Promoting Equitable Access to Good Jobs through Career Pathways

Career pathways can be a promising model to help students and job seekers, particularly those with low starting levels of educational attainment, advance through a series of well-connected training steps to progressively greater levels of credentials, job skills, and employment. Yet career pathways programs have demonstrated variable levels of success in helping people connect to family-sustaining jobs, or in achieving this goal equitably. Abt Associates is excited to share the results of multiple national research and evaluation projects that illuminate specific strategies career pathways and related workforce programs can utilize to improve all participants’ opportunity to access good jobs. Guest presenters who are implementing many of these strategies will share key features of their programs as well as practical ideas and advice. What Will You Learn? The importance of targeting family-sustaining jobs and careers from the outset in career pathways Which occupations programs should target as “launch pads” that help participants advance in family-sustaining careers over the long term How career pathways programs achieve different labor market outcomes for different populations and considerations for how to support BIPOC participants Why it’s so important for career pathways to connect the educational experience with career outcomes, and how this can be accomplished Examples of effective strategies and practical recommendations from peer organizations