‘Build Better Careers’ Helps CAEL Build Its Presence in Charlotte

In 2022, CAEL received a $15.7 million grant from Truist Foundation to strengthen financial career pathways in financial services and adjacent industries. The initiative, Build Better Careers, will help more than 6,000 adult learners connect with rewarding education-employment pathways in five regions.

Build Better Careers is designed to create upward mobility for individuals from underserved communities by forging career paths in professions and industries historically unavailable to them. It focuses on access to affordable postsecondary education and training, connections to employers offering higher-wage jobs and long-term career opportunities, and helping employers recruit, retain, and advance adult learners. 

Build Better Careers leverages a wealth of regional and national partners to help working adults build on their existing competencies to prepare for employment success. In Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, more than 130 students have completed BankWork$, a free eight-week training program. The Build Better Careers component was launched through collaboration among Goodwill Industries of the Southern Piedmont, CareerWork$, CAEL, the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance, and the City of Charlotte. Students employed through the program earn an average hourly wage of $20.15.

Now, CAEL is expanding its partnership with the city, joining the Future Forward Charlotte initiative. Launched earlier this month, Future Forward Charlotte is dedicated to assessing regional talent needs in the region’s high-growth industries and establishing career pathways to connect residents to rewarding occupations within them.

In the initiative’s initial phase, now underway, experts from CAEL and the city’s Economic Development Department are engaging human resources leaders, a key step toward optimizing the alignment of education and training offerings with industry needs. Next month, Future Forward Charlotte will host roundtables to convene hiring leaders from employers representing six key industries:

• Business and management.
• Advanced Manufacturing.
• Health Care.
• Life Sciences.
• Transportation.
• Technology. 

Their insight will complement CAEL’s analysis of local labor market data and its appraisal of talent pipelines. CAEL will incorporate these quantitative and qualitative inputs to lead career pathway mapping work for Future Forward Charlotte. As part of the process, it will prepare findings for each of the six industries that will be the basis of additional collaboration and individualized career pathways. 

Access to navigable pathways empowers jobseekers to make sound choices about education and training through a better understanding of how they can be layered on previous experience and help advance their careers. By raising awareness of not only rewarding career destinations but of the most efficient education and training routes to those jobs, career pathways support current and future workers as well as their employers. For example, by including clearly articulated opportunities for promotion and talent development from within, the pathways benefit employer retention as well as recruiting. 

CAEL performs similar career pathways mapping work throughout the country, customized for each region’s workforce needs. Information on such partnerships is available by contacting Doug Heckman, VP of Partnerships, at dheckman@cael.org