🔒Amid federal funding uncertainty, CT launches updated strategic workforce development plan; calls for AI tech talent accelerator, new training loan program

Gov. Ned Lamont’s Office of Workforce Strategy (OWS) has launched an updated strategic plan, and is seeking to get control of its remaining $30 million budget to implement new initiatives, including an artificial intelligence tech talent accelerator program.

The office was originally created under the Department of Economic and Community Development, where the bond funding still resides, but has since become an independent entity.

“The remaining $30 million is going through a reauthorization process, to come directly to OWS in one lump sum and for us to be able to utilize that for seeding additional innovations within the system,” said Kelli-Marie Vallieres, the state’s chief workforce officer.

The original strategic plan dates back to the early years of the Lamont administration, and was then powered during the COVID-19 pandemic by $70 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds.

That money was used to stand up a portal called Career ConneCT, which brought together the resources of the state’s federally funded workforce boards and community organizations to try to funnel low-income job seekers through a single system to access training, mentoring and employer connections, as well as support services like child care, transportation and even housing.

Vallieres used a recent Workforce Summit hosted by the Connecticut Business & Industry Association to tout the success of the Career ConneCT program, which so far has trained 7,000 people, with 77% of those achieving employment.

“We’ve exceeded every metric that we’ve set,” she said.

One program beneficiary has been Havenly, a New Haven-based nonprofit that works with refugee women to help them find employment.

Co-founder Caterina Passoni said most of the women she works with take a low-wage “survival job” after they arrive in the U.S., which reduces their opportunities to learn English and find more sustainable employment.

“They get stuck in these cycles where they’re working all night, all day and they never go back to school,” she told attendees at the CBIA conference.

Havenly created a six-month paid job-training program where women can work and learn at the same time, training in either food safety or healthcare skills. Passoni says so far 88 women have been trained, and 50 have found jobs.

“The model is to give them an opportunity to actually get the skills and the certificates and the education they need to restart their lives here in the United States,” she said.

To Vallieres, Havenly and other grantees are providing a model for the kind of partnerships she believes will drive the state’s strategic workforce plan forward.

“Our office is not in the position to run workforce programs across the state and to do the actual work of the (workforce boards and community organizations),” Vallieres said. “It’s to ensure that all of the work is laddering up together, and that it’s a cohesive, coordinated effort across all of the entities.”

‘Recent unpredictability’

Career ConneCT remains funded through the end of 2026, and Vallieres says the new strategic plan aims to build on that success and broaden the reach of who is served.

The new plan defines three key objectives: to drive growth, build skills and expand access, Vallieres said.

It includes investing $5 million in a new loan fund for job seekers who are not eligible, due to their income, for Career ConneCT services. The fund would provide access to a zero-interest loan to complete sector-based, industry-recognized training programs.

Loans would be payable once the applicant is earning at least $50,000.

Vallieres says gaining control of the $30 million that the state bonded for these efforts will help to make up for the loss of federal dollars, which is a major concern for workforce development officials in Connecticut.

Ryan Drajewicz, who chairs the Governor’s Workforce Council, says implementing the new workforce strategy will be challenging because of both disruption in the federal government and the rise of generative AI.

“As a one-time Connecticut resident, Mike Tyson, once said, everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face,” he told the CBIA’s summit.

“I think there isn’t a person in this room who doesn’t recognize the recent unpredictability coming out of Washington, and within that, the difficulty in being able to confidently rely on federal support and resources, which were critical to so many of the successful initiatives in this plan,” said Drajewicz, a former chief of staff to Lamont, who is also head of external affairs at Westport-based hedge fund giant Bridgewater.

He linked the challenges to a macroeconomic paradigm shift toward what “we at Bridgewater call modern mercantilism” — a change from globalization to a world where nation states are becoming more protectionist.

“Those implications to the economy are significant, and they are playing out in real time,” he said.

In addition to the federal and global changes, Drajewicz also named the disruption brought by the implementation of generative AI as another major challenge to creating a coherent workforce development strategy.

“The ground is shifting under our feet in real time,” he said. “The future is here, and we are already behind.”

Federal funding

Connecticut’s revamped workforce strategy focuses on creating what officials call a “future-ready” labor force to support economic growth, and attract and retain businesses. To that end, it’s also investing funds in an AI tech talent accelerator program, attempting to identify and foster the artificial intelligence-ready skills that employers are seeking.

Meantime, Vallieres says even beyond any funding cuts by the Trump administration, Connecticut is likely to receive fewer federal workforce dollars in the years ahead, due to existing rules. The workforce boards that form the backbone of the state’s strategic plan are funded in part through the U.S. Department of Labor’s Workforce, Innovation and Opportunity Act program, and the annual allocation is based on the state’s unemployment rate.

“They determine how much money comes in based on data that’s three years old,” she explained. “So, we are going to lose additional funding moving forward because we did a lot of training programs and our unemployment rate is very low, and our job participation rate is very high.”

At the end of March, Connecticut’s unemployment rate was 3.6%, below the U.S.’ 4.2% jobless rate.