Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

For the past three years, the New York City Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity (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. This work is pursuant to the City’s Career Pathways initiative to create a more comprehensive system of workforce development by building skills employers seek, improving job quality, and increasing system and policy coordination.

The NYC Opportunity 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 provide an overview of how NYC Opportunity developed a data-driven infrastructure by first establishing a set of performance measures that provide standard terminology and definitions for key milestones and outcomes commonly used in workforce programs (e.g., full‐time job placement). The speaker will discuss key governance challenges to building an integrated data platform in a highly complex regulatory framework and the 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 the public greater transparency around workforce services and outcomes.