The U.S. Department of Labor–Employment and Training Administration (DOL-ETA) is engineering a strategic shift in the design, implementation and operation of its key workforce development initiatives. Traditionally, program initiatives have been primarily shaped by the education and training needs of job seekers and incumbent workers (i.e., the “supply” side). While this remains a core focus, the DOL–ETA’s overriding mission is to pursue these efforts within a more “demand driven” context of employers’ workforce development and hiring needs. To promote this paradigm shift, the DOL–ETA recognized the importance of providing highly focused technical assistance to employment and training service providers.

The DOL-ETA retained Full Capacity Marketing, Inc., along with Abt Associates, to develop a highly targeted technical assistance (TA) strategy to support grantees in proactively reaching out to and engaging businesses/employers in their program, called the High Growth Youth Offender Initiative (HGYOI). Under this program sixteen grantees were selected to implement promising strategies for transitioning at-risk, court-involved youth to successful employment in targeted high growth industries in their local economy.

View the online presentation and project toolkit, or the full report, to understand how the TA team implemented a customer-centric framework to help grantees build a more positive brand and impact market share of high growth employers.