The Los Angeles workforce development system is a vast network designed to provide job seekers with training, education, and employment opportunities while supporting businesses with skills development and worker recruitment. In order to apply human-centered design to strategic planning we needed to map organizational and systems capacity to community needs.

The CivicMakers team conducted a robust engagement process to help refine the goals, vision and intended outcomes for the 5-Year Path Forward. From September 2023 – May 2024, nearly 150 people across 60 organizations served as contributors, thought partners and reviewers. We conducted 35 interviews, 11 focus groups, and 5 public meetings to shape the plan.

In order to elevate the experiences and insights of underserved Angelenos, our outreach and engagement efforts focused on providers serving populations such as youth, adults with developmental disabilities, older adults, people experiencing homelessness and LGBTQ+ individuals.

In addition to outreach and engagement, our team surveyed over 50 documents to set context and integrate former, existing and emerging efforts into the Five-Year Strategy. This gave us the opportunity to have a holistic view of what worked well in the past, and what strategic directions needed to shift in order to meet the needs of Angelenos today – as well as five years from now.

Insights from the engagement phase refined the goals of the overall strategy, giving us three Core Values:

• Connect Angelenos with high quality, living-wage jobs & opportunities to continue developing their skills and qualifications
• Ensure accessibility to pathways into quality jobs for all Angelenos
• Adapt to changes in workforce needs, considering demand from both the worker and employer perspectives

These core values reflect the need for a resilient, responsive, and inclusive workforce system. Working closely with our partners, we defined four ‘System Cornerstones’ to anchor the plan, and clearly define roles that would be integral to implementation.

Each Cornerstone will be accountable for implementing the 5-Year Path Forward and enhancing system connections.

A ‘cornerstone’ is the first stone laid when building a structure. Its role is to support the other pieces of infrastructure that surround it, and create alignment between other components.

To ensure the cornerstones acted as meaningful anchors for the plan, we structured all objectives and initiatives under one of the four cornerstones. These organizational principles will allow key partners within the Workforce Development System to prioritize activities and measure progress toward the ‘North Star,’ or overarching goal of the 5-Year Path Forward.

North Star: Place 50,000 Angelenos into high-quality, living-wage jobs, registered apprenticeships, paid work experiences and training as critical pathways to economic stability and success.

Sector Coalitions (one of the four cornerstones) are the main vehicle driving toward the North Star. By fostering direct collaboration between employers, workforce providers, training institutions, and the City, the coalitions will support Angelenos to develop experience within local, high-growth sectors.

In order to ensure progress is measured through more than just job placements, as is the case with many workforce development plans, we segmented metrics by system connectivity and participant experience. The system metrics monitor coordination and alignment, while the participant experience metrics ensure the 5-Year Path Forward remains anchored in human-centered design.

Metrics Categories:

• [System] Placements & Pathways
  [System] Enrollment in skill-development pipelines
  [System] Equity measures
  [System] Accountability, transparency and information sharing
  [Participant] Improved outcomes toward self-sufficiency
  [Participant] Satisfaction

To ensure this plan is a living document that can change over time, we handed off a spreadsheet and dashboard to track the plan’s implementation, and iterate where needed.