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Birmingham, Alabama

Birmingham, Alabama, like the rest of the nation, was facing a variety of workforce challenges prior to March 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic raised new challenges and perhaps unique opportunities as well. The committee selected Birmingham because it is a city in the geographic south of the United States with stark demographic and employment differences between the city and surrounding region. Josh Carpenter, director of economic development for the city of Birmingham, opened the workshop by sharing the motivation to discuss how the changes brought about by the pandemic “can be beneficial for those seeking new jobs or career paths here in Birmingham.” He noted that the pandemic is not the only factor influencing the nature of work in Birmingham. The Black Lives Matter movement in particular is shining a light on persistent inequities embedded in the workforce culture. “It is clear that efforts to rebuild our workforce must include intentional actions to root out racism and create inclusive conditions to support diversity and equity in all job sectors,” said Carpenter. “As we continue these conversations, we want to make sure that piece of this struggle is front and center.”

This workshop began with sessions that presented data on the economic outlook, labor force, educational attainment, and demographic data for the Birmingham metropolitan area, and discussed Birmingham’s economic outlook prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic and its investments in workforce training programs. These were followed by panel discussions on emerging workforce training programs, efforts to address labor inequities

exacerbated by the pandemic, and efforts by institutions of higher education in the region to support local workforce development efforts.

UNDERSTANDING THE ECONOMIC AND WORKFORCE IMPACTS OF COVID-19 ON BIRMINGHAM

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the city of Birmingham—the fourth-largest majority Black city in America—had undergone a rigorous study using quantitative and qualitative methods to better understand its workforce needs. Carpenter noted that city leaders and activists had been thinking hard not just about the ways in which equity should be morally important, but also how it is vital to the city’s economic viability and competitiveness.

To provide context for the ensuing discussion, Stuart Andreason, director of the Center for Workforce and Economic Opportunity at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, provided a data-based overview of Birmingham’s economic situation, noting that some of Birmingham’s unique characteristics point to regional variations that affect the city’s eventual recovery from the pandemic-induced recession and foreseeing this as a theme throughout the workshop series. He also commented that a challenge for anyone who uses data to think about economic issues and to inform policy and practice is that most data are not current. In fact, he said, there exist few pandemic-era labor and economic data at this time.

Demographics and Educational Attainment

Andreason said that the city of Birmingham entered the COVID-19 pandemic with greater economic stresses than the city’s suburbs were experiencing. For example, the poverty rate in the city proper was 25.2 percent versus 14 percent for the larger Birmingham metropolitan area, and median wages for people 16 years and older was $30,014 in the city compared to $36,427 for the metro area.¹ He noted that while Birmingham city is majority Black, the metro area is majority white (Figure 2-1). A comparison of educational attainment shows less variation between the city and metro area than one might expect, he added. Regarding the highest level of educational attainment in the metro area, roughly half the population

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¹ These data are from the 2019 American Community Survey single-year estimates, available at https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-kits/2020/acs-1year.html.

has less than an associate degree, more than 25 percent attained a high school diploma, and about 10 to 12 percent of the population did not complete high school (Figure 2-2). The only significant difference for the city is that a slightly higher proportion of its population did not get a high school diploma. “We know that workers that have a high school degree or less are significantly challenged and that many of the job losses have been concentrated in lower-skilled, lower-educational-expectation jobs in the crisis,” said Andreason.

Unemployment Data

Metro Birmingham’s unemployment rate in 2019 was below 4 percent, which put it among the nation’s metropolitan areas with the lowest unemployment rates. Unemployment in the city, however, was considerably higher in 2019, at 7.3 percent. In 2020, unemployment in the metro area spiked in March and April, as it did throughout the country, and while it has declined since then, unemployment remains around three times higher than in the same period in 2019.² Unemployment claims data for the state of Alabama—data unavailable for Birmingham city or metro area—show that

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² Comparable data for the city of Birmingham were not yet available at the time of this workshop.

women have fared significantly worse than men during the pandemic. In September 2020, 57 percent of the claimants in Alabama were women, even though women make up only 47 percent of the state’s workforce. Similarly, 46 percent of the claimants were under age 35 and 53.5 percent were Black, even though those two demographic groups represent only 35.8 percent and 24.9 percent, respectively, of the state’s workforce (Figure 2-3). Andreason noted that during the week of September 19, more workers were on the new

Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Program for nontraditional workers, part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, than were on traditional unemployment. Carpenter commented that a disproportionate percentage of Black unemployment speaks both to job quality and to who has access to jobs that pay a family-supporting wage.

