Alabama is all in on skills—competency-based learning, credentials, and hiring—as the way to unlock opportunity in the state. 

It’s a make-or-break move. Alabama has one of the lowest labor force participation rates in the country, a long-held distinction. Meanwhile, the state has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to capitalize on federal investments in pandemic recovery funds, infrastructure, and tech hubs.

They’re trying for a “population-level solution,” says Nick Moore, director of the Governor’s Office of Education and Workforce Transformation.

In 2018, Governor Kay Ivey set a goal of adding 500K credentialed and workforce-ready workers by 2025—launching what is now known as the Talent Triad, a reference to jobseekers, employers, and education providers.

Key to the Talent Triad work is a new AI-powered talent marketplace Alabama rolled out this summer. It’s a full-blown, statewide learning and employment record (LER) system and the product of more than five years of work. The marketplace is being piloted in the manufacturing and healthcare sectors and is set to roll out more broadly in coming months. 

  • Almost 20K learners with verified LERs are already in the system, and employers and colleges have shared more than 2K learning and job opportunities.

That’s still small in a state with 5M people, but it’s by far the most advanced state effort of its kind. And leaders on the ground say the ambitious project is gathering momentum. Kristen Holder, executive director of the regional workforce collaborative in the Birmingham area, recently was talking to a group of employers and mentioned her organization’s connections to the state’s Talent Triad.

“I had no idea they knew what the Triad was,” Holder says, “But I mentioned it, and they were like, ‘Oh, that work is great.’”

The word is getting out. It’s taken Alabama five years to get to this point, after a full-court press that involved just about every corner of government. 

As the work starts to bear fruit, dozens of states have reached out to hear how Alabama’s government has attacked this challenge. The state has put together a playbook that digs into the project’s tactics and discrete tools. We interviewed people about the high-level strategy and conditions for success.

Here’s what we heard, which isn’t a recipe for building LER systems but what folks at the leading edge think should be on the menu.

Know Why

It’s cliché at this point to say “know your why.” But state efforts around LERs that tend to not go anywhere are the ones that aren’t clear about the underlying need—all the more so when they have the potential to just be chasing another techno-fad.

For Alabama, the skills-based hiring push started when state leaders started to dig more into labor market data at the beginning of Ivey’s term in office. They quickly moved beyond the traditional measures of economic health like unemployment and job growth. Both of those look good in the state, but lurking under those top lines was a concerning and a persistent challenge with labor force participation.

Alabama’s current labor force participation rate of 57% is well below the national average of 63%, which has itself been trending down for two decades. As of the beginning of this year, the state had 24 counties with less than a 50% participation rate.

Changing that became the animating goal for the governor’s administration. Skills-based learning, credentials, and matching are just the tactics.

Be Prepared to Go All In

Across the country, LERs still mostly remain an idea. A smattering of localities, like greater Dallas, have some form of operational system in place. And a few other states, including Arkansas, have pilots in the works.

But plenty of skeptics still think LERs—and the broader skills-based hiring movement—may fizzle. And if LERs are going to go anywhere, the technological solution will just be a small part of it.

In Alabama, the work has required an all-in commitment from Ivey and a far-reaching, statewide mandate.

That started with state leaders getting a better understanding of how many unfilled jobs were actually “good jobs” and what was keeping people out of those roles. (The answers weren’t exactly what everyone expected—more on that later.) The state’s community college programs, too, needed a rethink to make their approach to teaching and credentialing better align with most working adults’ lives. And a whole host of agencies had to work to get their policies and data systems to work better together—and then to launch the new talent marketplace tools.

Any one of those things is a huge undertaking—and their impact will be felt whether the LER system ultimately takes off or not. Altogether, the initiative has stretched across 19 state agencies and years of work with a coalition of employers, nonprofit groups, education and training providers, and labor-market data platforms.

“The governor believes the state transformation across all education and workforce agencies must occur concurrently,” says John Pallasch, a workforce consultant and former assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Labor.

Going all in requires a certain staying power, too. The state just passed legislation this year codifying much of the Talent Triad’s work. Bills to do so had been introduced since 2016 but had not gone anywhere.

While it’s not essential, experts say, it certainly helps that Ivey will have had two full terms to do this work. And over the summer, she emphasized that her administration was doubling down on its education and workforce initiatives.

