States, localities use workforce development to combat the digital divide
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Leaders must prepare their residents for an increasingly digital society, experts say. Some jurisdictions are targeting workforce programs to do so.
Today, nearly every job incorporates tech in some way, and government leaders must consider how to prepare their residents and workers for that environment, one local leader says.
“We need a workforce to adapt to this market change,” said Kelly LoBianco, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Economic Opportunity.
Without that adaptation, people and communities that already lack tech and digital skills will fall further behind the curve, she said. But government leaders can help bridge that digital and workforce divide to further drive employment and economic growth in their communities.
Los Angeles County, for instance, launched a workforce development initiative last month that aims to build residents’ digital skills to support their long-term career success and expand the county’s tech workforce, LoBianco said.
Under the Digital Navigators initiative, 100 residents will receive up to 500 hours of training to earn IT credentials from programs like CompTIA A+ and Google IT Support. Participants will then provide assistance to teach foundational digital and tech skills — such as navigating online forms and uploading digital documents — to other residents to jumpstart their own journey into the tech sector.
The program’s ultimate goal is to build pathways for program participants and the residents they assist to jobs within the tech sector, said LoBianco. Doing so will help leaders prevent further expanding the digital divide in their communities, particularly as tech advancements like AI are rapidly impacting the workplace already.
Indeed, as technology evolves, so does the job market, said Amanda Bergson-Shilcock, senior fellow at the National Skills Coalition. She pointed to a 2023 analysis from the organization that found that 92% of U.S. jobs required digital skills in some way.
That presents an opportunity for state and local leaders to build individual’s digital skills to meet the growing demand for them in the workforce through efforts like the one in Los Angeles County, she said.
Otherwise, “governments are missing a huge opportunity to make their services more efficient and to save money when they don't invest in the digital skills of their population,” said Drew Garner, director of policy engagement at the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society.
Digital and tech savvy populations can better contribute to governments’ efforts to modernize and innovate services like telehealth or remote patient monitoring systems through programs Medicaid, he explained.
Efforts to address the digital divide through workforce development are ramping up across the U.S. Similar to Los Angeles County, Boston officials announced a workforce development program earlier this year that will offer digital skills training to residents to support their career and economic mobility.
Such initiatives are happening at the state level too. Michigan, for example, announced in May its statewide plan to integrate artificial intelligence education and training into its overall workforce development strategy.
The Michigan plan, for example, calls for the state to embed “AI skills into existing education and training structures for both AI-intensive and AI-resilient roles. It also means investing in broad community access to ensure no region or population is left behind.”
“A lot of states and cities have been running workforce programs for decades,” Bergson-Shilcock said. As leaders see the demand for tech skills in the public and private sector, “they can take the best of what they’ve already been doing and then blend in a technology component,” she said.