When Mike Rogers, Arkansas’ chief workforce officer, set out to build a new jobs platform for residents of the state, he envisioned “eHarmony meets Indeed.” The goal: successful pairings of workers and employers.
“I wanted to make a love connection, and both parties have to be able to offer something,” Rogers says.
The result was Arkansas LAUNCH, a platform that’s part job board and part career map for those looking to upskill. It’s also a place for employers to seek out workers, a departure from the usual one-way design of most job search websites.
The Big Idea: Arkansas LAUNCH is at the forefront of state efforts to better use data to match people and employers. With funding from Walmart and development support from the organization Research Improving People’s Lives (RIPL), the goal is to ultimately build out a full-fledged learning and employment record system that maps both credentials and skills. Employers can then seek out people who may not have applied for jobs based on their skills—whether they learned them in a formal degree program or not.
Arkansas was a good candidate to test a platform like LAUNCH. Three-quarters of Arkansans don’t have a bachelor’s degree, and the state has one of the lowest labor force participation rates in the country at 58%.
The state has tried a number of policies to address that challenge, including a work requirement for about 220K working-age adults receiving Medicaid benefits that was overturned by the courts and is now being revised. Arkansas also is investing in new pathways like apprenticeship degrees and rethinking government structures, working across two gubernatorial administrations to bring together education and job training efforts and make them easier for residents to navigate.
It is one of a growing number of both blue and red states, including Alabama, California, and Colorado, that are focused on making postsecondary education and workforce training more cohesive. In Arkansas, the work began about a decade ago under Gov. Asa Hutchinson and has continued apace under Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders with, among other things, the appointment of Rogers as the state’s first-ever chief workforce officer and the rollout of a new workforce strategy.
Rogers says one of the major problems in the state is a disconnect between employers’ hiring methods and jobseekers’ talent. He hopes that LAUNCH will help shift the conversation from “talent acquisition to talent recognition.”
“We’re trying to standardize career pathways with a person’s life and their education,” Rogers says. “I picture it like an interstate corridor with off-ramps. I shouldn’t have to go backward and do something to get where I want to go.
“There’s more than one path to get there. … If I can show you that I can do it, it’s irrelevant where I learned it.”
A Skills-First Design
LAUNCH has two entryways: one for jobseekers and one for employers. On their profiles, jobseekers can enter their job experiences and relevant skills, courses, and certifications, similar to a resume. Once completed, they’ll be taken to a personalized job board with local jobs that match their skill set. Another page highlights other career paths they can pursue based on their skills and links directly to courses and training they’d need to become qualified.
The algorithm optimizes recommendations for jobseekers based on unemployment data, wage data, and other market information, according to Alec Lintz, a partner enablement strategist at RIPL who helped develop LAUNCH. It aims to recommend jobs that would lead to wage increases based on data from other people with similar skills profiles and experiences.
RIPL helped other states, including Rhode Island, New Jersey, Colorado, and Hawaii, build similar platforms, but what makes LAUNCH unique is the entryway for employers.
Employers create their own profiles where they can upload job postings. But rather than waiting passively for applicants to find them, the platform recommends applicants based on their skills. The employer can then send them an application proactively.
“Arkansas has been sort of a sandbox for us,” Lintz says. “It’s the first state where we’ve really implemented the employer side of the tool. … It’s very skills-oriented and skills-focused—it’s building a whole skills ecosystem. We’re one of the first tools in the country to actually facilitate this marketplace where employers see the value of codified, credential-backed, and verified skills.”
Tyson Foods and J.B. Hunt are two of the largest employers in Arkansas. (Photos courtesy of Tyson and J.B. Hunt)
Getting Buy-In: One challenge facing LAUNCH will be getting jobseekers and especially employers to use it. Randy Zook, president and CEO of the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce, says LAUNCH will have to compete with more well-known websites like Indeed.
“The advantage of LAUNCH is that it’s tailored to Arkansas institutions and Arkansas employers and is a little more focused,” Zook says. “That’s going to be a value proposition that will take some time for people to understand.”
The platform is only useful for employers if jobseekers regularly update their profiles, too, adding credentials and skills as they earn them. The designers ultimately hope LAUNCH will be an integral part of Arkansans’ careers, from their earliest explorations in grade school through retirement.
A Verified Challenge: One of the biggest lifts for LAUNCH is creating a system to verify skills for those without degrees or certificates. Some skills can be self-reported, but others will need to receive some kind of credential. RIPL is working with the Digital Credential Consortium at MIT to build a learning and employment record wallet that connects to LAUNCH.
For veterans—who make up about 10% of the adult population in the state—LAUNCH is working with SOLID and The Manufacturing Institute to help turn military experience into tangible credentials for the civilian world.
Jody Bergstrom, chief executive director of Camp Alliance, Inc., a nonprofit that supports veterans in Arkansas, is working with LAUNCH’s builders to advise them on how the platform can best serve this population. A big part of her job is to help veterans learn to talk about their skills to employers. She hopes that LAUNCH will help businesses and other organizations better understand the value of military experience—and also have some compassion for returning service members who have witnessed combat.
“Historically, we’ve just always been very underemployed as a workforce,” Bergstrom says. “We have really great skill sets and we’re a very loyal demographic, but how do we articulate our military skills and translate them for civilian occupations?”
For example, she says, the project is grappling with how experience as an Army medic can translate into college credits and get a veteran on the path to being a certified emergency medical technician. Rogers and other state officials have been very open to having these conversations, she says, and the work aligns with the governor’s workforce strategy, which is focused on industry priorities and skills-based hiring.
Catering to ‘the Whole Person’
Edie Stewart, senior vice president and chief mission officer at Goodwill Industries of Arkansas, has been another advisor for LAUNCH. She works with employers in high-demand fields and helps jobseekers get the foundational training they need to fill those jobs. Goodwill has already set up LAUNCH on all its career center computers across the state, and career navigators are being trained on how to use the platform with people who want to upskill.
While LAUNCH is intended to be used by all Arkansans, it may be most helpful to those who are unemployed and vulnerable. Two years ago, Arkansas became the first state to deploy CiviForm, an open-source tool that makes it easier for residents to apply to government programs and benefits online. Instead of filling out multiple paper forms to receive different benefits, users only have to fill out a digital form once, which can be used across programs.
LAUNCH will be integrated with CiviForm, too, meaning someone who lost their job can more easily go to LAUNCH to look for a new one. While there, they might be connected to Goodwill and additional services.
The platform’s designers are currently working on building a third entryway for providers, including non-governmental organizations. The ultimate vision is for someone to be able to look for jobs, explore career trajectories, find a local food pantry, and even renew their car registration tags all in the same place.
“Not everybody knows every resource that is out there,” Stewart says. “It’s hard to put everything under one umbrella, and LAUNCH is doing that. … You hear that saying about considering the whole person, and that’s what this truly does from a platform perspective.
“It’s taking into account the whole person.”