The National Fund for Workforce Solutions is partnering with eight communities to engage employers in co-creating solutions with their workforce to improve job quality and career navigation

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Feb. 25, 2025) – The National Fund for Workforce Solutions is proud to announce a new collaboration with eight communities as part of Centering Workers in Job Design — an initiative that aims to help employers engage their employees to co-design new workplace practices that boost job quality, through increased compensation and/or better career navigation services.

The National Fund’s deep experience in leading efforts to improve job quality shows that when employers engage and empower employees to make critical decisions about business operations, employees experience increased job satisfaction, retention and advancement improve, and both businesses and workers prosper. Human-centered design approaches prioritize co-creating and testing solutions alongside the workers most affected by workplace policies and practices.

“Deeply engaging workers in co-creating workplace solutions is central to the National Fund’s approach to advancing equity,” said Michelle Rafferty, the National Fund’s Chief Program Officer. “Whether a business seeks to improve retention or better help its employees to navigate their own careers, its best to start by listening to and seeing workers as partners.”

This initiative is a cornerstone of the National Fund’s focus on activating industry leaders to improve job quality and builds on lessons learned both from its recent research project on career navigation, and through its highly-regarded guide for designing a human-centered workplace.

Centering Workers in Job Design will launch in eight communities across the country. This work is made possible, in part, through generous donations from the Gitlab Foundation, Prudential Foundation, and Walmart. Four of the projects will focus on work to improve job quality and business results in infrastructure (construction, energy, and manufacturing), and four others will focus on improving career navigation in healthcare. The participating National Fund Network Partners are:

• CareerRise – Atlanta, Georgia
• The Health Collaborative – Cincinnati, Ohio
• The Workforce Solutions Collaborative of Metro Hartford – Hartford, Connecticut
• The Workforce Alliance of South-Central Kansas – Wichita, Kansas
• Baltimore Workforce Funders Collaborative – Baltimore, Maryland
• Fund for Our Economic Future – Cleveland, Ohio
• EmployIndy – Indianapolis, Indiana
• Partner4Work – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania