State Roadmap for Workforce Recovery

While states are eager to restart and recover, doing so within today’s uniquely challenging context raises important questions for a state’s workforce development system to consider, such as:

1. How are states defining success for a new type of recovery that promotes upward mobility for families struggling with unemployment and poverty?
2. What responsibilities do the workforce development system and its employer partners have during each phase?
3. How can states and businesses align the call for immediate action with longer-term transformations in work and learning?
4. How can states and industry help one another capitalize on rapid innovations developed during the response to the pandemic to transform their services and operating models for good?

This resource is based on multiple interviews and workshops with Governors’ advisors and workforce and economic development state leaders during Fall 2020. The roadmap organizes state planning activities and policy strategies for each objective across the recovery phases: Respond, Restart, and Recover. The roadmap includes a basic recovery framework to accomplish each objective; policy strategies across each of the three phases of recovery; state examples and additional resources. This resource also contains case studies from four states (Hawaii, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Rhode Island) featuring new details about how state peers are implementing this framework and policy strategies. In addition to the subject-specific case studies, this resource identifies examples of emerging state best practices in support of each objective.

The State Roadmap for Workforce Recovery is organized around seven foundational and interconnected principles to guide policymaking for a strong and more equitable recovery, which are user-centered, equity-focused, data-driven, collaborative, accountable, innovative, and sustainable.

This roadmap offers Governors and state leaders a framework for addressing each of the four objectives necessary to respond holistically to the unemployment crisis as well as to recover and build resilience in the post-pandemic economy.

Governors and state leaders should use the roadmap in the following ways:

1. Use the recovery framework in each chapter as a template for refining vision, goals, key metrics, expected outcomes, and continuous monitoring and improvement processes for addressing each of the four objectives.
2. Consult the menu of policy strategies to explore opportunities for action during all three phases of the transition to recovery. This menu includes strategies implemented by peer states as well as new ideas to consider.
3. Refer to the selection of brief state examples and additional resources for concrete, real-world examples of how state peers and subject matter experts are implementing elements of the recovery framework and policy strategies offered.
4. Dive deeper with the state case study to understand how states are connecting multiple elements of the recovery framework and policy strategies together to advance the objective in recovery.

Evidence has demonstrated that states transition between these phases at different times and may propose varying definitions of these phases in their recovery plans. For this reason, this roadmap is not intended to specify a single or linear path. Instead, it offers a framework to support an equitable recovery from the economic impacts of COVID-19.

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2021
• Author(s): Ash, K.; Rahn, M; Stephens, R.
• Funding Source: National Governors Association (NGA), Center for Best Practices
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Wesley Peterson
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies