Key Highlights
Challenges
Workers face limited economic mobility because of a shortage of stable, well-paid jobs that require “middle skills” (i.e., more training than a high school diploma but less than a bachelor’s degree). Many are unable to pay for career and technical education and/or lack other necessary support, such as child care and transportation. As a result, the United States has a shortage of workers who can fill the middle-skill jobs created by recent investments in infrastructure.
Opportunities
Recent government investments in infrastructure offer significant opportunities to create middle-skill jobs in career pathways offering upward economic mobility. Public-private “talent finance” partnerships — which include governmental agencies, philanthropies, employers, and providers of skills training and supportive services — can expand training to deploy workers for these jobs at a greater scale than would be possible through training grants alone.
Talent Finance has three key elements:
- Payments are made in advance to organizations delivering training and supportive services to program participants. These payments are tied to outcomes for the learner-workers.
- Holistic support is offered to learner-workers in addition to career and technical training.
- Repayments from workers, or from employers who hire and retain participants from these training programs, are recycled to finance training and services for future workers.
Key Takeaways
- Public investment can create a greener infrastructure while improving the lives of American workers through skills development to fill new, well-paying jobs.
- Partnerships that share risk among governmental agencies, philanthropies, employers, and training partners create more effective, sustainable programs.
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About the Authors
Xavier de Souza Briggs
Xavier (Xav) de Souza Briggs is a senior fellow at Brookings Metro. He is also a senior advisor and co-founder of What Works Plus, a collaborative of philanthropic donors promoting equity and resilience through America’s generational investments in infrastructure and climate action, and senior advisor to Freedman Consulting, LLC, a mission-driven consulting firm focused on public-interest projects, including What Works Plus. An award-winning educator and researcher, he is also an experienced leader in philanthropy and government. Known for his wide range of interests and track record of building and reshaping fields, Briggs is an expert on economic opportunity and inclusive growth, racial equity and pluralism, housing, urban and regional development, and democratic governance in the U.S. and abroad. Briggs has testified before Congress on several of these topics. An elected member of the National Academy of Public Administration, he holds an engineering degree from Stanford University, an MPA from Harvard, and a PhD in sociology and education from Columbia University and was a visiting graduate fellow at the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil.
Tracy Palandjian
Tracy Palandjian is CEO & Co-Founder of Social Finance, a national nonprofit and registered investment advisor. Prior to Social Finance, Palandjian was a Managing Director for eleven years at The Parthenon Group, where she established and led the Nonprofit Practice to support foundations and NGOs to accomplish their missions in the US and globally. Palandjian also worked at Wellington Management Company and McKinsey & Company. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, Palandjian is a frequent speaker and writer on impact investing, social innovation, and results-oriented policymaking. Palandjian is a cofounder and Vice Chair of the US Impact Investing Alliance and a member of the boards of the International Foundation for Valuing Impacts, the Harvard Corporation, The Surdna Foundation, The Barr Foundation, and The Boston Foundation. She is also an Independent Director of Affiliated Managers Group. Palandjian graduated from Harvard College with a BA magna cum laude in Economics and holds an MBA with high distinction from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar.