1 Ready to Work Los Angeles Career Academies. The Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, is receiving a $7 million grant to build out new career academies in six high schools that will focus on health care, biotechnology, and other technology-related industries. The program is backed by funding from the Irvine Foundation. The United Way of Greater Los Angeles, the Los Angeles workforce investment system, and Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce will help provide work-based learning opportunities to students, including 10,000 student summer internships. To further support such partnerships among education, workforce and industry, DOL will also promote and support regional workforce and industry partnerships that include business and industry, community colleges and training providers, labor unions, non-profits and community organizations, and philanthropy working together with the workforce system to promote economic competitiveness and create pathways to the middle class and beyond for a wide range of workers. In collaboration with DOC and tapping the expertise of other federal agencies, DOL’s Center for Workforce & Industry Partnerships will promote existing partnerships, catalyze new ones, and form a common vision and approach to workforce and industry partnerships. Job Matching: Data, Guidance, and Credentials to Empower Job seekers and Employers Today, an unemployed worker may submit her resume for countless job openings without getting a call back to interview or feedback as to what she should do differently in the future to improve her chances. Employers, on the other hand, report an inability to find skilled workers for jobs they want to fill: according to Manpower, 39 percent of U.S. companies reported difficulty filling positions in 2013 because of a lack of skills – a substantial increase from the 14 percent of employers who reported such difficulty in 2010.12 Improving job matching presents an opportunity to connect more job seekers to jobs that utilize their skills. It also promises benefits to employers, as the search costs of filling vacancies are high: according to one survey, the average U.S. company spends $3,500 per new hire in advertising costs and human resources staff salaries. 13 These costs can be severe. Solutions to this job matching problem would benefit employers and the American economy, cutting down job search costs, raising employee satisfaction, improving productivity and reducing costly employee turnover. Industry-recognized credentials can grease the wheels of job matching by allowing job seekers to signal clearly to employers what skills they possess. For example, the Cisco Certifications System (CCS) is a successful example of credentials that allow individuals to demonstrate their competencies to install, maintain, and troubleshoot Cisco networking equipment at ascending levels of sophistication, in ways that thousands of employers recognize and trust. Around 700,000 U.S. workers are certified in one or more of the 45 different CCS certifications, many of which are available at no cost. A number of other software platform companies – such as Microsoft, Esri, and MongoDB – offer such certifications, and many more should do so as a business strategy to ensure that their software is used effectively by their customers. 12 2013 Talent Shortage Survey Research Results,” ManpowerGroup (2013). 13 Karen O'Leonard, “The Talent Acquisition Factbook 2011,” Bersin & Associates (2011); Steven J. Davis, R. Jason Faberman, and John C. Haltiwanger, "The Establishment-Level Behavior of Vacancies and Hiring," The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2013). 16