Centering Work: Integration and Diffusion of Workforce Development within the U.S. Manufacturing Extension Network.

Fixing Work, and Moving Beyond It

“…Much has been documented on the contribution of workforce intermediaries that take a “dual customer” approach, meaning they combine targeted support for incumbent or prospective frontline workers while also providing business assistance to the companies that employ them (Conway & Giloth, 2014). While intermediation strategies have worked well in raising job quality standards in some localities more than others, that spatial unevenness has encouraged researchers to uncover cases where intermediation has scaled by layering onto more widely dispersed or better-resourced state and federal economic and workforce development networks, including community college systems and the federally funded Manufacturing Extension Partnership (Lowe et al, 2021; Lowe et al, 2022; Myers & Kellogg, 2022). Those cases pointed to the creative and ongoing interplay between publicly funded workforce and economic development services, with coordinated interventions that help smaller firms become more productive and innovative, while also giving more workers the skills, dignity, and inspiration needed to keep introducing new and improved processes (Armstrong et al, 2021; Kelmenson et al, 2022; Lowe et al, 2021; Schrock, 2013).…”