Looking at the weekly employment claims by industry across Alabama showed that 15 percent of the claims in September 2020 were from workers in the food industry; 13 percent were in administrate support and waste management, which includes staffing firms; 10.5 percent were in manufacturing; 9.5 percent were in retail trade; 7.3 percent were in healthcare, and 3.9 percent were in construction (Figure 2-4).³ Andreason pointed out that

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³ Unemployment claims by industry were only available by state, and not by city or metropolitan area.

a significant portion of the claims in Alabama were in jobs that are difficult to do remotely. In terms of the risk of permanent job loss arising from the pandemic, he explained that the Atlanta Federal Reserve’s analysis suggested that the total risk of employment loss in Birmingham was lower than for other southern cities because of its mix of employers. The Atlanta Federal Reserve’s analysis did show, however, that Birmingham was at higher risk of permanently losing what economists call middle-skill jobs—those that pay above the median wage—compared to other southern cities. He noted that looking just at so-called opportunity jobs—those that do not require a bachelor’s degree but pay over the median wage—shows that many at risk of being lost permanently are those that are difficult to perform remotely, such as repair workers, insurance claim processors, and carpenters. What these data point to, said Andreason, is the critical need to focus on helping people who were in high-quality jobs likely to be lost permanently to transition to future opportunities.

Metro Birmingham’s industry mix, he continued, suggests that it might be somewhat more insulated from the risk of permanent job loss. Estimates from the Congressional Budget Office in 2006 on how a potential influenza pandemic would affect regional economies suggested that Birmingham’s metro area would be slightly less affected than would Alabama as a whole,

though the effect would still be large (Arnold et al., 2006). Pre-pandemic estimates suggest that 28.6 percent of Birmingham’s workers would be able to work from home, which Andreason said was comparable to the state estimate as well as those for many metropolitan areas nationwide (BLS, 2019a, 2019b).

Internet Connectivity

The ability to work from home during the pandemic has had a strong impact on individuals’ possibility of keeping a job that converted to a remote environment or gaining employment that requires remote work, as well as adults’ and children’s ability to do remote learning and training. In this respect, broadband internet access, which gives a person access to the internet on a useful computing device for work and learning, is a critical consideration. An analysis of broadband access by census track for the Birmingham metro area suggests that internet access is a regionwide issue affecting residents in urban, exurban, and rural areas alike, though the reasons why a given household may not have broadband internet can include not having it available in their neighborhood, not being able to afford it, and not choosing to subscribe to it. Nearly 85 percent of all households in the Birmingham metro area have a high-speed internet subscription, compared to 76.9 percent of households in the city proper. Almost 17 percent of households in the metro area access the internet only through a cellular data plan, compared to 20.6 percent in the city. Just over 40 percent of households in both the metro area and the city earning less than $20,000 have no internet subscription at all. Across the metro area, 72.8 percent of all households have a desktop or laptop computer, compared to 60.6 percent in the city; 12.7 percent in the metro area and 19.1 have only a smartphone; and 8.5 percent in the metro area and 13.8 percent in the city have no computing device through which to access the internet. “About one in five households in the city of Birmingham access the internet on their cellphone only,” said Andreason. “Imagine doing work, school, or job training on a cellphone only.” In other words, he said, internet access is important, but so, too is the hardware people use to interface with the internet when thinking about developing learning and work platforms and designing interventions to help people navigate the current crisis. He noted that these challenges can have a disproportionate impact on women and Black residents.

BIRMINGHAM’S ECONOMIC OUTLOOK PRIOR TO AND DURING COVID-19

The workshop’s first panel session featured three speakers who discussed pre-COVID investments in workforce training programs and the impact of the pandemic on their workforce alignment and learner access. The speakers were Joseph Parilla, metropolitan policy program fellow of the Brookings Institution, and Sanjay Singh, advisor and board member of Pack Health, which has developed a patient-centered digital health coaching program for individuals with chronic health issues. After the two short presentations, Antiqua Cleggett, executive director of Central Six AlabamaWorks!, the state’s workforce and economic development agency serving the Birmingham metropolitan area, moderated a discussion among the panelists and workshop participants.

Speaking first, Parilla noted that the Brookings Institution has partnered with the city of Birmingham and a network of corporate and university leaders since 2019 to develop an inclusive economic development strategy for the following reasons:

• Birmingham, as a majority Black city in an older industrial region, is a bellwether for many of the challenges the country has been facing regarding structural racism.
• There was a change moment with the election of a new mayor and a collection of corporate and civic leaders who recognized that it was time to act given that the interests and goals of the city’s public, private, and civic sectors were aligned.
• Birmingham has significant assets upon which to build an economic development strategy, identify labor market opportunities, and accomplish something significant for the city.

Parilla explained that a new mechanism called Prosper Birmingham, established by a group of local leaders and funders, was used to carry out a market assessment of the economic conditions of the region and identified key factors affecting the situation. An important source of information for this effort was a labor market assessment from the Building (it) Together coalition (Bradley et al., 2018), and, along with an alliance with the Brookings Institution, they identified disconnects between education and training efforts and the job requirements of local workplaces seeking to fill positions. “That foundation led to a new understanding of where there are

in-demand career opportunities and how that aligns with the education system,” said Parilla.