“We are giving our people the tools to gain the skills they need and working to make Alabama the place they want to live, grow and work,” she says.

Question Assumptions

To even get to this point, Alabama had to question a lot of assumptions. That started with reconsidering whether the unemployment rate was really the gold standard of labor market health, and it led to hard questions about defining good jobs—and why people weren’t filling them.

To start, Alabama brought together a host of state agencies and regional leadership to identify high-demand, high-pay roles across 16 different industry sectors and to begin breaking them down into core competencies. 

It quickly became clear that not all in-demand jobs are good jobs. 

“We won’t train you into poverty,” says Josh Laney, director of the state’s Office of Apprenticeship, which has been deeply involved in the Talent Triad work. “I’m not going to do certified nursing assistants where you’re making $10 an hour at the end of the training.”

And when it comes to filling high-need roles that actually are good jobs, skills matter—but so do challenges with transportation and childcare. And many unemployed or low-wage workers are in a situation where wage gains can actually leave them worse off because of the loss of public benefits.

Alabama has been working with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta to customize its benefits cliff tool, which shows the trade-offs between wages and benefits, and incorporate it into the Talent Triad. And advocates for the state’s plans, like Donny Jones, chief operating officer at the West Alabama Chamber of Commerce, have been having some tough conversations with employers about what a living wage really is.

“This is not a political statement. I’m a chamber guy,” Jones told the Montgomery Advertiser. “But who’s the dummy, who’s the group of individuals that try to tell people they need to get off the couch and get off government subsidies and get into the workforce without really understanding what those individuals are going through?”

Alabama has had to tackle some assumptions around education pathways as well. As they dug into the Talent Triad work, it quickly became clear that the standard higher education model—set semesters, credit only for what’s learned in the classroom, and exams that aren’t tied to a demonstration of real-world skills—wasn’t serving many working adults well. 

The state’s community colleges have been charged with moving to a new competency-based model for many programs, which will now focus on what students know and can do no matter when or where they learned it.

“The Alabama Talent Triad allows us to make even quicker adjustments to programs and curriculum as more employers become involved in aligning jobseekers to skills-based job descriptions,” says Ebony Horton Bradley, spokesperson for the community college system.

Break Down Silos—Really

Laney, of the apprenticeship office, says the Talent Triad initiative has made it this far because the governor has struck the right balance between giving agency and department leaders authority to act but also demanding they meet a shared set of goals.

It’s about breaking down silos, but without micromanaging from the governor’s office.

“Our governor is really good about using her convening power to say, ‘You all get into a room and don’t come out until you have an answer,’” he says.

For example, various state agencies—the labor department, the education department, and the community college system—all had different definitions of work-based learning. As part of the Talent Triad work, they all got together and hashed out a common set of definitions and practices.

“It’s tedious. It’s laborious. But it’s necessary,” Laney says.

Build for the Masses

At the end of the day, the linchpin for LERs is adoption. This piece tripped up countless other efforts to get better data tools to the public, says Matt Gee, the co-founder and CEO of BrightHive, a public benefit corporation that works on data collaboration. 

For example, he cites career-navigation apps states paid to create but that didn’t attract more than a few hundred users. “They built things and never turned the lights on,” says Gee, a data science expert and a senior research fellow at the University of Chicago.

Adoption is the piece that’s still the biggest question mark for Alabama.

Interoperability—the idea that government, employer, college, and other data systems need to all be able to talk to one another—has been a huge focus in the LER space. It’s the tech side of the idea that you’ve got to design things for the masses.

But there’s a human side, too. You have to get people—employers, learners, college staff—to actually log in and use these things.

That idea is reflected in how the talent marketplace pilot has been structured, says Holder, of the regional workforce collaborative Central Six AlabamaWorks! The project has a deep focus on employer participation and includes large, established businesses like Regions Bank and CMC Steel, along with startups and other small and midsize businesses.

“I think this is really going to be a game-changer,” Holder says, “but it really has to have critical mass.”

Editor’s Note: This article was produced as part of a reporting project with the National Governors Association, looking at lessons learned from ongoing experiments with skills-based hiring and LERs. You can read other articles in the series here.