New Requirements for American Job Center Systems Regarding One-Stop Operators, Partnership Agreements, and Certification

The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) of 2014 included multiple provisions to strengthen service quality, access, accountability, and alignment across many programs. This report focuses on implementation of key changes to financial and management requirements for the American Job Center (AJC) system in order to seamlessly deliver services to all workforce customers across various partners.

Data for this report are drawn primarily from site visit interviews, conducted in early 2019, with administrators, board chairs and members, employer and agency partners, and frontline staff in 14 states and 28 local areas. Other sources of information include administrative data and relevant state and local documents. The site visit locations were purposively selected to assure diversity geographically and in size, among other criteria. The findings here, based on those interviews, should therefore be viewed as suggestive of common experiences and not assumed to be nationally representative.