Next Steps: Connecticut Workforce & Education Strategy Blueprint

The following summarizes the discussions from the four outreach sessions hosted by the CBIA Foundation for Economic Growth & Opportunity and ReadyCT in April and May, 2026, as part of the release of the foundation’s Connecticut Workforce & Education Strategy Blueprint.

The sessions in Fairfield, Hartford, New Haven and New London engaged nearly 100 participants from industry, education, and workforce development at the table, and the conversations provided critical insights and feedback on the blueprint, which was made possible through the generous support of JP. Morgan Chase.

The ideas and themes that featured across the sessions will inform the foundation’s continuing work on the blueprint and its engagement with the new state commission on career pathways.

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Four roundtables informed the review of the CBIA Foundation’s Connecticut Workforce & Education Strategy Blueprint, and the notes from each, together with observations from colleagues who attended, surfaced dozens of distinct points across a wide range of topics.

This memo attempts to organize some of the stronger cross-cutting themes into three analytical sections and to consider what they might imply for refining the blueprint and informing state-level action. 

The strongest themes appear to fall into three categories: a set of compounding barriers that keep districts at local scale, a set of instructional problems that would persist even if those barriers were addressed, and a set of near-term opportunities that the state could pursue with relatively modest additional effort. 

1. Barriers to Regionalization 

Many of the issues raised across the roundtables share a common feature, which is that regionalization tends to be the harder option even where it might produce a better outcome for students.

The barriers come from multiple directions at once, which may help explain why incremental progress has been difficult to sustain over time despite the attention these issues have received. 

Transportation and scheduling as hard logistical barriers. Several conversations returned to the practical question of how students would actually get to programs in neighboring districts. The bus system appears to be at or near capacity in many places, students reportedly drive less than they used to, and changes to laws around 17-year-olds transporting other minors have closed off some informal solutions.

Scheduling compounds the problem, since school day and school year calendars differ across districts and rarely line up cleanly enough to support shared programs. The regional EMT program in East Lyme was cited as an example of a partnership that has made some progress on the scheduling problem, which suggests the barrier is difficult but not insurmountable.

Housing was raised alongside transportation as part of the broader set of access constraints on student participation, though it extends well beyond the scope of workforce policy itself. Even where a program in a neighboring district has open capacity and the marginal cost of accepting another student is low, the combined logistics of transportation and scheduling may be the binding constraint on participation. 

Incentive misalignments that penalize cross-district participation. Several specific dynamics surfaced across the sessions: 

• Cost-splitting that can penalize cross-district enrollment. When a district sends a student to a program in another district, it typically pays a fractional share of tuition. While total system cost may be largely unchanged, and the cost of addressing the fractional tuition is reportedly nominal, the home district can experience this as a budget hit rather than a neutral accounting transfer, which seems to discourage regionalization at the moment of decision. 
• A state scorecard that can penalize direct workforce placements. Indicator 10 measures post-secondary matriculation, so students placed into direct workforce roles tend to count against district performance on that metric. Smaller districts may be particularly exposed, since even a single cohort can move their numbers significantly. More broadly, several participants noted that the way schools and districts are measured does not reward those doing this work well, and that the definition of return on investment may be too narrow if employment is treated as the only positive outcome. 
• A local political economy that can reward offering breadth over depth. Communities generally want their own students served by their own schools, and specialization can feel like a loss of local control even where it might produce a better student outcome. 

Funding fragmentation and the question of who pays. Funding came up as one of the loudest themes across the sessions, and the picture appears to be more complicated than simply a need for more dollars.

Highly targeted grants, where eligibility is restricted by zip code, neighborhood, or specific population, can consume a meaningful share of their value in search and compliance costs, which means less money actually reaches programs.

Funding cycles are often misaligned with the timelines on which districts have to make decisions, and concerns were expressed about the upcoming Workforce Pell program and its implementation. One participant described having gone through three workforce boards without successfully finding funding for a credential, which captures the broader experience of fragmentation that several conversations echoed.

Underneath the fragmentation sits a harder question about who should pay. Responsibility tends to get passed from employers to higher education to K-12, and then often to districts or philanthropy. Larger employers do make these investments in many cases, but there is reluctance to ask industry to contribute more for fear of driving employers away, which leaves small and medium-sized businesses, who cannot easily absorb the cost on their own, in a particularly difficult position. 