Another critical piece of this effort was the availability of a new generation of in-demand training programs designed to complement traditional training programs in a way that recognizes the challenges of working with people who may come from a background of economic scarcity. These programs provide wrap-around services to stabilize the trainees’ lives and allow them to upscale their skills into something that is in demand. As an example, he cited Innovate Birmingham, which provides several programs to meet the demand for technology talent among employers in the city without requiring people to go the route of attending a two- or four-year institution. These programs, said Parilla, offer curricula informed by industry and provide necessary resources to help those who enroll in the program to address barriers in their lives. Another of the city’s programs is the Birmingham Promise, which Parilla called a generational investment in the city’s young people. Birmingham Promise offers both college scholarships for students in Birmingham’s city schools and apprenticeship opportunities at local companies.

These types of programs, said Parilla, tell participants that if they take advantage of educational and training opportunities, the city will have their back and invest in them. “That is an incredible civic gesture that the mayor has led, and that the corporate community has rallied behind, but it is also smart because the future of the Birmingham economy, those employers, and any sort of successful civil society is those kids,” he said. In closing, Parilla said that for all of Birmingham’s challenges that Andreason laid out, leadership across the city is behind these programs, which is why he and his colleagues at Brookings are “super bullish” on Birmingham’s future.

Fulfilling a Need for Health Advisors

Singh opened his remarks by noting that Birmingham has undergone a massive transition since 1993, having worked through four iterations of change and now starting its fifth. He then explained that Pack Health is a digital health advising company that helps people with chronic conditions manage their daily health when they are not interfacing with a healthcare system. One of Pack Health’s tasks is to develop a workforce of health advisors, a position for which no college or university in the country offers a degree. Instead, the company recruits community health workers, registered dieticians, social workers, nutritionists, and other people from an allied

health background and puts them through an intense, six-month training program that it designed and that has now become virtual. Over time, each health advisor will specialize in a platform area or condition, such as oncology or cardiometabolic disorders. Singh noted that all of the health advisors’ interactions with their clients are virtual, taking place through either email, phone calls, or texts. He explained that every client is assigned to a single health advisor for at least 90 days and that the health advisors are only available during set times arranged between the client and advisor, not 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

As this field of health advisor has evolved and enough people have taken this career path, the National Board of Medical Examiners created a curriculum for certification as a health and wellness coach.⁴ Pack Health has adopted this certification, and, in addition to coursework, requires all its students to coach for 1,000 hours before becoming eligible to take the certification exam. Singh noted that since this program is not the company’s primary source of income, it has set the price of enrollment to be the most affordable in the job training marketplace, allowing displaced workers to make a career change or sharpen their skills. In addition, his company is working with Carpenter’s Birmingham Strong initiative to provide a pathway for displaced employees who do not have health backgrounds to become customer success representatives. This position serves as an assistant to the health advisors, in much the same way that a pharmacy technician assists a pharmacist. With experience and ongoing interest, customer success representatives can apply for the health advisor program. For those individuals, the company pays their tuition, fees, and books. As a final comment, Singh explained that since the company was created to offer virtual programs, there has been minimal disruption to its programs during the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, he added, the company has tripled in size since March 15, 2020, and expects to double again over the next 12 months.

Discussion

The biggest changes Parilla has observed in Birmingham’s workforce training programs since COVID’s emergence have been educational and training institutions learning how to operate in a remote, online environment and the creation of a crisis mitigation strategy called Birmingham Strong. Birmingham Strong’s mission is to take displaced workers and serve

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⁴ Additional information is available at https://nbhwc.org/.

as the bridging mechanism between idle workers and efforts to address the most significant social and public health problems in the city triggered by the pandemic. While Birmingham Strong realized quickly that it would not be able to place every unemployed worker, it could steer a significant number of them into this program and pay them $15 to $25 an hour. Parilla’s colleagues at the Brookings Institution wrote about this program and now other cities are trying the same approach (Ross et al., 2020). He noted, too, that future federal relief packages might include efforts to scale this program, given the long-term effects of the pandemic that will leave some workers unemployed for a considerable time and create civic and social challenges. Singh added that the pandemic is forcing organizations that need employees to hire and train them remotely, which few are set up to do.

Regarding potential barriers to workforce development partnerships, Parilla suggested identifying sectors in the local environment that have a big enough need for employees that employers will be willing to put the time and resources into the partnership. He said that resources will always be a challenge, for even though moving someone from a training program into a career pathway is less expensive than sending them to a four-year degree program, doing so still costs $8,000 to $10,000, which may not be affordable for someone who is unemployed. Equally important, said Cleggett, is helping displaced workers pull together their workforce profiles that can help them understand where they have transferrable skills and to provide help navigating the training and employment systems, which are not always user-friendly.

