In 2006, long before she was Connecticut’s chief workforce officer, Kelli-Marie Vallieres took over her father’s manufacturing business and encountered a problem. The company, Sound Manufacturing Inc., was in constant need of new skilled workers, but it couldn’t find them.
“Most of the manufacturers in our area used temp agencies to bring in unskilled people,” Vallieres says. “We would train them up internally and then see who was going to stick and who would move on. We were spending about $100K a year in fees to the temp agencies to cover this, and we really weren’t getting the skills that we needed.”
To solve the problem, Vallieres teamed up with other manufacturing business owners in the area, as well as the local workforce board and two community colleges, and they created a short-term training program that became the basis of the work that Vallieres does today statewide. The Eastern CT Manufacturing Pipeline Initiative provides free training to unemployed or underemployed people to directly address the hiring needs of local companies. The program includes stipends for attendance as well as social support services, including a case manager for every participant.
Overall, the initiative has been a success. Since its inception in 2016, it has placed more than 5,400 people into jobs—representing a 93% placement rate for graduates. An independent analysis from an economist showed that the program has created $446M in total economic output.
The Big Idea: When Vallieres became chief workforce officer in 2020, she took the idea behind the manufacturing initiative and expanded it to other industries across the state. The resulting program, Career ConneCT, promises job seekers that they can earn the skills they need in four to 24 weeks with the help of a career coach. They also exit the program with an industry-recognized credential, many of which can stack toward a degree. With $70M in funding from the American Rescue Plan Act to back the program, it’s the largest investment the state has ever made in short-term credentials.
“The idea is to ensure that people get the credentials that they need to enter into a career ladder,” Vallieres says.
The state is now wrestling with how to maintain the Career ConneCT portal and extend key aspects of the initiative in its implementation of Workforce Pell and other workforce programs, as the discrete funding for the program runs out in the next few months. A coalition of industry and government leaders has called for additional state funding, as well as new federal investment.
In the meantime, Connecticut has made structural changes that provide more consistency around short-term programs, Vallieres says. The state consolidated its 12 community colleges, for example, in part to ensure that pathways were more consistent across the colleges and that short-term credentials could more smoothly stack into degrees.
“We understand that short-term credentials don’t typically get people a family-sustaining wage,” Vallieres says. “They’re just getting them into the front door.”
A ‘Farm System’ for Employers
Key to the success of the Manufacturing Pipeline Initiative is that it is completely employer-driven. In 2015, the shipbuilder General Dynamics Electric Boat in eastern Connecticut announced it would need to hire tens of thousands of people over the next couple of decades. Since then, the employer has hired more graduates from the program than any other employer. Last year, 1,100 people were trained to work at the manufacturer, and this year that number is expected to go up to 2K.
“The concept was to see if the public workforce system could almost serve as a farm system for one obviously huge employer doing a lot of hiring, but also the broader manufacturing sector in the region,” says Michael Nogelo, president and CEO of the Eastern Connecticut Workforce Investment Board.
The programs are designed to cover about 70% of the skills and knowledge a worker would need across different employers, and then employers provide the final 30% that’s more specific to their companies after they make a hire, Nogelo says. The median starting wage for graduates of the program is just above $24 an hour, and Nogelo says they are often moving up from jobs in fast food or warehouses.
Expanding to Other Industries: In manufacturing, the process has gone relatively smoothly. Translating it to other high-demand industries in the state, particularly healthcare, has been a little more challenging.
“In healthcare, we know that the demand is similar to what it is in manufacturing in eastern Connecticut, but it’s just such a diverse sector with hospitals, long-term care, home care, and federally qualified health centers,” Nogelo says. “It’s more difficult to aggregate all of those disparate needs and really inform cohort-based training.”
Healthcare has seen among the highest enrollment numbers in Career ConneCT, alongside infrastructure and clean energy, manufacturing, and commercial driving. In healthcare, job seekers often must have degrees, not just short-term credentials, to advance. For them, Career ConneCT acts as more of a bridge than a final destination. To help job seekers better understand the industry and where they might best fit in it, Career ConneCT offers a 40-hour academy about the different types of roles and responsibilities in the industry, whether patient-facing or not.
And the state has tried to reduce barriers to advancement for entry-level healthcare workers. While nurses are for the most part still required to have degrees, Connecticut’s community college consolidation created more consistency across its certified nursing assistant programs and clearer pathways for continuing on. The colleges also are implementing a new credit-bearing program for licensed practical nurses—the highest level of nursing one can achieve without a degree—so the credits stack toward almost a full year in the registered nurse program.
Setting Up for Success with Workforce Pell
The state hopes to continue the momentum as it implements Workforce Pell later this year, Vallieres says. One of Workforce Pell’s requirements is that states demonstrate that a given short-term program leads to a living-wage job in an in-demand industry.
Vallieres is confident that some of the programs in Career ConneCT will be eligible for the expanded grants. As of December last year, more than 6,800 people had enrolled in Career ConneCT and the programs had an average graduation rate of more than 70%. Among graduates, 85% are already employed. While Career ConneCT is a statewide program, its learners are clustered around low-income areas in the state.
Karen Hynick, acting provost and vice president of academic affairs, student affairs, and workforce innovation at Connecticut State Community College, says Workforce Pell will be a “game changer” for many students. Currently 46% of them are Pell eligible.
Hynick anticipates that some short-term programs, such as culinary arts, won’t qualify due to low starting wages. But many of the programs for high-demand jobs in manufacturing, IT, and healthcare stand a good chance.
“I think the stackable credential is where it’s at,” Hynick says. “Many of our students can’t wait two years to finish a degree and put food on the table. When a student can come in for eight to 15 weeks and leave with an industry-recognized credential that’s going to get them a living-wage job, many students choose that as an on-ramp.”
Editor’s Note: This story originally said the Manufacturing Pipeline Initiative began in 2008. The Eastern Connecticut Workforce Investment Board began doing sector partnership work that year, but the MPI did not formally launch until 2016.