What do Babe Ruth, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eliot Ness, Rosa Parks, Robert F. Kennedy, W.E.B. Du Bois, George W. Bush, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, and CAEL President Earl Buford have in common? They have all made an appearance at the City Club of Cleveland. On July 31, the City Club hosted Buford and Jill Rizika, the president and CEO of Towards Employment. In a moderated discussion, Rizika posed questions about workforce development, adult learning, and their critical role in economic mobility.
Like CAEL, Towards Employment, a workforce organization serving greater Cleveland, recently crossed the half-century milestone, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Towards Employment serves approximately 2,000 workers annually through skill development, employer partnerships, and career coaching.
Fittingly, Rizika first met Buford at a national conference in Milwaukee, which they both attended to discuss the effectiveness of a Towards Employment program that embedded coaches in workplaces to improve retention. At the time, Buford led WRTP/BIG-STEP, one of the first workforce intermediaries in the country.
That program would grow into what today is Towards Employment’s Employer Resource Network. The network’s focus on creating pathways to opportunity for workers highlights how Towards Employment’s and CAEL’s missions intersect, a synergy that afforded Rizika and Buford ample opportunity to develop their discussion’s theme, "Dignity of Work: Building Opportunity in a Changing Economy.”
Buford shared how his parents’ experience drove home the impact of workforce opportunity at an early age. His father had contended with the capricious and often callous nature of temporary jobs for several years. Then, he connected with an organization similar to Towards Employment.
“We call that the day we won the workforce lottery. It changed our lives forever,” said Buford. Thanks to the relationship the organization had with a major employer, jobs were guaranteed to all graduates of the electronics training program that enrolled his father. The job he landed became his career; he would retire from the company 30 years later.
Buford also shared that his mother, who completed her GED certificate, later attended college and went on to become a teacher. “My parents are the perfect example of the world that we work in,” Buford said of the challenges they overcame to access a rewarding career path.
It was a pathway he wanted to help others forge, initially, as a teacher, but eventually, from the workforce development side of the equation. Referring to the impact education-employment pathways had had on his own family, Buford wanted “to replicate that over and over and over again,” he told the forum. “Yes, I could do that from the classroom, but I think I could do it better working in the world of work.”
The rest, as they say, was history. Given that Buford ended up heading CAEL, which has always strived to link learning and work, it’s not surprising that his decision to focus on workforce development never meant losing focus on education and training.
In fact, Buford explained, much of the work is about filling gaps: aligning what jobs demand with what training delivers, filling seats at the table for critical cross-sector collaboration, and addressing blind spots that make navigating even the most rewarding pathways an uncertain prospect.
Bridging these gaps is essential to preventing immediate workforce wins from occurring at the expense of long-term economic mobility, Buford stressed. While praising programs that qualify workers for entry-level positions that provide a stable start toward a living wage, he painted the picture of the bigger challenge: enabling access to lifelong learning opportunities necessary to ensure that they can continue to advance in a rapidly changing labor market.
Unfortunately, when it comes to helping workers move from surviving to thriving in their career development, there is yet another gap. “There's no funding for that second layer or extended pathway,” said Buford. “It takes very courageous funders to … fund this extended pathways model.”
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In addition to more funding, more collaboration is needed to make living wages more accessible within the workforce system, according to Buford. Higher wages typically require a degree or advanced certificate, yet universities are not traditionally thought of as practitioners, he said. “We have to have our university partners more engaged in talent development. It's not a criticism, it's an opportunity.”
That opportunity is one of the things that drew him to CAEL, Buford said. He explained that traditional industry partnerships often focus on employers and labor, but are incomplete without community partners and educators. Without this broader alignment, Buford explained, it is difficult to identify and bridge the gaps between existing training certificates and actual industry requirements.
Such alignment is front and center in the "IEE" (industry-education partnerships) that are a hallmark of CAEL, Buford explained. Through initiatives like the Energy Providers Coalition for Education and the National Alliance for Communications Technology Education and Learning, CAEL is modeling sector-oriented partnership frameworks that embed university and online education directly into the partnership to ensure training modules are articulated and relevant.
That kind of close coordination enables another core CAEL tenet: all learning counts. Buford talked about how CAEL is introducing more workforce boards to the concept of credit for prior learning. Rather than forcing workers to sit through training on competencies they already possess, recognizing their prior learning expedites career progression and makes qualified workers more readily available within a talent pipeline.
To help streamline that process, CAEL offers Credit Predictor Pro, a web-based solution that guides learners through the process of documenting their work and learning experiences prior to -- or in between -- their college years. While Credit Predictor Pro is barely four years old, much like the adult learners and institutions it serves, it must continually adapt to address emerging challenges and opportunities, Buford indicated.
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Recognizing disparate sources of learning will only become more important as AI and other rapid changes point toward a future of work that is in many ways unrecognizable from what the norm was just a generation ago, he said. Buford, whose career also includes leading Partner4Work and Employ Milwaukee, joked that his mother, who served the same school district for decades, thinks he can’t keep a job. “But that just shows you how the world of work has evolved.”
Keeping up with that evolution, Buford stressed, will require every level of postsecondary education working more effectively with workforce boards and practitioners on behalf of employers, which in turn must see themselves as cocreators of the talent development ecosystem. “If all of that happens, and people know how to navigate, those talented individuals in the region can find their path, work hard, and be a functioning part of your community.”
A replay of the event is available at cityclub.org.