State gets grants to improve state of Connecticut jobs
Posted on June 17, 2014
The state has received a grant of over $800,000 from the U.S. Department of Labor to improve Connecticut jobs, according to a news item.
These funds will enable six states to build or expand longitudinal databases that link workforce and education data and help these states to better understand how education and workforce development programs complement each other.
The funds go to six states in all.
Grantees will be expected to achieve multiple goals during the three-year grant period. These include:
developing or improving state workforce longitudinal data systems with individual-level information;
enabling workforce data to be matched with education data to create longitudinal data systems;
improving the quality and breadth of the data in the workforce data systems;
using longitudinal data to provide useful information about program operations;
analyzing the performance of education and employment training programs; and
providing user-friendly information to consumers, in the form of scorecards or integrated digital platforms, to help them select the training and education programs that best suit their needs.
Grantees will be expected to use these longitudinal databases to conduct research and analysis aimed at determining the effectiveness of workforce and education programs and to develop tools to better inform customers about the benefits of the publicly-funded workforce system.
These grants stem from the administration’s focus on access to high-quality data and is a companion initiative to the U.S. Department of Education’s Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems grants, which are designed to build education databases.
Grants awarded through the Department of Labor’s initiative have been made across the country to single-state grantees. The grantees include four states that will begin to develop their longitudinal databases (Connecticut, Indiana, Kentucky and Mississippi) and two states that intend to expand work already initiated on their databases (Nebraska and New Jersey).