Scattered employer engagement. A related barrier concerns how the employer community itself is engaged. Several participants pointed to the proliferation of industry advisory groups, describing them as too numerous and too diffuse to function well, and noted that employers are in effect over-utilized without a clear overall strategy or consistent method of engagement.

Employers, for their part, expressed a desire for more streamlined processes and better awareness of what is happening across the state. The current pattern asks a great deal of employer time without giving employers a coherent way to engage, which appears to limit the depth and durability of industry partnership. 

The pick-winners problem. Several sessions surfaced the underlying tension that aggregate workforce funding is large enough to make an impact but spread across too many recipients to do so.

Concentrating resources at regional scale would require some form of choosing among programs and providers, which participants generally acknowledged but seemed reluctant to engage with in concrete terms. The reluctance appears to stem partly from territorialism and partly from the genuine difficulty of deciding who loses out.

The question of how to pick winners, and how to choose who chooses, is uncomfortable enough that it tends to get deferred, though it appears to be the question that most directly stands between the current distributed pattern and a more concentrated one. The state and its partners will likely need to engage with it more directly if real concentration of resources is the goal. 

A counterweight worth holding in mind. Several participants raised the question of whether more centralization is necessarily better, with one state-level participant arguing that a dispersed network has resilience properties a more centralized system would lose. Local failures tend not to cascade across the wider system, and accumulated local knowledge can be hard to recreate at higher levels.

The more constructive middle-ground lever raised in this context was a shift toward longer-term investment, ideally combining employer, state, and philanthropic funds, on the explicit understanding that short-term funding cycles undermine the stability these partnerships need. The implication for the state is that the relevant question is one of granular design, asking which specific functions benefit from regional aggregation and which are better left dispersed. 

2. Instructional Misalignment 

Even if the regionalization barriers were addressed, several distinct problems on the instructional side would remain. These appear to be substantially independent of the regionalization question and need their own treatment. 

The deep bench problem. Many of the instructional issues raised across the sessions seem to flow from a single underlying constraint, which is that the supply of qualified instructors with relevant industry credentials is thin and difficult to deepen at a local level.

Finding and keeping CTE teachers was described as a persistent challenge, and the supply pipeline is narrow, with few candidates coming through state-level training programs. Local programs cannot easily reach the depth they would need to be genuinely strong without a sustained supply of instructors who can teach to current industry standards, and that supply appears to be a binding constraint on program quality.

Several of the issues that follow are largely downstream of this one, since the structure of programs, the staff allocation choices schools make, and the ability to update curriculum all depend on having a deep enough bench to work with in the first place.

Participants also described the teacher as a multiplier and pointed to the power of the gatekeeper, both of which underscore how much program outcomes rest on this thin bench. 

Instructor certification as path dependence. Investing in certifying a teacher to deliver a specific course creates a sunk cost that can be difficult to walk away from, since sunsetting the course effectively writes off that investment.

The deeper issue appears to be on the supply side, where staff time allocation becomes constrained by the certifications a school has already invested in. Once instructors are certified in a particular set of areas, the menu of programs a school can offer tends to be shaped by that existing bench rather than by what students or industry might actually need at a given moment.

The bench problem and the path-dependence problem appear to reinforce each other, since the costs of certifying new instructors are high enough that schools rarely build the bench they would need to operate flexibly. 

The adjunct and industry-as-teacher strategy. A potential lever for deepening the bench involves bringing industry professionals into teaching roles, often on an adjunct or part-time basis, and this came up across several sessions.

The strategy appears to be fraught in practice. Pay for adjunct teaching tends to be lower than what an industry professional earns in their regular job, which creates a recruitment problem, and union bargaining structures may complicate adjunct arrangements in some districts.

One idea raised for partly addressing the pay gap was for employers to incentivize their own staff to take leave to teach, which would treat the contribution as a form of industry investment rather than a salary decision for the school.

Specific regulations also limit who is eligible to teach particular subjects, with the requirement of a master’s degree to teach clinical-level nursing (reportedly last updated in 1994) cited as a working example of a structural barrier that may add little value relative to the constraint it imposes. Adjunct strategies probably need to address each of these constraints rather than being treated as a single intervention. 

