News Articles

Mary Ellen Clark, WIRED Bio-1 and Aaron Fichter, Ph.D, Heldrich Center for Workforce Development take a look at how to measure the effectiveness of your implementation strategies.

Some of the key questions addressed include:

1. Are you feeling any pain over the time/resources it takes to collect data and report on it?
2. Are you confident the data you report is accurate

Bio-1 is in Central New Jersey, and comprises 5 counties and 4 workforce investment boards. Some initiatives they have focused on include: life science career campaign, career academies, residential programs, increasing bioscience workforce development with the 'Flak Jackets to Lab Coats' program to reintegrate returning vets into the workforce, enhancing linkages between education and industry via the web.

Metrics Steps:

Plan and Prepare (critical few, leverage/impact), Develop a Framework (strategy/alignment, balance, data collection), Development (Strategy ALignment,Balance, Op. Definitions), Deployment (Vertical alignment, accountability transfer), Collect and Analyze Data (Review Process, Actions, Project ID), Review Process (status, opportunities, projects), Plan and Prepare (Strategic Objectives, Development Team).

Operational Definitions:

Measure Owner: Who will report on this metric

Data Owner:  Who will collect and summarize data

Formula: How is this derived?

Benchmark/Goal: What is the target? If you have benchmarks from comparable regions include them here.

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At the Boston Academy, Ed Morrison gave a helpful overview of WIRED Nation, what you as a WIRED Nation user should try to get out of it, and what you can do to contribute and interact in the community itself:

If you don't have an effective way to structure information, you end up with a 'garbage bag' of stuff - this is why on WIRED Nation we are making effective use of categories and tagging. It helps the community identify common themes as it to relates to a piece of content, such as 'advanced manufacturing', 'biosciences', etc. Moreover, categories and tags allow you to search using the 'Advanced Search' to

A few key components of WIRED Nation include:

• Forums: essentially a running list of comments - a discussion unfolding as a series of comments on comments
  

• Weblogs aka 'Blogs': generally represent a way for an individual to share information with a group
• Wikis: a fantastic way for more than one person to create content ; a quick and easy way for business professionals to be able to author content to the web quickly and effective - in a matter of minutes.
• RSS: allows you to grab content from the web and be automatically updated anytime any content is changed on that webpage.

In WIRED Nation, we have the following tabs:

• 'Forums' is an area for you to have ongoing discussions around particular topics
• 'Regions' is a wiki page which has been created to share the industry segments, key contacts, implementation plan, etc. in each region.
  
• 'Home' is yet another great example of a wiki page in action - this is a easily editable webpage including graphics, a slideshow, etc., which is updated by members of WIRED Nation, not an IT professional.
  
• 'Stories' is where we are sharing complex stories of what is working in various WIRED regions.
• 'Library' is where we are putting files - files can include a detailed description of what a particular file is
• 'Events' is a great place for us to share schedules for key sessions and events with other regions.
  

WIRED Nation is an open community which allows us to have the most qualified and well represented discussion - there is no 'webmaster', but rather the community as a whole driving the discussion.

A few points Ed emphasized include:

Categorization and tagging.

According to Ed, "categories are like the chapters of a book." For example, in WIRED Nation they include broad ideas and concept areas such as 'Innovation', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Talent', etc. Tags, however "are like the index in the back of the book." Use categories and tags together to make if far easier to find content later as well as to help people more quickly deduce what the relevance of a particular post is.

Weekly Webinars

Fridays at 1PM EST, we have a webinar in which we discuss what is new in WIRED Nation, and go over regional initiatives and how to increase visibility and support for these initiatives in the community using WIRED Nation.

Blogging:

The blog is a great way to quickly share points of interest with the rest of WIRED Nation - maybe a paragraph our two or a link to an interesting research finding or editorial related to economic development.

Jump in - contributing takes only a few minutes. The Law of Networks states that value accrued from a network increases exponentially as each new connection is added.

Senator Voinovich (R-Ohio) has introduced legislation to amend the Workforce Investment Act to promote the principles of Wired (Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development). The proposed legislation would establish the three new voluntary programs within the WIA framework.

The bill, called the WIRED Act:

• Authorizes states and regions to work with a governor (or governors in the case of multi-state regions) to submit WIRED plans for approval by the Secretary of Labor. The plans must be aimed at crafting targeted workforce development programs that provide enhanced job training and related employment activities in the region. They may include complementary economic development activities. If approved, the plans could allow states to combine a number of different federal workforce and economic development funds;  
  
• Authorizes the Secretary of Labor to award supplementary grants to assist in implementing a WIRED plan or to carry out other regionally-focused workforce development activities; and
  
• Authorizes the use of formula funds available to states and local areas under WIA to carry out regionally-focused workforce development activities without going through the entire WIRED approval process. As stated earlier, some of this vital funding is currently going unused because of the inflexibility of the WIA program.

You can read more about the Voinovich bill here.

You can read the text of the legislation here.

Washington State announced its Generation 3 Wired grant earlier this week. In a ceremony at the New Market Skills Center in Tumwater, Washington State's Senator Murray, Senator Cantwell, and U.S. Representative Brian Baird attended, along with representatives of the governor's office, county commissioners school board members and, importantly, representatives from the business community.

the Wired grant will be administered through a five county consortium, five-county group, the Pacific Mountain Workforce Consortium.

Read more.

An essay about the complexities of explaining WIRED.

WIRED-What's That????