The following is shared from Forbes:
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has launched a new nationwide initiative to coordinate AI workforce readiness across all U.S. states and territories, partnering with the Department of Labor, Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Small Business Administration. The program, called TechAccess: AI-Ready America, will fund a national convener, state-level coordination hubs, and AI education efforts to help workers, small businesses, and local governments adapt to AI’s impact on the economy.
When states and regions face shocks to their labor markets, local workforce and economic development actors are tasked with the herculean effort of triaging labor market needs, organizing local institutions and organizations, pursuing and allocating funding and resources, implementing solutions in a coordinated fashion, and instituting a feedback loop to refine approaches.
Whether it be a response to natural disasters or global pandemics, recessions, federal industrial policy initiatives, or the impact of technological change as with AI or the advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s, it is almost always underfunded, invisible work, and its beginning to implicate AI education and workforce development efforts.
Francie Genz, a Fellow with New America’s Future of Work & Innovation Economy program, recently defined this work as the six functions of economic and workforce development intermediaries, drawing on the experiences of workforce and education leaders working within tech-based economic development organizations.
Coordination leaders must conduct an orchestra comprising a broad set of workforce and education leaders playing their own instruments with their own set of incentives, funding formulas, politics, and segment of the labor market.