September 24, 2026
Three sector partnerships show how regional workforce leaders can use data, employer relationships, and flexible strategies to adapt to economic change and build stronger pathways to quality jobs.
Industry-led workforce development depends on strong coordination among employers, workforce boards, training providers, education partners, and other stakeholders. Sector partnerships are a key vehicle for facilitating success: Ongoing collaborations align training and hiring strategies with regional economic demand. At their best, these partnerships build workforce systems that are responsive, coordinated, and capable of supporting participants through training and into employment.
With funding from the U.S. Economic Development Administration, communities across the country build and strengthen sector partnerships as part of broader regional growth strategies. As a provider of technical assistance to several of these sites, JFF has seen both the promise of this approach and the challenges of sustaining it over time. Although these partnerships vary by industry, structure, and training model, they share a common reality: To remain effective, they must adapt to changing economic conditions.
Many of the sites that JFF has supported first launched in 2022 and have since had to respond to major shifts in employer demand, industry conditions, emergent technology, and new regulations. Those changes have required local leaders to reassess assumptions, adjust strategies, and in some cases redesign core elements of their partnerships.
Read below how three sites made those pivots in real time. What changed in their local economies? How did they recognize the need to shift course? What adjustments did they make, and what can others learn from their experience? Here are three stories that illustrate how regional leaders and stakeholders adapted their strategies to continue to support sector partnerships.
The Washington Student Achievement Council (WSAC), which operated the Washington Jobs Initiative, faced drastic economic changes and uncertainty across their focus sectors. Following updates to economic priorities and related challenges, WSAC found many of their partner employers in advanced manufacturing and construction reluctant to make hiring commitments. In healthcare, regulatory changes in Washington state made employers hesitant to bring on new staff. And in the tech sector, layoffs combined with new AI integrations reshaped the demand for entry-level workers.
To move forward amid these disruptions, WSAC guided their backbone organizations, those that provide the infrastructure for their sector partnership, to invest in deeper employer collaborations and codesigned, demand-driven programs. WSAC has seen that when core organizations and training providers work closely with employers, they achieve better placement outcomes and can adjust program size more quickly to meet hiring needs. They had several local examples of success:
The Washington Tech Workforce Coalition sectoral partnership asked local industry leaders to instruct local colleges explicitly about their required technical skills. Under this umbrella, Microsoft worked with Wenatchee Valley College to customize the training for their new data center, and Oracle partnered with Saint Martin’s University—WA Vets 2 Tech to create a new Data Center Technician Pathway. Through these two pathways 100% of graduates received full-time employment offers with starting salaries averaging $72,000, complemented by $10,000 allowances for relocation expenses.
In a different sector, the Spokane Workforce Council partnered with Providence Healthcare in Spokane through the Healthcare Talent Development Pipeline to jointly build and run English-language-learner versions of their certified nursing assistant and phlebotomy courses. By training immigrant healthcare workers, they ensured their eventual staff reflected their patient experiences and needs.
Separately, King County JumpStart partnered extensively with clean tech employers to pilot and iterate on their training program, which has a curriculum customized to employer needs. Their education success is evident through incredible employer investment, with employers now reaching out to request new candidates and high employer turnout at hiring events.
In the Construct a Career sectoral partnership, the Washington State Building and Construction Trades Council provided significant value to construction industry employers by supporting apprentices in career navigation and basic needs. Participants of the program had a 91% retention rate in the trades compared with a nonparticipant retention rate of only 60% statewide. In the face of a shifting economy, WSAC found that registered apprenticeships, which integrate training with employment from day one, have fostered better outcomes for participants. For the WSAC team, apprenticeship is a stabilizing strategy for both workers and employers against evolving demands for specialized skills and competitive labor.
Apprenti is a national apprenticeship intermediary. They launched this sector partnership work to help regions nationwide grow their local technology workforce. Apprenti’s approach hinged on two core employer partners: Boeing, as the partner in the advanced manufacturing, aviation technology, and cybersecurity sectors; and Amazon Web Services (AWS), representing cloud computing operations.
Almost immediately after the program was funded, Boeing faced significant public challenges. Apprenti had to “redraft how we approached the market,” according to CEO Jennifer Carlson. Because the aviation scope was designed to include more companies than just Boeing, Apprenti pivoted to the wider ecosystem—airlines and other aviation/aerospace employers.
Boeing helped open those doors, shifting its role in a competitive marketplace from “Boeing as company” to “Boeing as ecosystem.” This shift allowed Apprenti to keep pursuing the 1,000 placements originally tied to Boeing’s side of the grant. As they broadened into aviation and aerospace, Apprenti discovered that demand was skewed toward tech roles and away from advanced manufacturing. As of October 2025, Apprenti has placed apprentices with 225 employers, expanding pipelines into software development, cybersecurity, and cloud operations and updating outreach messages to reflect these new opportunities.
