, we can also explore and analyze changes in policy and model out how a specific change might impact the CLIFF, whether it’s exacerbated or eliminated or push it back. And so we have sort of seen adoption of that aspect of our work in several states, right? In a place like Florida, for example, they have changed some of the rules around whether it’s CHIP or their childcare subsidy to change the limits and push out the CLIFF so it’s not as impactful for a lot of communities. In a place like DC, they’ve actually come up with a program in which basically they will make families whole if they do experience a CLIFF, right? What do they call it, the career mobility action plan.

And so the tool might identify the potential of a family to experience a CLIFF, and they’ve set aside basically $10,000 annually per family in this pilot for families that are experiencing CLIFF, again, to sort of make them whole, to ensure that they’re able to make a transition and pursue career advancement without suffering sort of economically from that. So there’s clearly been sort of incorporations at the policy level of our tool. With that said, we’re always looking to sort of connect other communities, other states, looking to analyze and see how they might be able to make similar moves.

Sergio Galeano

Thank you, John. Really impactful story. I’m going to combine two audience questions also for you because they’re about the CLIFF tool. One, as we had talked about this fall with a partner here in Atlanta, question from Nancy Batu, French, hope I got that okay, “Is does the CLIFF tool focus on individuals who receive SSI and SSDI?” That’s one. And if you can keep in your back pocket the second one, which is, “Inflation or just such cost of living accounted for either of these tools, can they be?”

John Rees

Yes. So I’ll take both of those questions. We do have SSI and SSDI in our tool. I don’t know if you remember this during the presentation, it sort of asks, does anybody in the household have a disability? If you do select that, you can then select SSI and SSDI just for simplicity’s sake. I did not include that in the scenario that we worked with today, but again, I’m happy to do so sort of at a later date. As far as inflation, it technically is not accounted for in those sort of multi-year projections. And that’s been basically because if you look historically over time, expenses and wage gains have pretty much happened in lockstep for the past 20 or 30 years. And we continue to monitor that, but in general, as overall household costs have risen, inflation and wages have increased at about the same amount, and so that nets out zero. So that’s not been part of our tool historically.

Sergio Galeano

Thanks, John. I’ll return to our panelist here. We’ve got a question from Sean Caskey. We talked a little bit about this, but just like when I asked Mayra to walk us through the experience of what it’s like to actually walk in and receive the services of a workforce board, Sean’s getting at, “How are both of these tools, the OME and the CLIFF, reaching their target audiences, especially employers who may not be aware of these issues?” So I’ll repeat what we already answered where in the example of a workforce board, you can actually just turn around the monitor and very humbly show a worker what a career path can look like while a tool like the OME could say, “Hey, you’ve got these skills and yeah, they’re really good for this set of jobs you’re looking at, but check this out.” There’s maybe a dozen, maybe six, maybe 30 other jobs you’ve never considered in your region or depending on their need for geographic mobility that you can apply to.

But I guess we’re getting at the art of engagement here, whether it’s workers or employers. How do you take a tool that, I’ll be honest, may not be the most approachable for some people who just want to be told and given good advice. How do you have impact there? So even Jill, if I could start with you, you shared with us that you spent a lot of time talking to community partners who then serve workers directly. You must see this, translating data to make it actionable. How do you see them then use it? Are they showing it on a PowerPoint slide? Are they convening communities together? Are they doing the visits around schools and chambers of commerce? What does that art of local personal impact look like?

Jill Avery-Stoss

Yeah, I can give an example of one of our workforce development programs in the region. At The Institute, we’ve worked on the program evaluation for its pilot. And in doing that, we’ve been able to see them design the program in such a way that there is a social services partner involved with an education partner who helps enrollees advance along a career track while minimizing barriers, things like housing and childcare and transportation that I mentioned earlier. But in doing that, their program is designed in a way that allows for multi-weekly meetings between the social service provider and program enrollees. And in doing so, they talk about program goals and career goals and do some case management. And we suggested to those social service providers at one point that the OME tool in particular and the CLIFF tool can really be useful for introducing the different pathways and progressions that are available.