To assist higher education institutions, industry, and state and federal policy makers in meeting workforce demands resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, Parilla suggested operationalizing remote training and using the pandemic to further higher education’s use of online learning. Such actions would facilitate lifelong learning and help these institutions sustain themselves into the future. He called on the federal government to use this historic labor market crisis as an opportunity to invest 10 times as much as usual in workforce development so that institutions can reach people on the scale needed to address the sheer number of displaced workers. Singh noted the need for more micro-credentialing opportunities that students could earn while still in school to short-circuit the need to further train an individual after they have received their college degree. The challenge, he said, is to compress the time scale required for new employees to become productive employees.

CHANGES IN WORKFORCE TRAINING PROGRAMS IN BIRMINGHAM

In the workshop’s second session, four panelists discussed emerging workforce training programs for the Birmingham region and efforts to address labor inequities exacerbated by the pandemic. The panelists were Suzanna Fritzberg, executive director of Birmingham Strong; Rachel Harmon, chief executive officer of Birmingham Promise, a program that provides college scholarships and apprenticeship opportunities at local companies for Birmingham high school students; Waymond Jackson, chief executive officer of Ed Farm, an organization that promotes innovation in education to increase educational equity, improve learning outcomes through technology, and prepare the future workforce; and Emily Wykle, acting principal investigator and board member of Innovate Birmingham—a coalition of more than 15 community partners and 30 employers working to meet the rapidly growing local demand for an information technology (IT) workforce by harnessing the potential of under- and unemployed residents in Central Alabama—and director of external affairs at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. LaChaun Banks, associate director of the Ash Center’s Innovations in Government Program at the Harvard Kennedy School, moderated a discussion among the panelists and workshop attendees.

Birmingham Strong

Birmingham Strong’s flagship program is the Birmingham Service Corps, launched in May 2020, and its major funder is the city of Birmingham, though all its activities are designed to be reimbursable through the CARES Act. Fritzberg noted that Birmingham residents were already experiencing extreme levels of poverty—nearly half of the city’s families lived in poverty before the pandemic—and many neighborhoods in the city are no stranger to some of the dire unemployment numbers seen now, particularly neighborhoods that are majority Black.

Birmingham Strong modeled the Service Corps on some of the Great Depression–era work relief programs with the goal of connecting unemployed residents with paid volunteer opportunities that address community needs. In general, the program prioritizes building skills among the participants for growth industries that will best position the participants to compete for jobs in the future. At the time of the workshop, the

program had placed over 350 residents into paid work positions that pay between $16 and $22 an hour. Two-thirds of corps members placed into paid positions are people of color, and 63 percent are Black. Fritzberg said that for 90 percent of the participants, Service Corp work is a key factor in their ability to pay their rent or utility payments, not fall behind on debt repayment, and meet basic economic needs. In addition, over 2,800 small businesses have been assisted through a call center, staffed by Corps members, that provides CARES federal assistance advice and administers small business technical assistance programs.

According to the Building (it) Together report, new job postings in Birmingham are down by nearly 50 percent, and the Birmingham metropolitan area stands to lose 14,000 jobs for individuals with a high school diploma or less by the fourth quarter of 2024 (Bradley et al., 2018). Fritzberg said that the skills acquired in the Birmingham Service Corps can be the foundation for new career trajectories in data collection and management, client services, and precision population health, an emerging industry. Toward that end, the Birmingham Strong model leverages COVID relief and recovery funding toward earn-and-learn workforce development rooted in employer partnerships and targeted toward community need. The program focuses on workers between ages 32 and 55 and could evolve in ways that more closely align it with the formal workforce ecosystem and a regional workforce development strategy.

Birmingham Promise

Harmon described how Birmingham Promise started as a campaign promise to capitalize on the inherent value of local talent to strengthen the city’s economy, eventually became one of the city’s strategic initiatives, and now functions as an independent nonprofit organization. The organization has two programmatic streams: a scholarship program similar to the more than 300 other Promise programs across the country, and a youth apprenticeship program. The scholarship program focuses on providing postsecondary school access and ensuring postsecondary success for students in the city’s schools, over 90 percent of whom are Black and about half of whom come from families that experience poverty.

In the apprenticeship program, juniors and seniors in high school participate in paid, work-based learning opportunities. The program focuses on four industry clusters based on the research done for the Building (it) Together report (Bradley et al., 2018). “We wanted to ensure that we were

prioritizing industries and occupations that are high opportunity and where students would have a higher chance of ending up in a job that is family-sustaining or a career that’s family-sustaining,” Harmon explained.

