Last January, Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL) and Truist Foundation announced the Where It Starts: Build Better Careers Initiative. Funded through Truist Foundation for $15.7 million and led by CAEL in partnership with several other local and national organizations, the six-year project aims to connect more than 6,000 adult learners to career pathways that sustain equitable economic mobility.
Prioritizing traditionally underserved adult workers and learners, Build Better Careers will improve connections among postsecondary institutions, the financial services sector, and workforce development organizations across five regions, including Charlotte. The project will provide adult learners with access to affordable post secondary classes, connect more job seekers to higher-wage jobs and long-term career opportunities, and encourage financial services organizations to hire more adult learners and set them up for success.
Recently, CAEL’s project team and local industry partners in Charlotte completed a key project deliverable: a report detailing priority occupations and associated career pathways maps. The report is a pivotal planning element that will drive implementation activities in the remaining phases of Build Better Careers in the Charlotte region.
This work was made possible by the regional sector partnerships CAEL established to ensure that Build Better Careers targeted outcomes would be industry-driven and genuinely responsive to local workforce demands. One such partnership includes the CLT Alliance, Charlotte Works, the Charlotte Executive Leadership Council, and the City of Charlotte Economic Development Office (HIRE Charlotte). A year ago, they began working with CAEL to create a local industry advisory group made up of representatives from the financial services and insurance sector.
The advisory group identified top “good jobs” and laid out occupational competency maps and career pathways that highlight existing and emerging opportunities within the Financial Services and Insurance sector (NAICS 52) across Mecklenburg County and the City of Charlotte. The purpose of this collaboration was to identify common career pathways across employers within the sector experiencing shortages of talent in order to align skills required for these careers so that talent can be skilled up and ultimately connected to in-demand careers.
The resulting body of work offers new and localized resources for hiring managers. It provides the basis for further alignment work, smoother career on-ramps, and more effective pathways for guiding talent into in-demand good jobs.
For example, the career pathways maps tell us there are many progressive occupations in demand within the Charlotte Region that are accessible without a bachelor’s degree. Many of the feeder occupations for these roles are found in customer service-based roles. This sheds light on greater opportunities for the community to access generational changes in employment prospects within this high-growth sector.
As the project team and partners enter the new year, they will begin a broader collaboration with employers and training providers to assess more rapid or incremental programs to skill up job seekers to allow for more fluid movement in and through the prioritized pathways. This includes a stakeholder group we are forming, which is open to Charlotte-area trainers and employers in the financial services and insurance sectors. If you are interested in helping inform and develop strategies, curricula, and training programs that align with in-demand jobs, we invite you to participate in this stakeholder group. Please contact Victoria Avramovic at vavramovic@cael.org for more information.
