Advancing Workforce Equity: A Guide for Stakeholders

Phase 5: Turning Strategy Into Action

You Have Your Strategies—Now What?

“Without strategy, execution is aimless.  Without execution, strategy is useless” ~Morris Chang

At this point, you have identified inequities in the local labor market and identified what is driving them. Your workgroup has gathered, analyzed, and discussed deeply disaggregated labor market and other data, and expertly identified data-informed strategies.

In the last phase, you must make those strategies executable.

Here’s one approach to securing resources to execute your strategies.

Executing Your Strategy

ASSESS each workforce equity strategy for impact, cost, required capabilities, risk, and the likelihood of success.

PRIORITIZE no more than three strategies for inclusion in a high-level funding proposal.

REFINE the prioritized strategies using the following as a guide.

    1. What is the problem you’re trying to solve?
    2. What are you trying to achieve?
    3. How will you accomplish your objectives? What are the coordinated set of actions you will take?
    4. What impact do you expect to make? It is helpful to have quantitative measurements.)
    5. How will you measure your impact?
    6. What is the estimated cost?

Final Words

The process outlined in this guide is by no means the only one. Advancing workforce equity is crucial to our economic future and should be a shared responsibility of employers, policymakers, training providers, and community organizations.

We supported five communities in this process. Explore their reports and stay up to date with the National Fund to see how they move strategy into action to advance workforce equity.