RESOURCES
The new report, Leveraging Technology to Increase Opportunity and Economic Security for Adults, shares findings and recommendations from the EdTech Center @ World Education’s national field testing of seven technology tools for increasing access to learning and employment opportunity for lower-skilled adults. The findings represent a year of field testing with over 1,500 working learners and job seekers across the country.
The seven digital tools field tested include companies receiving impact investment from the Employment Technology Fund and proven to help adults enhance their skills and achieve greater workforce mobility, including CareAcademy, Cell-Ed, Nepris, Northstar, PAIRIN, Signal Vine, and SkillSmart.
The field testing uncovered five key strategies technologies should leverage to meet the needs of adults with lower skills, including mobility, accessible onboarding, personal connections, screening-in, and rich media. These and other learnings will help more tool developers improve their products to better serve lower-skilled adults, with feedback from workforce development agencies, community-based organizations, adult educators, and employers. The learnings are based on direct feedback from the end users— including frontline service workers, English language learners, diverse adults in employment training programs, jobseekers, and community college students.
The field testing of technologies and Workforce EdTech were made possible through grants from Walmart and the Walmart Foundation as part of the Technology Testing for Adult Learning & Employment (TTALE) initiative.