• Reaching out to people where they live and work, focusing on a neighborhood-based approach to training, technology and community support;

• Reaching out to employers to find out what their hiring needs are, and soliciting their input for training approaches and training curricula;

• Creating collaborative, focused, and sustainable initiatives to provide a long-term impact;

• Bringing together existing services and initiatives wherever possible to meet the needs of employers and individuals, while tapping the resources of the business community, foundations, and the public sector to fill the gaps; and

• Balancing the needs of businesses and people for the sustainability of the community as a whole.

Career Connection: a state-of-the-art career resource center with free computer and Internet access for the public. Career Connection also features career development professionals to assist customers with their job search and career questions.

Winning New Jobs: funded by the California Wellness Foundation, Winning New Jobs offers free, intensive 20-hour workshops in job search skills for anyone over the age of 18.

Learning Lab: a computer lab where customers can upgrade computer skills and both basic and advanced English, math, software, and other skills. At present the Learning Lab is a resource for JTPA clients, or on a fee basis for individuals or companies.

Career Ladders: a series of reports explaining necessary skills and career paths for new and returning entrants to the workforce. The reports focus on occupations that lead to a self-sustaining living appropriate for our region.

LMI+: "Labor Market Information Plus" reports offer in-depth studies of emerging and growth industries as well as public forums for dialogue among employers, students, job seekers, and educators. These reports are a valuable resource in developing career options and curricula in local communities.

Professional Effectiveness Program: a combination of assessment, instruction, and follow-up in the so-called "soft" skills that employers value highly, such as teamwork, communication, problem solving, and time management.

Summer Work Experience for Youth: the NOVA Youth Employment Office is currently designing summer employment programs for young people that will fit under the new requirements of WIA. Focusing on information technology, the program will include upgrading technical and computer skills as well as introducing people to the high-tech work world.

JTPA/WIA Occupational Training Programs for Adults: Currently through JTPA and subsequently through WIA, though at a greatly decreased level, funds are available to train low income adults and dislocated workers in skills and occupations in high demand in our labor market region.

Career Advanced Retention Services: NOVA has a contract with the County Social Services Department to purchase lap top computers and software to loan to low income families. A partnership is being developed for adult education to provide the tutoring for the project.

STEP Program: NOVA, along with industry powers Sun Microsystems, Cisco systems and Oracle, Evergreen and Mission community colleges, and Occupations Industrial Center West (OICW) have already initiated the Systems Administration Training and Employment Program to increase the number of qualified UNIX system administrators available in the local labor market.

Wanting to Work: an innovative program to assist individuals in transition to successfully move off of public assistance. Wanting to Work is a partnership with the Silicon Valley PIC, the Santa Clara County Department of Social Services, and the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group. Participants receive job placement assistance in the manufacturing industries, on the job training and skills upgrades, neighborhood based support services, and intensive career retention assistance.

Neighborhood Self-Sufficiency Centers: an integral part of Wanting to Work and of the countywide Welfare to Work effort. Six centers are located throughout Santa Clara County where Welfare to Work clients can access evening classes, child care, mentoring, and other services. Each center reaches out to the community-based agencies in its area to bring together the services that its residents need most.

Youth@Work: an award-winning collaboration among the public, private and non-profit sectors. Youth@Work's free Internet-based system connects young people, educators, and employers with the job, career, or hiring information they need. Public access sites are located throughout Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, where young people can access the system, participate in job search skills workshops, and receive one-on-one counseling on their job search. An innovative addition to NOVA's Young Parents Programs included using Youth@Work to teach computer, career planning, and job search skills to teen parents through our high schools-- a model which is particularly relevant to NOVA's Digital Divide outreach strategy. In a new service enhancement, the local EDD field office is working with Youth@Work so that EDD staff can begin to solicit job listings for Youth@Work from the large employer pool with which EDD works.

School-to-Work: NOVA is aligning itself with the school-to-work effort in Santa Clara County and the Bay Area, offering the resources of Youth@Work and the partners at the Youth Employment Office to supplement the efforts that are already underway in area schools. Workforce Silicon Valley, a school-to-work initiative, is focusing its effort strongly on careers in information technology.

The Santa Clara County Training Directory is produced as part of a state-wide project and is primarily a cooperative effort between NOVA and the California Employment Development Department’s Labor Market Information Division. The directory provides information on all vocational and career training available in Santa Clara County, and can be used by individuals to access appropriate training, and by employers to find out who is training in the areas they need to hire.

Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network: Joint Venture's mission is in complete alignment with NOVA's strategic goals of growing the Valley's workforce and addressing the Digital Divide. Joint Venture has already been extremely successful in bringing together stakeholders to work on improving the economic vitality and quality of life in the region. Joint Venture is committed to providing leadership with NOVA on these issues.

Community College Districts: Longtime partners in workforce development, the community colleges have resources and growing commitment to address workforce issues in a collaborative environment. Mission College is using innovative tools such as Work Keys to match people with jobs based on skills profiling. The Occupational Training Institute of the Foothill DeAnza Community College District offers customized classroom training, placement assistance, and retention services, and their expertise in working with student populations who are not "traditional" students makes them an invaluable partner.

Adult Education: as primary providers of Vocational ESL (VESL), the adult education system is a critical part of addressing workforce and technology access issues. The adult education system also offers access to and basic skills training in computer technology.

CONNECT!: The community college districts and the adult education providers, along with many other agencies, are partners in CONNECT! CONNECT! brings workforce investment and business services together in a collaborative with over 30 partners, ranging from economic development initiatives to vocational education to veterans' services. The growing strength and commitment of these partnership to a seamless, customer-focused One-Stop service delivery system makes it easier to design effective multi-agency initiatives.