She noted that one of the most important elements of Birmingham Promise is that it is inherently collaborative and is done in close partnership with the city’s employer community, its K-12 system, and the region’s higher education institutions, including the University of Alabama at Birmingham. This multi-institutional partnership creates smoother pathways that are easier for students from underrepresented groups to navigate, which is important from a systems change perspective.

The first class of postsecondary scholarship students started in college in the autumn of 2020, and the second cohort of youth apprentices started in January 2021. Harmon noted that 75 percent of the program’s students who started college in the fall said their college experience had been affected negatively by the pandemic, whether due to a parent losing a job or the challenge of attending school in an unfamiliar virtual learning environment.

Ed Farm Programs

Jackson applauded the city of Birmingham for using data to drive progress in programs, particularly as they relate to serving people in the community. One thing these data illustrated was that the city did not have many residents with the digital skills needed to thrive in the 21st century job market, or residents with the skills to meet the projected six-fold increase in computer science jobs that would be available over the next 10 years and would require a bachelor’s degree. This realization mobilized Jackson and several colleagues to approach Apple and ask them to help make Birmingham the epicenter for education, technology, training, and coding. The result was Ed Farm, launched in February 2020 with the goal of providing all people—and he stressed all—with the tools they would need to fill and create the jobs of the future.

Those jobs of the future, said Jackson, require individuals who have a deep ability to think critically and use digital skills, including coding, to solve problems. To give people those skills, Ed Farm offers a program called Pathways, an adult learner boot camp that teaches Apple’s relatively simple-to-learn coding language. This 11-week program, which meets for three hours two nights per week, provides city residents with the opportunity to become interested in coding and gain some initial skills that can perhaps

interest them in computing careers or develop the type of transferrable skills that local employers have indicated they need.

Jackson explained that when the pandemic struck, it forced Ed Farm to shift to a virtual instructional model and provide Apple MacBooks and iPads to its Pathways participants. The benefits of going virtual, he noted, were that it sped up efforts to provide those computing devices and it eliminated the transportation barrier that some participants faced in terms of getting to class.

Innovate Birmingham

Innovate Birmingham was designed around two critical challenges facing the city, explained Wykle. The first was the fact that Birmingham is the second fastest growth market in the nation for IT jobs, and the local talent pool cannot keep up with that growth. The second challenge is that there are some 26,000 disconnected youth in the city who have great capability but have not had the “on ramps” to IT careers. As she put it, talent is distributed equally in society, but opportunity is not.

Innovate Birmingham started with a $6 million seed grant from the Department of Labor’s America’s Promise program and has grown into a workforce training program that provides multiple pathways to technology careers. Full-time, 13-week boot camps focused on software development and data analytics are the program’s “bread and butter,” said Wykle. Innovate Birmingham also provides Alabama’s first registered IT apprenticeship program in collaboration with its workforce partner, Central Six. This is an earn-to-learn opportunity for people who want to get a foot in the working world and acquire experience in a low-risk manner, she explained.

At the time of the workshop, Innovate Birmingham had served 774 participants with a 92 percent retention rate to completion (Figure 2-5). Wykle noted that in addition to the program being free, program staff provide wrap-around services, such as childcare and housing assistance, as well as professional development support including coaching. The program’s demographics mirror those of the city of Birmingham. Wykle also highlighted the fact that Innovate Birmingham has played a key role in shaping regional workforce development efforts in the IT realm along with its nonprofit and K-12 partners and in supporting students when they go to one of the regional institutions of higher education and then into the working world. She added that the program’s technology council, comprising employer partners, higher education partners, and workforce

partners, provides a venue to discuss what is needed to prepare students to be successful members of the IT workforce.

In terms of how the pandemic has affected Innovate Birmingham, Wykle said the biggest shift has been to move all of its boot camps and services to a virtual environment. This effort included creating a loaner program for computing devices such as laptops and tablets, and internet hotspots. In late spring 2020, there was a large increase in applications from furloughed and displaced workers, and the program has been able to serve many of these individuals, in part because the pandemic struck just as the program was already planning to expand across the six-county metropolitan region. She also credited several of the program’s employer partners who designated scholarships targeted at people of color who lost jobs because of the pandemic to participate in Innovate Birmingham.

Discussion

When asked how Birmingham Strong’s Service Corps was going to move forward once emergency federal funding to deal with the pandemic ends, Fritzberg said the program has some generous private sector philanthropic supporters in addition to its CARES Act funding. The hope, she said, is that by demonstrating that the Service Corps is having a real impact on the residents of Birmingham, this support will continue. In addition, the program receives a staffing fee for a significant portion of the jobs that the program supports. In response to a question about the types of

skills Service Corps participants are gaining, some program participants are learning client management and customer support skills; others are learning data management skills. Currently, she said, the program does not yet have much data to identify the career paths that unfold from these experiences. The program is looking to expand its efforts on small business support by supporting Small Business Administration loan applications.

