Key Challenges

Interventions Seem Ambitious Public: Employment professionals working with customers with significant barriers to employment may feel disconnected from the metrics and the daily service interventions they provide to customers in public employment programs (basic job readiness, skill remediation, mental health services, housing, reentry services, and other support services to prepare them to look a job).

The plan is focused on what can be done to advance job quality, not what cannot. The strategy lays out a vision and roadmap to increase the amount of and accessibility to good jobs for all residents living in the jurisdiction. The plan was informed by evidence of what works in the field, performance metrics and compliance considerations, and feedback from businesses, frontline employees, and job seekers in public employment and economic development programs. The strategy also recognizes that not all jobseekers or businesses are at the same stage of their own job quality journey.

Not Enough Time/Resources: Developing a strategy takes time—staff are already overcommitted.

Establish clear goals and reasonable expectations. Significant change takes time. Celebrate incremental progress so partners, staff, funders, and other stakeholders do not become discouraged or distracted from the long-term goals that have been established.

A response could be:

"Job quality is a strategic priority central to the agency's planning, governance, staffing, and budget priorities. There will be structured oversight of the progress of this effort at the [insert subcommittee] to keep things moving forward."

Stakeholders’ Visions Conflict: Reasonable people will disagree with how this work is scoped and executed. There will be disagreements from key partners about how best to advance job quality.

This is true, and we expect the team to approach challenges with curiosity, not judgment, in order to understand and address them. The most effective improvement strategies involve people with firsthand experience—frontline workers, employers, partners working in the field, and members of the community. Many of these stakeholders approach job quality from different, and sometimes conflicting, perspectives. A variety of perspectives makes the strategy stronger, if managed well.