H-1B Technical Skill Training: The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Employment and Training Administration (ETA) aims to enhance the occupational skills of job seekers to meet employer demand for highly skilled technical workers locally, rather than bringing foreign workers in on H-1B visas. In particular, the industries that appear to generate the most H-1B demand include information technology and health. NOVA is working with its partners in the STEP project to expanding that program for an additional 25 individuals at each site. NOVA is also working with employers to gather information on the occupational areas for which they are now using H-1B visas, and the community colleges and UC Santa Cruz Extension as training providers of the high-level technical training that would be needed to prepare workers for these positions.

This grant can only be used for training and would provide the funds that would allow NOVA to supplement its greatly decreased funding under WIA. The funds can be used for both employed and unemployed workers, enhancing NOVA’s ability to provide wider public access to its services. It would also allow NOVA to assist employers in retraining some of their current workers in the new technology needed for job retention, rather than laying them off.

NOVA proposes to train 200 individuals with these grant funds. In partnership with the Silicon Valley PIC, these services will be offered countywide, and the amount of the grant application will not exceed $1.5 million.

Regional Skills Consortia: US DOL ETA is seeking to award grants to support the development of regional skills consortia. These consortia will assess employer skills needs, determine the gap between those industry needs and the skills possessed by regional workers, and develop a concrete action plan to train regional workers to fill the identified skill gaps. This grant is an ideal complement to the H-1B Technical Skill Training Grant. This grant would be used for the research, the H-1B grant for some of the training in the "gap" areas.

Grant funds can also be used to target for service young adults (aged 18-24) who may have fewer educational or occupational credentials. In this case, the research should clearly indicate career paths which will help these young people to acquire the high proficiency levels that may be required for some of the vacancies.

NOVA's expertise in creating and growing LMI+ reports and collaborations would be expanded to include the systematic development of regional consortia, and the study of employer skill needs. SkillsNet, a collaborative which grew out of NOVA's studies of digital media industries, will serve as a model for creating new teams.

With the support of the Silicon Valley PIC, the consortium will be countywide, and the grant application would be for an amount not to exceed $1 million.

ITA/Eligible Provider Demonstration Grants: NOVA is partnering with the California Employment Development Department and several selected California service delivery areas to submit this application to DOL ETA. Under WIA, one-stop operators will be required to develop a system to make Individual Training Accounts (ITAs) available to eligible job seekers, who will then use vouchers to pay for training with eligible training providers. The purpose of this grant is to develop demonstration programs to test innovative methods of implementing ITAs and establishing an Eligible Provider List process.

The ITA system as described by WIA is very similar to NOVA's current system of individual referral to classroom training, so EDD has asked NOVA to collaborate in the development and testing of several possible systems which may eventually be used statewide.

Likely partners in this application are the PIC serving a consortium of localities in the upper Sacramento River Valley, the Napa PIC and the San Diego PIC. The amount of this grant application would not exceed $500,000.

California Welfare to Work Funds: the state of California has discretionary Welfare to Work moneys available to local areas. NOVA is working with EDD to determine whether these moneys can be used to upgrade the career readiness and earning potential of the older youth of welfare families. The funds might also be used to bring young parents into the workforce using a "work first" model, then develop their skills and help them move up a career ladder while they are employed. This service delivery strategy is the same as the Wanting to Work initiative.

Foundation Funding: many foundations, such as the Noyes Foundation, the eBay Foundation, the Gates Foundation, Intel Foundation, and others have particular interest in community, youth, technology, and employment issues. NOVA staff is researching potential matches between these foundations' interests and the strategic objectives of NOVA and its partners, and will submit grants where appropriate and authorized by the PIC. Foundation moneys may be subject to fewer restrictions and allow more innovative program design than traditional federal and state sources.

STAR X/NOVA One-Stop: NOVA staff is exploring the possibilities of receiving a grant from the State's discretionary WIA funds to continue and improve NOVA's One-Stop service delivery system for dislocated workers. This "STAR X" grant would be based on the STAR grants that have helped to make NOVA the model for the nation's workforce development system. Training provided through these funds would focus on the occupations and skills in demand by regional employers.

Outreach to Underserved Communities: there is still considerable need and opportunity to reach out to Spanish-speaking populations, long-term welfare recipients, and out-of-school youth both within the region that NOVA serves and within the Silicon Valley PIC and San Benito PIC. California Senator John Vasconcellos has announced an initiative to reach out to Latino populations in the region to enhance their access to information technology and jobs that lead to greater economic self-sufficiency. It is NOVA's commitment to work closely with Senator Vasconcellos and other community agencies to develop further action plans to address this issue.

Employment Training Panel: NOVA currently provides employers with services to facilitate their training of incumbent workers through California's Employment Training Panel (ETP). In NOVA's countywide Welfare to Work strategy, ETP services allow employers to train their own workers to move up a career ladder, thus opening entry-level technical positions to those making the transition from public assistance. This tactic will work equally well in opening viable career paths for any of the targeted populations mentioned above. NOVA and its partners will work with employers to create new ETP opportunities and to gain employer buy-in to promoting their existing employees upward and crossing the Digital Divide to hire new workers.

• H-1B Technical Skill Training, not to exceed $1.5 million.

• Regional Skills Consortia, not to exceed $1 million.

• ITA/Eligible Provider Demonstration Grant, not to exceed $500,000.

• Welfare to Work Discretionary Funds Demonstration Project for older youth for approximately $500,000.