When asked how much interaction there is between Birmingham Strong and the traditional safety net to help people who are struggling financially to get into these programs, Fritzberg said that Birmingham Strong makes a point of employing individuals who are not eligible for unemployment. Jackson added that Ed Farm has let all of the local social services agencies and nonprofits know about the program’s offering. He noted, too, that the corporate community is starting to provide computing devices and internet connections for city residents who are having to take advantage of safety net programs. Both Harmon and Wykle noted in closing that the pandemic has provided a way of focusing in a singular manner on addressing inequities, though it is still unclear whether these programs are helping to reduce inequities.

HIGHER EDUCATION PROGRAMMING FOR THE BIRMINGHAM WORKFORCE

The workshop’s final panel session featured five speakers from institutions of higher education in Alabama: Jarralynne Agee, provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at Miles College; Cynthia Anthony, interim president of Lawson State Community College; Pam Benoit, senior vice president of academic affairs and provost at the University of Alabama at Birmingham; Guin Robinson, associate dean of economic development at Jefferson State Community College; and Daniel Coleman, president of Birmingham Southern College. Cassius Johnson, senior director of the Education Strategy Group, which works with education leaders and employers to design, scale, and implement strategies that improve attainment and advance equity, moderated the final discussion period.

Benoit noted that one consequence of the pandemic is that students are concerned about the types of jobs that will be available when they finish their degrees. She discussed the ongoing initiatives related to the science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine workforce at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, including the development of new interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree programs in bioinformatics, immunology,

genetics and genomics sciences, cancer biology, and entrepreneurship. She also said that students have shown more interest in public health as a major since the start of the pandemic.

At the graduate level, the university is offering stackable certificates for specific competencies that can be turned into an interdisciplinary master of science. For example, a student who wants to work in research laboratory management might compile certificates in lab management and in leadership and professional development to create a master of science degree. To prepare to work in a nonprofit community health organization a student could combine a certificate in nonprofit management with one in public health. “There is a wide variety of different kinds of certificates that can be stacked together to be flexible and adaptive to changing workforce needs, especially in light of COVID,” said Benoit.

Another initiative is the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Lifelong Learning program, led by a new associate provost charged with identifying opportunities to extend both credit and non-credit courses to respond to workforce development needs. Benoit said there is a great deal of interest in this program offering courses on issues such as mental health and resilience. The final initiative she discussed is the Alabama Advanced Specialized Skills, Education, and Training (ASSET) microcredentials program. The purpose of Alabama ASSET is to rapidly meet dynamic workforce needs for employment, advancement, or transferable skills for career mobility. Individuals earn these ASSET microcredentials by taking between six and 15 hours of graduate-level courses at any participating institution in Alabama. These credits can be applied later to a formal master of science program if desired.

Regarding workforce retention, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the state’s largest single employer, has established childcare programs for employees at its campus hotel that includes virtual learning assignments done with support of the university’s students. The university has also partnered with the McWane Center—Birmingham’s science museum—to provide full-day childcare and high-quality programming in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Next, Robinson described Jefferson State Community College as an institution that serves a four-county area in central Alabama. Enrollment has dropped by just over 2 percent between fall 2019 and fall 2020 semesters. Jefferson State offers non-credit workforce education opportunities that provide skills training for specific, entry-level jobs. In this program, students acquire skills for immediate employment instead of credit toward

a college degree. These nine-week to nine-month courses are offered across multiple sectors, including healthcare, IT, manufacturing, and industrial training, aligned with industry-recognized credentials. The courses are employer-led and informed by ever-changing labor market data. Jefferson State also offers several scholarships for healthcare training programs and for online IT programs directed toward women. It also has training programs for dislocated workers affected by COVID-19 layoffs that are funded by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. These programs include a line worker program with the Alabama Power Company using scholarships provided by an Appalachian Regional Commission grant, a vision assistant program in collaboration with the Callahan Eye Foundation, and a clinical medical assistant program in conjunction with the University of Alabama at Birmingham and St. Vincent’s Hospital.

Miles College, said Agee, has changed its focus to one that aligns its academic programming with the workforce needs of Alabama’s industries. The college’s 100-plus-year history as a liberal arts institution means it can train its students on a wide range of subjects and have them be well versed in the information literacy, communication skills, and people skills they need to succeed in the business world. At the same time, said Agee, Miles College is helping its students build the technical skills to help them to be more successful at their jobs. Currently, given its partnerships with both local and national organizations, Miles College is focusing on artificial intelligence, security and cyber security, data science, and Swift coding. It is also launching an e-gaming program, both as an extracurricular e-gaming club and an interdisciplinary minor with business, communications, computer sciences, and psychology.

Agee explained that her institution is establishing internships, both in person and virtual, through the Birmingham Business Alliance and various federal agencies. Virtual internships are proving valuable for students with transportation issues or who cannot travel to Washington, DC, to participate in internships with federal agencies. Miles College is also creating certificate programs so that its students can build extra skills.