So that was sort of one way that we shared the information. And so then it could have been paid forward and ultimately delivered to the end user. It has been a little bit more difficult to get employers to come to the table. We find that some are, they’re either really, really engaged and eager or not at all. So that’s been a little bit more of a challenge, but on the end of the job seeker or the worker, they’re a little bit more accessible and receptive.

Sergio Galeano           

I hear that.

Tracey Everett

Sergio, if you don’t mind, I can also share from a Rework America Alliance perspective, we similarly serve in an intermediary capacity. So we have a number of national delivery partners, including the National Urban League, UnidosUS, Rural LISC, where we work with those organizations who then share information out to all of their affiliate locations. So these tools have been really helpful as we work with those organizations on training their career coaches to include them and train them up on how to use these in conversations. They both fit really well into sort of the framework that we use for career navigation being skills-based, human-centered, and equity-driven. And we worked very closely to build a course for coaches in partnership with the Atlanta Fed around Benefits CLIFFs. So that has gone out to over 400 organizations, and 1,500 individuals have participated in the training. So just as a way of getting coaches, getting these tools in front of coaches, we find that they’re really receptive to high quality data tools that help them have good conversations with individuals. And so we are happy to share those throughout the Rework America Alliance Network as well.

Sergio Galeano

I hear that. I’m hearing a network of networks, right? Some organizations are so local and regional, and they have these established networks. And that JFF can leverage that to spread good resources and services across the country.

Mayra Nunez

And Sergio, I would like to mention that with the customers that receive cash assistance, we do implement the tool with each of those participants. For some of you that are probably not familiar, but the cash assistance benefits has a time limit. So we have to be intentionally in the services that we provide to these participants. The CLIFF tool really help them to navigate to the changes CLIFF and benefit platforms they will face throughout their time in the casual system. So the feedback that we receive from the customer is once they understand the tool, they are also utilizing with their young adults, which help them to guide them through the processing a different career. So CLIFF, we utilize them with the participant, but we also teach them how to use it within their own family when they want to guide them through making informative decisions for their future and career advancement.

Sergio Galeano

Thank you, Mayra. Thank you so much. Kyle, I’m going to close with you as we wrap up our panel. Shavani Datar asks a really, I think, important question, “How do we think about people who aren’t fully captured in standard household data when assessing mobility? You could answer this both from an outreach perspective, but also how can we imagine a future where there’s more data for these underrepresented voices? I wish I could give you an hour, but shoot.

Kyle Fee                         

No, that’s a good question to end on, Sergio. And I think not only do tools that we’ve created struggle to capture people that aren’t in standard household data, but a lot of different interfaces struggle with that. For me, I think I take this question to think more about what about if someone that doesn’t have a solid work history or robust work history, how could they still find use of the tools? And for me, I think it’s more about exploring the options and seeing what’s out there for individuals. I think the second example that I used around the individual that was interested in a career in construction management knew the end goal where they wanted to go, but how do they see themselves fitting into different pipelines or channels to get into that type of work is where I would go with that question.

Sergio Galeano

Thanks, Kyle. And thank you to Shavani for the question. It’s certainly, I think, one of the top questions in community development, how do we keep the momentum and keep improving where there are gaps? Well, with that, as we close, I want to give a huge thank you to our two presenters and our three panelists for taking time from your day-to-day roles, and to share your experience and your insights with us. For the audience, I hope that over these last 90 minutes, our polling questions showed that you were familiar with both concepts to the extent that you are familiar with the tools, whether this is a refresher or your first time considering how to use it or embedded, I hope that you can walk away with an insight. There are resources available across the Federal Reserve Banks of Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Atlanta to learn more, and you can reach out to Kyle and John.

And I also want to thank Tracey, Mayra, and Jill for your experience. Thank you so much. I hope that you’ve also learned something from each other and that from this audience can make new partnerships and continue to be impactful in your field. As we close now, I do have a few closing comments. I invite our panelists to go off camera. And to the audience, thank you so much.

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