Dive Brief:

• Skillful Indiana has launched an initiative that aims to help career coaches across the state's colleges and universities, workforce centers and staffing organizations better match job-seekers to in-demand positions. 
• The first group of participants in the program, called the Skillful Governor's Coaching Corps, will learn how to use new tools to assess the skills job-seekers have and use information about the state's workforce needs to help them forge better career pathways.  
• The coaches are also expected to form teams and explore possible solutions to some of the challenges faced by the workforce in Indiana. These teams will present their recommendations to the Governor's Workforce Cabinet. 

Dive Insight:

Skillful's Indiana branch launched in October, and it's one of almost 20 arms nationwide. The program is designed to help recalibrate the workforce with skills for the new digital economy and helps employers rethink job requirements to open opportunities to a wider range of talent.

Most training initiatives like these focus on upskilling workers who have been displaced by technology or who come from underserved populations. Demand for tech-savvy workers continues to increase despite the talent and skills shortages currently felt across all industries, particularly in tech fields.

To meet this demand, colleges are scrambling to redesign their curriculum so graduates can be successful in the job market. One way they are approaching this challenge is by expanding industry's role in crafting college programming. This especially prominent in the tech disciplines. 

Tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Apple have all recently had their hand in designing college curriculum to help create pipelines of workers that better meet their needs. And Amazon's forthcoming HQ2 in Northern Virginia, which will require some 25,000 workers, helped accelerate some of area colleges' plans to make massive expansions to their tech program offerings.

While Skillful's initiative uses career coaching to addresses the skills gap, other programs, like Washington, D.C.-based Education Design Lab, see credentialing as another route to upskilling. The nonprofit announced last year it was partnering with Credly to designate several colleges as authorized issuers of credentials for skills such as critical thinking, collaboration and resilience.