Critical Industry Skills Act

Key Points

• States can set aside up to 10% of their federal workforce funding to create two new job training funds: a Critical Industry Skills Fund that pays employers per worker trained, and an Industry or Sector Partnership and Career Pathways Development Fund that builds school-business partnerships.
• Training payments are performance-based: part of the payment goes to the training provider when a worker completes the program, and the rest is paid only after the worker has been employed by the participating employer for six months.
• Small businesses get more generous federal cost-sharing. The government can cover up to 90% of training costs for employers with 25 or fewer workers, 75% for those with 25 to 99 workers, and just 50% for businesses with 100 or more employees.
• States must match the federal dollars they reserve with their own state funds or other federal resources, ensuring states have skin in the game before accessing the new training funds.
• The bill gives priority to partnerships that serve people with barriers to employment, including those with disabilities, dislocated workers, rural communities, disadvantaged youth, and unemployed individuals, and requires performance data to be reported broken down by race, ethnicity, sex, disability status, and age.
• The Department of Labor must conduct a study within four years of enactment to evaluate how states are using the Critical Industry Skills Funds and measure effectiveness, including which industries and occupations are being targeted and the reported performance outcomes.