05/06/2026
Leaving California Workforce Association's WorkCon feeling reinvigorated. Redefine Alliance hosted a panel with Jonathan Yackley, Maria Alexander, & Stephen Norris on what's working with ESE and Workforce Board partnerships.
A couple themes stuck with me from the conference: 1️⃣ workforce practitioners are being asked to do more with less, and workforce systems can't keep up with the labor market. That makes real partnership and the ability to adapt critical.
Here's where ESEs can play a practical role-- by adjusting training quickly as job demands shift, bringing employer perspectives as operating businesses, and providing more individualized, ongoing support than most systems are set up to do.
You see this in their results & programming:
- Rise Up Industries placing 100% (!) of its machine shop apprentices into unsubsidized, living-wage jobs.
- Juma Ventures implementing innovative strategies to retain youth in workplaces, supported by its decades-long partnerships with sports arenas across California
- Center for Living and Learning evolving its offerings based on participant interests and labor market needs to pivot call center workers into peer support jobs
And through workforce board partnerships, each ESE is able to do more -- serve more people, sustain programming, offer more training, extend the length of transitional employment, apply to grants together.
2️⃣ WorkCon was a reminder about how we talk about work in this field. Practitioners tout “earn and learn,” “on-the-job training,” and “work experience” models, but the ESE leaders helped us reset on what those terms actually represent in practice:
Opportunities for people to grow, make mistakes, build confidence, and reimagine themselves in environments they never thought possible. Not having to sacrifice feeding families to invest in higher paying career pathways. For ESE participants, it’s often the first time they’ve had a work environment structured to support that kind of development rather than filter them out.
That’s the real value of work. Not just a paycheck but the chance to build stability, capability, and a sense of direction in a setting where people don’t have to get it right on the first try. What an important reminder to us all in these chaotic times.
