It’s not common for states to explicitly designate a portion of incumbent worker training funds to support workers who are learning English. But that’s what happened in California, where the state legislature allocated $10 million from the state’s General Fund to launch a new Workplace Literacy Pilot Program in 2023.
While the Golden State already makes various robust investments in adult English learning through the California Department of Education and the Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, this particular program is distinct in being operated by the state’s Employment Training Panel (ETP).
Founded in 1982, ETP oversees approximately $100 million in training and upskilling funds each year. The agency’s primary role is to operate an incumbent worker training program, which is funded by a small tax on employers. Under this program, employers are reimbursed for the cost of training their existing workforce. In recent years, ETP has expanded its role, and now also administers other sources of funding for upskilling.
National Skills Coalition has followed the Workplace Literacy Program (WLP) closely since its inception. The program is one of several programs launched by the Newsom administration to improve economic mobility for immigrants, refugees, and English learners (ELs) in the workforce.
Addressing skill-building issues is especially important because of the sizeable role these workers play in California’s workforce. Overall, immigrants and refugees comprise about 1 in 3 California workers, or 10.5 million people. English learners represent about 10 percent of the state’s labor force, or approximately 3.3 million people. (Note: Most of California’s adult English learners are also immigrants, but roughly 1 in 10 were born in the U.S.)
The Workplace Literacy program was open to applicants statewide. Eligible entities included employers themselves, as well as training providers that work with more than one employer, such as community colleges or nonprofit organizations. Overall, ETP contracted with 28 entities, including nine individual employers and 19 providers via Multi-Employer Contracts (MECs).
Eleven of those entities operated statewide, and the remainder were focused on a specific geographic location or locations. The major population centers of the Bay Area and Los Angeles were well represented among contract recipients, but the program also reached people in rural Kern County, the Inland Empire’s San Bernadino, Fresno/Madera in the Central Valley, and the San Diego/Riverside area, among others.
The Workplace Literacy Program saw its highest participation from the manufacturing and healthcare sectors. This mirrors national trends, as those industries have often been the target of workplace English programs, while other industries are less well represented. Notably, however, the WLP also reached workers in the warehousing, agriculture, grocery, and retail, aerospace-related, tourism, janitorial, education and childcare industries.
The program was originally focused on helping workers build English language skills and workplace readiness. However, significant demand for digital skills across occupations and industries in California drove ETP to explicitly affirm – partway through the grant period — that digital skills were not just an eligible activity but could be the main focus of the grant.
This decision reflects promising practices in incumbent worker training generally. As NSC has documented, supporting workers’ digital skill-building is particularly important as more companies adopt new technological tools, including automation and AI-related tools.
As of May 2026, the program had served at least 4,700 workers. Due to the timing of the program’s contracts, this number is expected to rise slightly before final data collection is completed in 2027.
Nationwide, $2,000 is considered a minimal benchmark for effective workforce development training. Many adult education programs run on much leaner funding, sometimes receiving just a few hundred dollars per student. Using the current participation rates as a guide, the Workplace Literacy Program has an approximate cost of $2100 per individual served. Of course, this is a rough estimate and does not reflect the nuances of particular programs’ funding structures or contracts with ETP.
One goal of the Workplace Literacy program was to reach employers that had not previously contracted with ETP. In part, this reflects the reality that ETP’s typical funding is available only for workers who are earning at least $18.50 to $33.64 per hour — the exact amount depends on specific local economic indicators — and many immigrants and English learners are employed in lower-wage positions. Because the Workplace Literacy program did not include a wage level requirement, it allowed entities that had not previously been eligible for ETP-funded training to apply.
Ultimately, the program succeeded in its goal of contracting with new partners. Overall, four of the individual employers and six of the training providers who received Multi-Employer Contracts were new to ETP. Notably, however, these organizations were not new to providing education and workforce services to adult learners and jobseekers; ETP required training providers to have at least two years of prior experience providing adult education and/or workforce services.
In addition to contracting with new partners, the Workplace Literacy program also supported existing contractors (both employers and training providers) that sought to expand their existing literacy, digital skills, and workplace readiness programs. As expected, entities that were expanding programs were able to ramp up somewhat faster than those who were launching brand-new programs.
The Workplace Literacy program began in 2023 and ran through June 30, 2026 (with data collection continuing into 2027). As a result, the program began towards the end of one federal administration and continued through the beginning of another. Starting in early 2025, rapid and substantive changes to federal immigration policy under the Trump administration had significant effects on immigrant and refugee communities nationwide.
Myriad changes to immigration work permit processing procedures and timelines, green card and citizenship application processes, and compliance requirements for individuals present on humanitarian visas had spillover effects on workers and businesses in virtually every industry. Uncertainty and anxiety about whether having legally-authorized status would protect people from detention meant that fewer individuals were comfortable registering for or participating in new publicly funded programs.
Additionally, high-profile immigration enforcement actions, especially in Southern California, affected many workers’ ability simply to get to work, or to carry out their work in a timely manner. This stressful environment pushed education and workforce development activities lower-down on the priority list for businesses and workers who were just trying to maintain daily operations.
While none of these federal policy changes were within the control of ETP, the broader atmosphere nevertheless shaped the agency’s ability to implement the Workplace Literacy program.
National Skills Coalition’s observation of the Workplace Literacy program confirmed that there was an appetite among individual employers and among training providers to reach a population of English learners in the workforce who may never previously have qualified for incumbent worker training. The program also affirmed the urgent importance of digital skill-building for many of these workers and the businesses that employ them.
Other states that are interested in the upskilling of incumbent English language learners in their workforce can take these factors into consideration:
