NNSP releases 2010 “Sector Snapshot”.

National Network of Sector Partners (NNSP) released a new report - Sector Snapshot: A Profile of Sector Initiatives, 2010- which provides results from a survey of nearly 200 organizations operating sectoral programs in 37 states and the District of Columbia. The paper provides important insights about the current landscape of industry-focused workforce development programs, including a range of data about the types of organizations that engage in sector partnerships, the industries being targeted, and the range of services being offered to both incumbent and potential workers.

Key findings from the survey include:

• Sector-based initiatives are operating in more than 20 separate industrial sectors across the country, with health care (66 percent of survey respondents), manufacturing (57 percent), and construction (40 percent) the most prevalent. Most respondent organizations (83 percent) are operating initiatives in two or more sectors.
• Sector initiatives are particularly focused on the needs of local industry clusters, with 75 percent of programs operating at the city, county, or regional level.
• Sector initiatives are successfully responding to the demands of multiple local and regional employers, providing services to a median of 20 businesses each year. 
• Sector partnerships are meeting the workforce development needs of significant numbers of current and potential employees, serving a median of 360 incumbent workers and 400 jobseekers annually.
• Sector partnerships are reaching a broad range of hard-to-serve populations, including low-income individuals (50 percent of all participants), racial minorities (46 percent), and individuals with less than twelve years of formal education (21 percent). Women represent 44 percent of all participants.
• Most organizations (85 percent) have been engaged in sector partnerships for three or more years, with 53 percent having been engaged for six or more years – a testament to the sustainability of sector strategies over time.
• Sector initiatives are growing - despite the difficult economic climate, 73 percent of organizations reported that their top programs expanded in the last two years, while only 12 percent reported program contraction in that timeframe. 

The findings from the NNSP survey – as well as the results independent two-year study of sector partnerships released last month by Public/Private Ventures (P/PV) – underscore the importance of sectoral strategies as part of our nation’s economic recovery and competitiveness efforts.  And policymakers at all levels are taking notice: NNSP reports that more than half of states have implemented sector partnerships as part of their broader workforce development systems, and in July the U.S. House of Representatives passed the SECTORS Act, which would fund competitive grants through the Department of Labor to develop and expand new and existing partnerships. National Skills Coalition looks forward to working with our national, state, and local partners to increase policymaker awareness about the effectiveness of sector strategies and to advance policies such as the SECTORS Act that will support these critical initiatives.