When COVID-19 arrived last year, Phoenix, like cities around the world, faced devastating health and economic consequences. As businesses temporarily closed and social distancing requirements were implemented to save lives, hundreds of thousands of workers were displaced, creating economic hardship and instability for families across the metro area. At the peak of the health and economic crisis, unemployment in Phoenix reached 12.5 percent, with workers in the leisure and hospitality industry facing the most significant and long lasting cuts. As was the case in most large U.S. cities, unemployment above 10 percent created immediate concerns about the ability of displaced workers to afford healthcare, food, and housing. And looking to the future, the city’s workforce and training system faced historic challenges.

Potentially permanent cutbacks in the leisure and hospitality industry raised a critical question for workers across Phoenix: how to retrain and employ tens of thousands of hospitality workers whose jobs may not exist after the pandemic. This would not be easy. Any retraining program would have to be remote, affordable, and flexible enough that workers managing family responsibilities from home could participate. Further, it would need to ensure that workers with limited broadband, lack of access to particular devices, or other technological hurdles could engage.

An effective retraining program for hospitality workers would also need to be efficient. Workers impacted by COVID-19 could not afford to undertake a lengthy training as they temporarily or permanently changed roles; once it was safe to do so, getting back into the workforce was an urgent priority. To make informed decisions, these workers deserved a sense of prospective wage levels, job availability, and the level of COVID-risk in new roles. Without visibility into where different training pathways led, workers would be understandably reluctant to undertake training in the midst of a pandemic.

Leadership at Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD) wanted to build short, accessible pathways between current and future roles for hospitality workers impacted by COVID-19. To do this, the team developed a process to test the skills of these workers while also giving them a sense of their options. Former service and hospitality workers in search of new opportunities took a simple skills evaluation that tested various personal and professional dimensions. At the end of this assessment, they were shown pathways to new careers that included the cost of training, location of training, time to completion, and prospective wages in the targeted role. Depending on their needs, workers were able to sign up for shorter or longer training through an arm of the Maricopa Community College System, with data forthcoming on program completion and post-training placement.

MCCCD has developed a process that they hope will guide workers in making training decisions for years to come. Their objective is to create, develop, and market short, affordable credit programs that will help workers quickly identify and add more skills and certifications that can help advance their careers.

Read the full article about retraining programs by Zach Neumann at The Aspen Institute.