To better address the needs of workforce education in California and improve agency communication, the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) has recommended a set of “common outcome measures” to the California Workforce Development Board, and suggests that programs be required "to collect and report data for those measures,” according to a recently released report.
The LAO report further recommended that “the Legislature replace the state’s existing method of linking data with a streamlined, system-wide method,” following the announcement that in 2016 and 2017, eight state agencies will receive “more than $6 billion in state and federal funding to administer almost 30 workforce education and training programs.” The report identified some of these recipients as community colleges and schools, as well as the Department of Social Services and the Employment Development Department, among others.
The report calls the state’s current method of linking data “inefficient and administratively burdensome,” and made note of the fact that state and federal laws have historically “required service providers to report different types of outcome information even for similar workforce programs, making comparing programs and assessing the overall system's performance difficult.” California currently uses agency-to-agency agreements, while agencies in other states “link their data using different methods, with some states relying upon a central repository of data,” according to the report.
The LAO also recommends that the California Workforce Development Board present the data in a few reports each year, in order to better inform policymaking and funding decisions to “improve the overall quality of the state’s workforce system.”