Curricular lock-in and the difficulty of knowing what to train for. A separate but related problem is that programs sometimes get built for jobs that do not actually exist at the level the program is designed to serve.

A biotech high school pipeline came up in this context, where graduates of a high school program face the reality that biotech entry-level work typically requires post-secondary credentials, and where the broader question is whether the sector’s business model, heavily weighted toward startups, generates entry-level employment in the way some other sectors do.

Too much resetting of programs reportedly produces high school pathways to nowhere, and unwinding an institutional pipeline after it has been built is considerably harder than starting one, so curriculum review processes may benefit from a more explicit sunset capacity and a clearer plan for how to pivot when a given bet does not pay off. 

Several related questions surfaced alongside this. The definition of “priority industries,” typically high-paying, high-quality jobs, does not always match where high school graduates actually find immediate employment, and participants noted that family-sustaining wages and employer behavior should factor into which sectors receive emphasis, with some skepticism about investing heavily in low-wage areas such as hospitality.

Durability skills, or soft skills, were repeatedly flagged as critical, on the grounds that employers are unlikely to hire without them. And uncertainty about which jobs will remain relevant in a post-AI labor market complicates any long-term curricular bet, a difficulty compounded by the fact that essentially all of the data currently informing these decisions predates the labor market effects of AI.

A recurring implication is that better information about where job density actually sits, and about the business model of each sector, would improve the quality of these decisions. Developing that kind of sector analysis is an area where CBIA may be well positioned to contribute, and it connects directly to the workforce data opportunity discussed in Section 3. 

Adult education as an underused instructional venue. Adult education came up in several conversations as a priority area that has not received much attention in the broader workforce discussion. Municipalities already operate Adult Ed services, which could potentially provide an alternative pathway for some students rather than requiring schools to be the sole delivery mechanism.

The question of how adult education fits into the overall instructional picture seems worth surfacing more directly, particularly for opportunity youth and others whom the traditional school structure does not serve well. 

3. Opportunities 

The most actionable items from the roundtables cluster into several near-term opportunities that the state could pursue without waiting for broader structural reform. 

Workforce navigators. The most recent state budget approved workforce navigators, which means the question is no longer whether to create the function but how to use it well, and this may be one of the more actionable areas for state-level follow-up given that the authority is already in place. 

One observation from the roundtables seems particularly worth carrying forward. Program viability often depends on the presence of a champion at the school, and specific individuals who are personally invested in CTE appear to drive program success in ways that more diffuse staffing arrangements do not.

Where such champions are absent, programs seem to underperform regardless of design, so any navigator deployment that does not somehow account for the champion factor is likely to run into this constraint. 

The navigator function seems to naturally split into two parts that may need different structures.  

Employer-side matching appears to be regional in scope, since employers tend to operate at regional or sectoral scales, programs sit in specific institutions, and the matching work benefits from a regional view of both supply and demand. Workforce navigators may be well suited to this function, and concrete deliverables on this side could include maintaining a regional inventory of program capacity, building and sustaining employer relationships that no individual district can readily carry alone, and offloading the industry-interaction burden that currently tends to fall on district staff who are not particularly resourced for it.

This function also offers a way to address the scattered employer engagement described in Section 1, since a regional navigator could consolidate what is currently a diffuse set of asks into a more coherent and streamlined point of contact for employers.  

Student-side matching seems to need to operate locally and personally, since students need someone who knows them and knows the local employer landscape, which suggests the optimal scale is closer to the individual school. The more promising path may be to embed the student-side function in existing school personnel such as counselors, CTE coordinators, or designated teachers, with support and training from the regional navigator structure, rather than building a parallel student-side network that would raise coordination costs. 

An intermediary to facilitate work-based learning and career connections. Beyond the navigator function specifically, there was clear interest across the sessions in an intermediary entity whose role would be to facilitate work-based learning and career connections more broadly. The intermediary concept and the navigator concept overlap, and one open question is whether the navigator authority should be understood as the vehicle for this intermediary role or whether the intermediary is something broader.

The roundtable discussions suggested that an intermediary functions best as trust-building entity that creates consistency in program delivery and design. 