Lawson State Community College, explained Anthony, has chosen to use the pandemic as an opportunity for reinvention and to reimagine itself as an education and training entity. The pandemic has forced her and her colleagues to examine its processes and procedures and adopt new ways of doing things that include virtual, online, remote, hybrid, and distance learning in order to thrive both in the pandemic and post-pandemic era. Coming from a student services background, she stressed the importance of

thinking about not just the teaching part of education but also how students learn and how they can embrace the training they receive.

Anthony also stressed the importance of collaborations and partnerships in her institution’s retooling and redesigning activities so that it will have an impact on the workforce. She noted that in terms of programs, much of the activity is around expanding existing programs and adding hands-on training and simulations. For example, Lawson State Community College is part of a virtual reality–based workforce initiative sponsored by Alabama Power, the regional utility.

In the day’s final panel presentation, Coleman provided a brief history of Birmingham Southern College, which was founded as a liberal arts college in 1856 as an institution that would serve the community and help develop a future workforce and leadership for the community. He then discussed data showing the top five “hard-to-fill” jobs in the Birmingham metropolitan area that require a bachelor’s degree, both pre-COVID-19 and during the pandemic: registered nurse, sales representative, software developer/engineer, business development manager, and retail store manager. The highest-paying job on that list, according to Coleman, is software developer and engineer, which requires a broader skill set that grows broader every day.

Coleman acknowledged that the Birmingham metropolitan area’s economy has been growing slowly for the past few decades, particularly compared to cities such as Nashville, Tennessee; Charlotte, North Carolina; and even Chattanooga, Tennessee. The key issue to him is that local employers are not filling these high-demand jobs with Birmingham residents, which in his experience in the business world and in talking with local companies means one thing: they are either hiring from other places or setting up offices outside of Birmingham.

Though Birmingham Southern is a small institution—its enrollment is approximately 1,100 students—it has produced many of the city’s leaders, including 10 percent of the Birmingham bar and many leaders of local nonprofit organizations. However, going forward, he expects that the sectors of the local economy with leaders who graduated from Birmingham Southern will be much different than today. “Our challenge is to figure out how to keep this relevance and the importance of this institution here, and in doing so, we have to integrate new types of approaches, such as data science and technological skill sets, into the liberal arts curriculum, and demonstrate how we can apply these skills the same way that we apply other skills in liberal arts,” said Coleman.

Discussion

Johnson observed that a common theme of the five presentations was the use of labor market information to inform the work the five higher education institutions are doing. Another theme, he said, was the ability or the need to be agile and pivot during the pandemic. However, several speakers noted challenges to engaging individuals who could benefit from further education and training and keeping them enrolled in the various programs their institutions offer. Anthony noted that Birmingham does a good job of connecting students to the wrap-around services they need to succeed at community colleges and four-year institutions. Getting the financial resources to create new programs, however, is another barrier. She also said that her institution, as well as the Alabama community college system overall, has put a great deal more focus on the enrollment management process and the student experience, from the initial recruitment through graduation and into the workforce. She added that it is doubly important now, with education moving to a remote environment, to engage students, get them into programs, and keep them enrolled.

When asked if the tension around racial injustice triggered by the death of George Floyd was showing up in her work at Miles College, a historically Black college, Agee highlighted the new Miles College Institute for Economic and Social Justice, which will allow the institution to work with its partners, including its business sector partners, to define what moving forward looks like in terms of racial equity. She noted that many Miles College graduates become the first Black person to accept certain positions in some companies or institutions, whether in Birmingham or elsewhere, and they have the skills and talent to perform in that environment.

Responding to a question about creating authentic regional connections with employers to create pathways into careers and work-based learning experiences, Agee said that institutions of higher education need businesses to work together on building bridges that will help students succeed in the academic environment and then in the work environment. Benoit said that in addition to partnerships, she wants to see more businesses represented on college and university advisory boards to help develop curricula that are more responsive to businesses’ needs and to serve as mentors to these students. Along the same lines, Anthony pointed to the importance of having education at the table in the early stages of regional business development and recruitment activities so that higher education institutions know what is coming and have time to develop programs to meet the needs of new and developing industries.

CLOSING REMARKS

To conclude the day’s discussions, Carpenter; Maria Flynn, president and chief executive officer of Jobs for the Future; and Sarah McMillan, director of workforce and talent development for the city of Birmingham, summarized the key themes, challenges, and policy opportunities around workforce training and program development for Birmingham. McMillan commented that prior to the pandemic, Birmingham’s metro area unemployment rate was under 4 percent, while the city’s unemployment rate was nearly double that. By September 2020, roughly 54 percent of unemployment claims were for Black people in the city of Birmingham, even though Black workers only account for a quarter of the city’s workforce. She called this a “concerning number that further illustrates the racial divide in the city, in our country, and a need for equitable and inclusive responsive work force and economic development initiatives, particularly in the city.” Women were also disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Given that so much work has become remote and virtual, the digital divide is set to further increase the disparities affecting women and people of color.

