What We Heard: A Study of Utah's Workforce Development Ecosystem

By: Marin Christensen, Community & Policy Research Consultant

Last year, I partnered with the Center for Economic Opportunity & Belonging and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco to answer a specific question: where are the real gaps, needs, and opportunities in Utah's workforce development ecosystem for people typically facing more than one barrier to employment? 

Utah's workforce development system is active. Dozens of organizations across the Wasatch Front train people for new careers, help immigrants and refugees find their footing, support parents returning to work, and connect people to jobs every day. So the question wasn't whether the work was happening, but why so many people, even after going through a program, still ended up without stable work. To find out, we surveyed 45 workforce development service providers across the region and sat down with six Utahns who were navigating more than one barrier to employment at once, so we could hear what this system feels like from both the inside and outside.

What we found comes down to capacity, access, and connection. Organizations told us over and over that they don't have the staff or the bandwidth to meet the need in front of them. Some serve as few as 5 people a year, others as many as 8,000, and nearly all of them said they can only "somewhat" meet the demand they see. Even where training exists, it doesn't always lead to real advancement. Most people we talked to did find some kind of job. What held them back was what came after: credentials that weren't recognized, benefits cliffs that penalized a raise, and employers who invested in hiring them but not in helping them grow. The result is a lot of people underemployed despite real skills and experience.

That pattern became evident once we started listening to people's own stories. One participant had built a full career and earned an MBA before coming to the United States as a refugee. She described it this way: "Every employer that would see my CV would call me. But the challenge is my accent. They would count me out because of my accent." A man rebuilding his life after incarceration put words to a frustration we heard in nearly every interview: "Workforce Services would do a job fair… they promise you all these cool things and then you go to apply and it's a temp service, just a week-to-week job without stability." And a mother returning to the workforce after years of caregiving told us something that should give all of us pause: "I didn't know about these programs until someone told me." Good help existed, she just never heard about it.

The organizations doing this work see the same pattern from their side of the table. When asked what keeps them from serving more people, their answers were blunt and consistent: "Not enough staff for the demand.” One organization summed up what might be the single most important insight in this whole study: "We need stronger bridges between training and employment." 

"We need stronger bridges between training and employment." 

Together, study participants describe a system where people on either side of the system are working hard against constraints that no single organization can fix by itself.

That's why this work matters. The job seekers we talked to describe a mismatch between how our systems are built and how real lives actually unfold: non-linear, shaped by caregiving and health and unexpected setbacks, and rarely solvable by one program acting alone. Closing that gap will take additional funding, shared capacity across organizations, stronger connections between training and employers, and support designed for the exact moments, like reentry, arrival, or a mid-career disruption, when people are most likely to fall through the cracks. It's a job too big for any one organization to take on alone, but it’s exactly the kind of work a community takes on together.