Policymakers eager to recruit workers for new and emerging industries often consider launching an online “jobs board.” But as NSC Senior Fellow Amanda Bergson-Shilcock explains, this tactic is more like a garnish than the main course and investing in them too early can be an expensive distraction from running effective workforce programs.
The bottom line: Smart workforce policies invest first in the personnel to build relationships and provide high-quality programs, and only after that consider if there are remaining challenges that a jobs board can help to solve.
A: It’s pretty much just a website that lists job openings. Often, it’s focused on a specific industry or geographic area – say, telecommunications jobs in Mississippi. And sometimes it includes ancillary information, such as short videos about people already working in that industry, links to community college or workforce training programs, and other information about the types of careers available.
A: It seems really appealing, on the surface! The theory is that it will help new workers to find out about an industry, and after having read about it or watched videos online, they’ll apply for a job or enter a training program.
Sounds great, right? To many of us, the idea of googling for information seems plausible. We assume that workers looking for a career change — or to find their very first job — will search online.
But in practice, most people don’t choose a new career field by doing an online search. Instead, they rely on a trusted person to help them learn about career possibilities. Looking up information online comes much later in the process, once they are already considering a specific career path or training program.
A: Well, I always start with the why. Why do you want to build a jobs board, and what evidence do you have that it will help you accomplish your goals?
In all of those cases, investing in high quality programs and relationships is more likely to yield the outcomes you’re looking for. Specifically, focusing on those trusted people that jobseekers are likely to turn to when they are at a decision point in their careers.
A: Sometimes that is a friend or family member. Often, it’s what I call a “first responder for workforce” – a frontline professional whose job it is to help people navigate a career pathway.
For example, student advisors, guidance counselors, workforce center staff, adult educators, librarians – basically, people whose jobs have them interacting directly with students or jobseekers in an advisory capacity.
The benefits of relying on a trusted person are that you’re less likely to be scammed or misled by a supposed opportunity that just wastes your time and money. The downside is that no advisor is knowledgeable about every career, and advisors often have especially limited knowledge about newly emerging careers in fields such as clean energy, cybersecurity, or artificial intelligence.
A: Different communities in the U.S. have different experiences of being given career guidance, and some are much less positive than others. For example, in prior decades, students of color were sometimes “tracked” in middle or high school – with advisors steering them away from college and toward vocational training programs.
And there are unfortunately still some bad actors in the training field that exploit students’ lack of knowledge about higher education to sign them up for high-interest loans or encourage them to train for low-paying jobs that won’t enable them to pay back their student debt or support themselves. Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote about this in her book Lower Ed.
If a student or worker has seen their friends or family get ripped off, or even just given irrelevant advice, they tend to be skeptical of online marketing and other impersonal information. If your best buddy from high school wanted to be an electrician, but the sales pitch he got meant that he ended up in debt without a credential or a job, you might be wary of any career-related sales pitches.
In contrast, one workforce program that I know of took a really innovative approach. It was a nonprofit in Chicago serving primarily low-income Latino immigrant families. When they began to advertise a new training program, they held family-style information sessions that encouraged young adults to bring their parents with them to ask questions and learn about the opportunity. It shifted the tone completely, because it brought parents in as supportive and knowledgeable allies in their 20-something child’s career journey, rather than excluding them.
A: Maybe! My advice is, if you’ve already done the fundamentals and you still have a budget left over, a jobs board can be a nice garnish. It does give you a place to steer people too – not necessarily even jobseekers themselves, but those first responders for workforce who might not know much about your specific industry.
But be aware that it’s a big, expensive challenge to promote and drive traffic to a new website. There is a whole science built up around how best to launch and advertise a new site, and most workforce agencies don’t have the budget to pay for that. So you run the risk of spending time and money creating a website that just doesn’t attract many visitors.
Plus, someone has to stay available for troubleshooting and keep the website up to date, and that can be pretty time-consuming and expensive too.
A: Here in the United States, we have been doing adult education and workforce development in various forms for nearly 150 years, dating back to the settlement houses that helped new immigrants find work in the late 1800s.
By this point, we know some key elements that policymakers should prioritize. They include:
A: The takeaway is clear: A well-maintained jobs board can be a helpful tool, but only after a strong foundation of high-quality training programs, career advising, and workforce relationships is in place. Otherwise, it’s just another expensive website that jobseekers may never find.
