Federal workforce policymakers have spent much of the past couple decades trying to “scale” all sorts of workforce programs. It doesn’t seem to have worked.

There's a phrase in the work of getting people to work that's always struck me as off, and it's one policymakers of both parties use quite frequently when talking about what they want out of workforce programs.

Here’s some recent vintage from the party in power, starting with former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer in a March press release:

And here’s the February funding opportunity for the Department of Labor’s recently awarded apprenticeship pay-to-train incentives for employers.

And here’s the phrase in a 2023 Biden-era workforce grant I worked on:

If it’s not clear from the above examples, how “scale” typically gets used—particularly by political leaders—is as if workforce programs are a balloon that can expand in all directions and serve everybody. We just got to put enough air into it, or the right kind of air into it, or remove whatever physics is keeping it from blowing up, and then… scale.

It doesn’t seem to be working. Here’s Trump’s first labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, nearly a decade ago complaining about the Registered Apprenticeship programs Chavez-DeRemer wanted to scale.

Trump I’s answer to “scale” apprenticeship ultimately was to start over and “privatize” apprenticeship registration by handing it over to industry groups in non-construction industries. In adopting regulations in 2020, DOL said “this approach should encourage a more rapid scaling of quality apprenticeships across multiple industries where apprenticeships are currently underutilized.” It did not do that.

I like pointless futility as much as anyone, but it strikes me as weird that all these attempts to draw “scale” out of workforce programs—especially apprenticeship—don’t seem to have worked well enough to meet policymakers’ expectations. That’s a lot of cash going toward trying to swell ideas as far as they’ll go. If nothing else, it’s a lot of hours put in by smart people to try to figure things out.

As I’ve simmered on why that is, I’ve started to wonder if all the worrying about “scale” is part of the problem.

While this can be debated, and it’s the type of persnicketiness that might eventually drive my loved ones to put me on a trebuchet and launch me into a rock quarry, I’m not sure that the usage of “scale” is actually accurate here.

The term, as I’ve heard it used by policymakers, is most likely cribbed from business and startup culture. In the Economics 101 sense, you achieve scale when your costs to make your product—pizza, Pepsi, lavender hand soap, or whatever—don’t go up, but your revenue does, meaning you’re tapping into a new level of profit.

We can be way too employer-focused in this space, but it’s helpful to isolate their needs to show why that type of scaling is really, really damn hard in workforce. What employers do and the skills their workers need can evolve very, very quickly, and whether it’s accurate or not, a lot of very large employers expect their skills needs to be bespoke to them.

The organizations I see doing the best in getting people actually hired work their asses off to keep up with how employers’ needs and expectations evolve. That includes knowing who actually wants to buy their “product,” which is not every employer. Some employers aren’t interested in workforce development. Some say they are, but aren’t willing to do the work or tell you what they need because they’re not really sure. The organizations that do the best work have figured out the signs of who is worth their time.

That’s a level of discernment that I’m not sure policymakers can presently give us with the hyperemphasis on “scale,” especially in light of the politics on these issues. There's a thirst for The Big Number in most of the quotes above about "scale"—and in the funding solicitations I read calling for a "focus" on six or seven industries. There isn’t usually all that much new in those funding solicitations, which seem to ask for the same thing every year, just to slightly different ends. The wheel gets reinvented often.

And it’s very, very hard to “scale” when you don’t know what your product even is.

I’m not saying that policymakers shouldn’t expect big numbers from workforce programs, or that they shouldn’t expect those numbers to come efficiently from limited public resources. What I am saying, though, is that they can do a little bit more work in shaping how those dollars do that beyond using the word “scale” a lot.

Where do they start? Well, not all programs funded through past public efforts to “scale” workforce programs are unsuccessful—not in the least. Like the organizations I mention above, there are likely elements of a better product that can be mined from those projects and funded more. That doesn't happen as often as you might assume, in part because of that thirst for "scale."

Spending more on growth without a clear direction for how to get it handwaves away the hard work it takes—and puts us farther away from the Big Number political leaders have in mind.