Fresno County’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) establishes training pathways across Central Valley in California as durable pipelines into high-paying, skilled jobs in industries such as business services, construction, manufacturing, and transportation, distribution and logistics. Fresno EDC selected these sectors for their growth potential and the possibility of local employer investment. Even with a strong foundation for sector partnerships and a strategy to scale proven models, Fresno EDC had to refine their approach to support participants in accessing training and employment. The Central Valley area covers a large and diverse set of economies, from urban Fresno to rural communities, with very different labor markets and infrastructure. Despite investing in proven training models and working with experienced sub-awardees, the EDC wasn’t seeing the recruitment numbers they needed to meet their training and placement goals.
When the Fresno Good Jobs team aimed to scale a successful construction pre-apprenticeship program from urban Fresno to a rural Central Valley community, many steps of this successful model proved to be unexpectedly hard to scale outward: outreach, recruitment, screening, and support for retention and placement were all more difficult when participants had to travel longer distances. Even transportation support services, like gas cards, were not instant solutions that guaranteed completion of the entire 12-week program.
To determine how to move forward, the EDC invested in advanced data tracking, visualization, and communication strategies that allowed sub-awardees to better understand their own performance and design solutions for improvement. Data dashboards and regular review cycles clarified where barriers stood and turned performance conversations from exercises in compliance into joint problem–solving sessions.
Fresno EDC supported their sub-awardee while gathering information and simultaneously pausing an upcoming cohort that would have included a large number of participants traveling greater distances. Then, using data-informed decision-making and community feedback, stakeholders were able to strategically reinvest in rural training pipelines, adjusting marketing, recruitment, delivery models, and supportive services to better fit local conditions.
In advanced manufacturing, Fresno EDC saw opportunities for their sector partnership to bring employer-led solutions to the industry’s talent crisis. The EDC knew that success depended on high levels of employer engagement to clarify the paths toward quality jobs. As a result, Fresno EDC, in partnership with nine local manufacturers, launched the first Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education (FAME) chapter on the West Coast, at Reedley College.
The FAME program is an earn-and-learn model toward a position as either a maintenance mechanic or an industrial automation technician: Students attend college two days per week and work three days per week for a sponsoring employer. Importantly, FAME is designed to outlast any individual funding stream, creating a durable regional talent pipeline in advanced manufacturing.
Overall, Fresno EDC has witnessed excellence in the manufacturing sector as a result of employer-led assistance in codesigning the learning curriculum. Employers created a 120-hour crash course in manufacturing that mirrors their onboarding process—covering safety, workplace norms, punctuality, measurement and conversions, and the operation of basic and even some advanced machines. According to Christopher Zeitz, EDC’s vice president of workforce development, graduates can “hit the ground running,” giving employers confidence in the pipeline and strengthening the case for continuing to invest beyond the life of the grant.
Across these stories, data functions as more than a reporting requirement—it is a strategic asset. Fresno EDC shared stories that revealed key lessons:
Alignment between training outcomes and labor market outcomes is crucial to strengthening the performance of these investments over time. Timely, disaggregated data on enrollment, completion, and job placement make it possible to see when a particular pathway or the geography of a scaled-up plan is leading prematurely to underperformance before a full grant cycle ends. These data are crucial to staging interventions that strengthen performance and recapture investment value over time. Accessible dashboards and visualization tools help frontline staff, including those working for sub-awardees, and employers understand what is working and where participants get stuck.
When sector partnerships and training systems invest in early data reporting and establish norms for regular data use, they can pause, pivot, or scale with confidence. Instead of guessing, they can align resources with sectors or strategies where employer demand is strongest and where workers are able to rapidly acquire quality jobs.
The sites that successfully navigated the most turbulence were those who were both nimble and deeply networked:
When the economy is changing rapidly, sector partnerships must be ready to adapt in scope, timelines, and even target occupations. That flexibility works best when it is grounded in strong, long-term relationships with employers, training providers, and community organizations.
One throughline in these stories is that economic shifts, new industry needs, and unexpected scalability challenges are the norm, not the exception. New economic priorities, regulatory changes, high-profile corporate news events that impacted target employers, and evolving technology all reshaped the landscape between design and implementation.
For regional sector partnerships, ‘expect the unexpected’ is more than a mindset; it’s an operational strategy.
Sector partnership leads have mastered key skills:
For regional sector partnerships, “expect the unexpected” is more than a mindset; it’s an operational strategy. By designing programs around change, sector partnerships are better positioned to respond to whatever comes next while staying focused on their central goal: connecting workers to quality jobs and helping employers build resilient talent pipelines.