Prior to the pandemic, the city commissioned the Building (it) Together report that highlighted the fragility of certain industries and the jobs that automation was putting at risk. COVID-19, said McMillan, has accelerated this prediction, particularly for jobs held by a large portion of the female and Black populations in the city (Bradley et al., 2018). The Building (it) Together report highlighted the need to create opportunities for more of the city’s workforce to advance into higher-paying, family-sustaining jobs and the need for focused and intentional efforts to close equity gaps and promote access to jobs in growing industries.

McMillan then noted that today’s sessions conveyed one crucial lesson. “When the pandemic first hit, city leaders believed that it was crucial to respond strategically to avoid losing time, because with each day that went by, the consequences of crisis sharpened. “Folks in Birmingham, the people that are directly impacted, cannot wait for us to create a novel, new, beautiful, fancy, shiny program. They need access to resources now,” she stated.

She applauded the collaborative community efforts that enabled Birmingham Strong to place over 300 residents—mostly Black and female individuals—in various jobs, and Birmingham Promise’s commitment to youth development and its investment in the marriage of workforce and educational experiences for young people that will ultimately shape their future and the future of Birmingham. She called out the collaborative efforts

of Pack Health, Innovate Birmingham, and the area’s higher education institutions to sustain a sense of long-term economic security and career advancement for the city’s citizens, and credited the city’s partnership with Birmingham Promise and Ed Farm with enabling the city to invest in its future citizens to create a prosperous Birmingham.

McMillan concluded, “Today, we learned that we are set up for success, and to achieve the city’s longterm economic goals of creating an inclusive economy while offsetting the negative impacts of this pandemic, through our efforts in fostering workforce development, expanding economic opportunities for marginalized communities, and just creating a more robust community here in Birmingham. . . . we have the right people on the bus.”

Flynn remarked that one thing she came away with after seeing the data that Andreason presented to open the workshop is that it is not just the unemployment rate that is important, but also the interplay between the unemployment rate and the poverty rate. That interplay means that workforce development efforts should not just be about getting people into jobs, but getting them into well-paying, family-sustaining jobs in an inclusive and equitable manner.

Reflecting on the first panel’s message that resources are important, Flynn agreed that an increase in federal investment in workforce development is critical, but also suggested that innovative financing models are important given the likelihood that federal investment will not be enough. “Even in the best-case scenario where we see a dramatic increase in federal investment, there are still going to be gaps in resources,” said Flynn. Vehicles such as career-impact bonds and income-share agreements may be useful, and Jobs for the Future is launching a financing-the-future initiative to look specifically at innovative financing models for workforce development.

From the second and third panels, Flynn took away the importance of having these various programs coordinate their activities and how they can help someone decide which of these programs would be the best one for their needs and skills. In that respect, she noted the importance of building an agile career navigation system. She also said that the digital divide that existed before the pandemic was exacerbated by workplace and school closures that required shifting to a more remote and digital world. This situation increased awareness about the lack of infrastructure and hardware for groups not prepared to work remotely. For the final panel her key takeaways were the importance of real-time labor market information and having the agility to adapt to changes in the labor market. In all, she said, she found the day inspiring.

Providing the final comments of the day, Carpenter agreed with Flynn that the interplay of unemployment and poverty was important, and so, too, is the interplay of labor force participation on race and gender dynamics. For him, the pandemic has underscored the fact that too many people of color and women are dependent on jobs that would not be considered quality or opportunity jobs. Addressing that disparity, he said, is going to continue to be the most important challenge facing communities like Birmingham.

His take from the employer perspective of the first panel was the importance of being nimble and adapting swiftly to a changing environment. Similarly, the second panel featured organizations that were also able to pivot quickly in the way they delivered their programs and scaled their efforts to reach more participants by going online and moving their case management model online. He thought that the idea of creating stackable credentials was interesting and wants to see more about how those are aligned with demand in the area. He was also impressed with the extraordinary efforts that the local colleges and community colleges made to move their programs online and continue to reach their students.

The final undercurrent that ran through the day, said Carpenter, was the use of federal funding. “We need to figure out how we are connecting to Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act funding and maximizing CARES Act funding,” he said, while also noting that Alabama was one of eight states selected for Reimagining Workforce grants to help people displaced by the pandemic identify work opportunities. He noted that while there is a great deal of action in the community, translating that action into an organized and systematic way of on-boarding folks who have been hurt by the pandemic disproportionately—women and people of color—should be at the forefront of these strategies going forward.