Giving Compass' Take:

• RAND has led research for a collaborative effort among companies, schools and other influencers in Appalachia to help local workers get adequate training for the 21st century job market.

• The main takeaway is that both technical and soft skills are in high demand, but many programs fall short on offering such education. This partnership (and perhaps others) could help fill the gap.

• For more on this topic, check out our comprehensive workforce development guide for donors.

In the lean years, when the steel mills closed and jobs vanished, when families locked up their homes and left, it wasn't clear how this community tucked into a bend in the Ohio River would even survive. The area “felt like it had had the breath kicked out of it,” one local council member said.

That was before companies discovered that the black shale beneath the ground here, once used to make schoolroom slates, harbored an enormous supply of natural gas. This part of Appalachia now produces more natural gas than Iran, and that means jobs. Head out toward the river here, and you can't miss a skyscraping city of construction cranes piecing together an ethane plant that will soon employ 600 people.

But with new opportunity has come an old problem. America's rusty system of workforce development has slipped further and further out of alignment with the needs of employers, sending workers into the labor market without the skills they need. In Appalachia, business leaders, schools, and other community stakeholders are now spending millions of dollars to recalibrate that system. With help from RAND researchers, they hope to build a model of workforce training for the 21st century.

Read the full article about the Appalachia partnership that addressed workforce change by Doug Irving at rand.org.