California Policy Lab

Every year, over a million Californians receive workforce support and training from state and federally funded programs. In an effort to learn about the benefits of these programs, an inter-agency partnership led by the California Workforce Development Board (CWDB) created Cross-System Analytics and Assessment for Learning and Skills Attainment (CAAL-Skills). The CAAL-Skills partnership facilitates data-sharing across seven California state agencies that deliver thirteen workforce programs. Bringing this data together significantly improves the state’s ability to observe who is enrolled in these programs and makes it possible, for the first time, to measure the impacts these programs have on participants’ employment and earnings.

This report highlights findings from the first causal study to estimate the impacts of ten California workforce training programs that share data with CAAL-Skills. The causal impact measures the effect of receiving training on participants’ employment and earnings, relative to what those same workers would have experienced without training.

This work has been supported, in part, by the University of California Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives grants MRP-19-600774 and M21PR3278.