Wall Street West has accomplished a significant achievement by enhancing collaboration among the five Workforce Investment Boards in the region. By building on prior relationships and identifying a champion to create change within, WSW united the WIBs around the objectives of WIRED and is making substantial progress on its workforce development goals.

Like much of the country, the California Innovation Corridor is facing a workforce shortage in highly skilled, technical positions as the baby boomers retire. Following the dot com bubble burst, there are a number of dislocated software engineers with strong technical backgrounds that are relatively well-prepared to transition to the aerospace and defense industry. This is a story about how California Innovation Corridor WIRED collaborated with a local university and workforce board to retrain these engineers to meet regional industry demand.

Other Resource:
http://www.doleta.gov/wired/regions/1g_California_Innovation_Corridor.cfm

Transforming Partnerships: How to Apply the U.S. Department of Labor's Equal Treatment and Religion-Related Regulations to Public-Private Partnerships is an online training course that provides in-depth training on the equal treatment and religion-related regulations at the U.S. Department of Labor. This course is designed as a training tool primarily for administrators and staff who work in the Workforce Investment System or at faith-based and community organizations.

Led by the E. Philip Saunders College of Business at Rochester Institute of Technology, the Finger Lakes WIRED Strategic Growth through Innovation Program prepares regional business leaders to grow their high potential firms. Executive education specialists and RIT business professors bring their expertise together in this training program, in which senior management officials from regional firms develop their own strategic growth plans.

Appalachian Ohio is an expansive rural region comprised of 29 counties and extending 300 miles from one end to the other. Holding meetings was an expensive and logistically problematic endeavor that threatened to reduce the WIRED team’s effectiveness. They decided to hold meetings virtually and since have witnessed attendance and productivity skyrocket.

West Michigan identified the flexible workplace as a defining characteristic of many high-growth sectors. They have developed a toolkit for creating remote work sites that can support and attract mobile workers. This toolkit facilitates regional development by providing the means that enable the regional market to develop new regional assets. The project coordinators expect the project’s unique market-based approach to be the key to the model’s success and sustainability.

The Metro Denver WIRED Initiative demonstrates how governance structures can remain flexible and be reformed as programs evolve and functional demands change. Metro Denver’s Leadership Council was originally comprised of co-chairs from each of the Initiative’s eight panels representing industry, education, the public workforce system and small business. It was charged with oversight of the data gathering efforts of the eight panels and forming recommendations for transformation of delivery systems for a skilled workforce for four targeted industry clusters – Aerospace, Bioscience, Energy and IT/Software. As Metro Denver WIRED transitioned into the implementation phase, the Leadership Council was restructured as a decision-making body representing all partners and supported by four Solutions Teams.