The Workforce Field Building Hub at Workforce Professionals Training Institute (WPTI) is pleased to release Why Focus on Frontline Workforce Professionals?, the second in our series of briefs in connection with our recently administered 2020 Survey of New York City’s Frontline Professionals.
As has become abundantly clear since mid-March, the COVID-19 pandemic is currently and will in the foreseeable future impact nearly every aspect of the workforce development system. The unprecedented crisis facing New York City demonstrates the critical importance of frontline workers that make up our workforce system, ensuring New Yorkers have access to economic opportunity and quality employment in a challenging and unstable job market.
The crisis has already managed to highlight an issue central to much of the analysis and recommendations in the Workforce Agenda for New York City report (2018), that of a weak workforce infrastructure rife with structural barriers that, in turn, contribute to structurally vulnerable provider organizations. Frontline workers in many ways bear the brunt of the existing and exacerbated issues of system fragmentation. They are the ones working to provide comfort and assurance to clients, sometimes in the midst of great uncertainty about the status of their own employment situation. While working to ensure clients can access resources and training virtually, many of them lack the technological tools and digital skills required to perform their quickly evolving jobs. Frontline workforce professionals matter more than ever now, and the research being conducted through The Hub aims to shine a light on this critical component of the field.
We look forward to sharing additional briefs and insights over the coming months. In this rapidly changing environment, WPTI will do our best to serve as a resource to you, your organizations, and the communities you serve, working closely with other workforce intermediaries to ensure you have the support, and the resources, you need.
Click here to read Brief 2 - Why Focus on Frontline Workforce Professionals?
Click here to read Brief 1 - Who is the "Frontline" of the Workforce Development Field?