Business Roundtable, representing CEOs of leading U.S. companies from every sector of the economy, today released key principles for reauthorization of the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), encouraging policymakers to embrace them to “ensure a far more effective and efficient workforce investment system in this nation.”

“The Workforce Investment Act is an important tool for building a workforce equipped with the skills U.S. employers need, yet it has languished, unauthorized, for close to 13 years,” said Eric Spiegel, President & CEO, Siemens Corporation, and Vice Chair, Business Roundtable Education and Workforce Committee. “It’s long past time for this important Act to be renewed, and we encourage policymakers on both sides of the aisle to embrace the employer principles we have released today and reauthorize WIA without delay.”

The Business Roundtable key principles for creating more effective and efficient workforce investment system through WIA Reauthorization are:

• Business Driven: Provide for a strong and active role for the employer community. This involvement is critical for ensuring training and employment services are relevant to the jobs that are in demand today or will be in demand in the future.
• Less Bureaucracy: Be streamlined and efficient. Overlapping and duplicative funding streams are unnecessary and the administrative costs diminish funds that could be used for training. Overly complex federal rules and regulations, which micromanage state and local implementation of programs, drive away the willingness of business leaders to participate and create barriers to individuals seeking to obtain necessary services.
• Expanded Training for In-Demand Occupations: Have “preparing individuals for a career” as a main focus. Currently, too few individuals receive training under the Workforce Investment Act, in part due to the multiple hoops individuals must often go through to access training. This issue, along with better allocation of resources and more efficient delivery of services, must all be addressed.
• More Innovation: Enable new approaches for the delivery of employment and training services and promote innovations that expand access to training and make training relevant, such as industry-recognized credentials. It must also promote positive outcomes such as through pay-for-performance contracting.
• Performance Driven: Be driven by real accountability that is focused on outcomes that matter most — such as a job. A key objective is consistency across similar programs and the assurance that grantees and providers of services are accountable for results by measuring placements of those trained, the compensation and quality of the job and success on the job.
• Collaboration: Be fully engaged with the full array of local and regional partners, particularly community colleges and other postsecondary institutions that share similar missions and urgency for preparing individuals for careers.
• Better Information: Be driven by high-quality data so that high-quality labor market information drives training opportunities, participants are able to make informed career and training decisions among providers and program outcomes are reliable in order to ensure a robust and fair system of program accountability. 

Read the full principles here.