Accessible workforce data to guide pathway decisions. A consistent thread across the sessions was the value of workforce data that is genuinely accessible and that can inform career pathway decisions based on actual employer demand.

Career pathway choices currently rest on limited and somewhat dated information, and better data on where job density sits, on hiring demand by sector, and on the business models that do or do not generate entry-level employment would improve the quality of those decisions.

A relevant development here is a talent marketplace dashboard reportedly funded and beginning development, which could become the practical vehicle for making this kind of information available. The opportunity for the state, and potentially for CBIA, is to ensure that this resource is built around the questions that pathway decisions actually turn on, and that it is paired with the sector analysis described in Section 2 so that the data translates into better pathway design rather than simply existing as a dashboard. 

Selecting a regional institution to host the deep bench of instructors. A recurring question across the sessions concerns which regional institution should host the depth function, meaning the deep bench of instructors, equipment, curriculum coordination, and employer relationships that local districts struggle to sustain on their own.

Several candidates surfaced. Community colleges can deliver CTE programming, and the legal authority for this appears to be established, which makes them a serious candidate, and better alignment with dual enrollment offerings could strengthen the connection between high school programs and community college delivery.

RESCs surfaced repeatedly as potential hosts for specific regional functions, including transportation coordination, a funding clearinghouse for cross-district student costs, equipment maintenance that individual schools struggle to sustain on their own, curriculum coordination, the consolidation of underutilized programs, and standardized remote learning, though the RESC network varies considerably across the state in ways that may complicate any uniform expansion of their role. The technical high school system is another natural candidate, but it was described as effectively full, with prior disinvestment in industrial arts meaning that capacity would need to be rebuilt before it could absorb more demand.

The state will need to take a position on which institution, or which combination, is best suited to this function. 

Learning from innovative pockets within the state. Several conversations pointed to the value of identifying and learning from the places within the state where effective practice already exists. Genuinely innovative programs tend to be small and not widely known, with perhaps two or three schools running a strong program at any given time, and there is currently no reliable mechanism for surfacing these examples and assessing what could be replicated elsewhere. Building better awareness of local and regional examples appears to be a relatively low-cost intervention.  

Lower-cost opportunities within the existing system. Two further opportunities are worth noting because they are relatively inexpensive to capture.

The first is the underused window in the senior year, since high school seniors who are reasonably on-track academically often finish their required courses early and end up with low-value classes in their final semesters, time that could be redirected toward CTE coursework or work-based learning. This is worth validating across districts before building a recommendation around it.

The second is a market or clearinghouse for excess program capacity, since some programs have open seats that students from other districts could fill but no mechanism currently exists to make this easy. A clearinghouse function, potentially hosted by a RESC or another regional entity, could lower the transaction costs of cross-district enrollment, and combined with cost-splitting reform at the state level it could meaningfully change the incentives around program sharing. 

Closing Thought, Next Steps 

Taken together, the three sections above describe a coherent system. Multiple compounding barriers tend to keep districts at local scale even where regionalization would likely produce better outcomes for students. Independent of those barriers, a thin bench of qualified instructors limits the depth that local programs can reach, with several downstream issues flowing from that constraint.

The state has near-term opportunities in workforce navigator deployment, intermediary design, regional institution selection, workforce data infrastructure, and the use of underused windows in the existing system, though these opportunities probably do not reach their full potential without parallel attention to the underlying barriers and instructional issues. 

A possible test for any recommendation to the state could include questions such as: 

• Does it change a statute, regulation, or scorecard weight? 
• Does it redirect a specific dollar flow? 
• Does it eliminate a current penalty for cross-district participation? 
• Does it create a market or clearinghouse mechanism that reduces transaction costs? 

Recommendations that pass at least one of these tests seem more likely to produce structural change, while recommendations that fail all of them may risk reproducing patterns the field has lived with for some time without much movement. 

A reasonable next step from this synthesis would be a working list of candidate recommendations sorted against these tests, with specific statutory, regulatory, or budgetary citations attached. That working list could feed directly into the blueprint revision and into the legislative engagement strategy for the next session. 

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For more information, contact CBIA Foundation director Dustin Nord (860.244.8522).