Mayor Eric Adams’s promise to overhaul New York City’s workforce development system is welcome news for the nearly 350,000 New Yorkers who are unemployed—200,000 more than before the pandemic. Helping thousands more New Yorkers connect to the career training and support services that lead to well-paying jobs will be essential for driving an equitable economic recovery and building a more inclusive economy. Adams has already taken a strong step forward by appointing the city's first deputy mayor for both economic and workforce development. Now it’s time to make the investments and policy changes needed to help New Yorkers reenter the workforce while building ladders to economic mobility. 

In this op-ed for Crain's New York Business, CUF Editorial and Policy Director Eli Dvorkin makes the case for eight steps the Adams administration should take to build the workforce development system of the future:

• Scale up the city’s most effective workforce development programs.
• Expand support for bridge models, which provide crucial on-ramps into effective training programs for in-demand occupations.
• Spark hundreds more apprenticeships in high-wage fields that are insufficiently diverse, such as technology, finance, advertising, and the green economy.
• Connect New Yorkers enrolled in workforce training programs with free, high-quality childcare.
• Build new connections between economic and workforce development.
• Strengthen CUNY’s ability to provide career-relevant continuing education to New Yorkers at scale. 
• Develop recurring revenue streams to fund workforce development. 
• Launch the nation’s first Automation Preparation Plan to help prepare the city’s workforce for a vastly more automated economy.

You can read the full op-ed here.

This op-ed builds on the Center's ongoing research on expanding pathways into good jobs through investments in CUNY, skills-building programs, and workforce development, including recent reports Making Rezoning Work, Opportunity Costs: Affording the True Costs of College in NYC, Preparing New Yorkers for the Tech Jobs Driving NYC’s Pandemic Economy, Upskilling for an Equitable Recovery: Hardest-Hit New Yorkers Most Vulnerable to Automation, and event “Making Workforce Training an Engine of New York State’s Economic Recovery."