Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The NYC Mayors Office for Economic Opportunity (NYC Opportunity) has extensive experience partnering with City agencies and providers in piloting and expanding on sectoral workforce program strategies, dating back to the launch of NYC’s first sector-focused one stop career center in 2008. A quasi-experimental study conducted by Westat used administrative data and New York State wage data to compare results of the City’s Sector-Focused Career Centers to general career centers. The findings, which showed that the sector-focused approach had higher placement rates for clients and better wages relative to the regular career center approach, received widespread attention. Building on this work, NYC Opportunity worked with partners to develop the WorkAdvance model, which combines the sectoral approach with a career advancement focus. An evaluation of WorkAdvance conducted by MDRC and delivered in three cities, included a randomized control trial, an implementation study, a cost study, and a practitioner’s handbook. Findings show that the program increases training completion and employment in the targeted sector and boosts earnings for low-income individuals.

Based on this and other evidence for the sector approach, NYC Opportunity worked with partners in City government to grow its use in the system. In 2014, NYC announced its Career Pathways initiative, which articulates a vision for creating a more comprehensive workforce system by building skills employers seek, improving job quality, and increasing system and policy coordination. The plan called for the creation of a system-wide data infrastructure that measures outcomes to create a more complete and robust understanding of the efficacy of New York City’s employment programs.

For the past three years, NYC Opportunity has led a citywide effort to integrate data from the City’s largest workforce development programs across multiple City agencies into a single data platform. The integrated workforce data platform will be used to measure program performance against a set of commonly defined performance metrics to create a more complete and robust understanding of the efficacy of New York City’s employment programs. In addition to linking data across multiple city agencies, the effort will also integrate State wage records, facilitating the City’s ability to understand job retention and career progression over time. This holistic view of programs will help identify programs that successfully lead to job retention and growth, subsequently enabling the City to direct funding to programs that offer residents the greatest benefit.

This presentation will discuss evidence built to support the sectoral approach in NYC, and provide an overview of current thinking and possible future directions. It will also provide an overview of how NYC Opportunity developed a data-driven infrastructure by establishing a set of performance measures that provide standard terminology key outcomes (e.g., full‐time job placement). The speaker will discuss new research opportunities emerging from integrated, longitudinal data. Additionally, the speaker will discuss NYC Opportunity’s work to launch an online portal complete with dashboards, data visualizations and maps to provide greater transparency around workforce services and outcomes.