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New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr. today issued a comprehensive review of New York City’s workforce development system, finding that the City’s poor coordination of this system has compromised its efficiency, accountability and effectiveness.

Thompson’s study, Demands of the Time, Turning the Workforce Development Model of the Last Century Into a Skills Education Model for Today, identifies nearly three dozen City- run occupational training and related employment programs costing a total of more than $925 million in City, State and federal funds last fiscal year. Thompson offers a series of recommendations to coordinate programs and make them operate more efficiently, with potentially better results for job-seekers and employers.

The report is available at www.comptroller.nyc.gov.

“An expanding skills gap in this country is widening the gulf between rich and poor and putting economic pressure on the middle class,” Thompson said. “Elevating workforce development to this higher level within the Mayor’s Office would give it the prominence and emphasis it needs to meet its dual goals of providing businesses with the well-trained employees they require and job-seekers with opportunities to secure a living wage and an upward career path.”

Noting the recent turmoil on Wall Street and the roiling economy, the Comptroller stressed the urgency in prioritizing workforce development efforts.

“With the city’s economy increasingly dependent on the financial services sector -- in 2007 financial services accounted for 25 percent of city wages, double what it was 12 years earlier -- and with that sector experiencing significant restructuring, it is more important than ever that New York City’s workforce be qualified to work in fields that promise growth and economic diversification,” Thompson said. “Ensuring that enough New Yorkers have the skills required to fill these positions is vital to the city’s continued prosperity.”

Thompson’s report is his second in the past year to focus on the need for the City to better address the growing skills gap. Last October, Thompson issued, The Future is Now: Addressing the Skills Gap Through Career and Technical Education in New York City High Schools. That report analyzed the city’s Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs, finding that CTE has not been a priority of the New York City Department of Education (DOE). Since then, the DOE and City Hall have announced efforts to remedy the problem.

The new report notes that the City’s workforce development system has markedly improved over the last five years. However, Thompson points out that there remains almost no coordination among the myriad agencies and programs that comprise the City’s labyrinthine workforce development and training system.

“The system’s programs are spread across so many agencies, reporting to so many different deputy mayors, that it is not possible to tell whether nearly $1 billion in public funds is being spent efficiently or effectively,” Thompson said. “That is unfortunate. To do the best job possible in helping people gain marketable skills and enhance the skills they already have, we need a well-coordinated, fully accountable system.”

Among the report’s other key findings:

• There is no comprehensive list of the City’s workforce development and training programs. The report counts 33, not including the City University of New York (CUNY).
• Efforts are not well-integrated. Agencies – including DOE,  the Human Resources Administration (HRA) and the Department for Youth and Community Development (DYCD)- and their programs operate independently, with little integration or coordination of resources to meet citywide training priorities. Thus, for example, because there is virtually no connection between CTE high schools, which enroll 28,000 students in job-training classes, and the rest of the workforce development system, it is left largely to CTE high school principals -- without any help from the Department of Small Business Services (DSBS) -- to develop invaluable partnerships with private businesses to obtain internships, jobs for students and equipment donations.
• Under the current structure, core programs report to three different Deputy Mayors and the CUNY Chancellor, while some smaller efforts report to other deputies and to other, non-mayoral agencies. .
• The city’s Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO), established in September 2007, oversees a large number of innovative and worthwhile initiatives to help low-income workers, but at the same time contributes to the fragmentation of the City’s workforce development effort.
• CUNY’s extensive training efforts are not well integrated into the overall workforce development process.
• The workforce development strategy articulated by the City focuses largely on DSBS/Workforce1 and DYCD programs, even though these represent only one part of the workforce development system, and not the largest part.

In the report, the Comptroller compared New York City’s efforts to those in other cities -- particularly Chicago -- that better coordinate workforce development systems. New York City’s lack of overall vision and coordination, he says, produces consequences that are harmful to the city, employers and job-seekers.

“It can be confusing for job-seekers or those who wish to upgrade their skills when they are trying to find out what programs might be available,” he said. “We need to meet the specific needs of the city’s dominant and emerging employment sectors while giving New Yorkers a chance to find stable, well-paying jobs in fields for which they may not be presently skilled.”

Accordingly, Comptroller Thompson offered a series of recommendations to the Mayor to launch a comprehensive effort to build an integrated, coordinated, publicly funded workforce development system. Thompson said the City should:

• Establish a Mayor’s Office for Skills Education with responsibility for all the City’s workforce development programs.
• Broaden the reach of the Workforce Investment Board beyond Workforce Investment Act-funded programs for adults, which are administered by DSBS, and WIA-funded youth programs run by DYCD.
• Expedite further development of the City’s Labor Market Information System.
• Develop and periodically update a multi-year workforce development plan that ties together programs in public schools, those offered through HRA, the skills development initiatives of CEO, and youth programs provided through DYCD.
• To make the workforce development system easy to access for the average New Yorker, the Mayor’s Office of Skills Education should serve as a single, extensively publicized information source on the full panoply of workforce development programs.

“The stakes could not be higher,” Thompson said. “A 2007 report of the Educational Testing Services notes that as the United States continues to fall behind in the acquisition of vital new skills, ‘our nation will gradually lose ground in relation to other countries, becoming more divided both socially and economically in the process.’”

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