Career Pathways

A vibrant middle class where every New Yorker can maintain stable employment and earn a family-supporting wage is crucial to what makes New York City one of most vibrant economies in the world. However, not all New Yorkers are sharing in this prosperity, as a quarter of the entire labor force earns less than $20,000 per year. At the same time, employers in fast-growing, high-paying fields are confronting a shortage of skilled workers.

That is why Mayor de Blasio convened the Jobs for New Yorkers Task Force, a diverse group of stakeholders determined to broaden opportunity for all New Yorkers. The Task Force released a report entitled Career Pathways: One City Working Together, which outlines the City's new workforce strategy and realizes the opportunity to equip more New Yorkers with skills for high-quality jobs that employers need to fill.

WKDEV coordinates New York City's workforce initiatives and the articulated goals for the workforce system that include ten recommendations to build a system that will:

• Support career advancement and income mobility by helping jobseekers and incumbent workers address educational needs and develop high-demand skills;
• Ensure that business in New York City can find the talent they need within the five boroughs;
• Improve the quality of low-wage jobs to benefit both workers and their employers;
• Leverage New York City’s economic development investments and purchasing power to place more New Yorkers in jobs; and
• Use system data to enable workforce to function as a coherent system that rewards job quality instead of the quantity of job placements.