. . . where I’m in the middle of a busy season of travel and speaking at events held by some great organizations. A few places you can find me in the next few weeks:

News you should know about money and things getting people to work

I recommend you read an interesting paper published last week about outcome-based investments in workforce by David Socolow at the Social Finance Institute and Harry Holzer of the Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy.

The paper focuses on outcome-based workforce finance programs, wherein, for example, a third party provides money for training and gets repaid by the employer or the workers based on the results. In my experience, these can be controversial in some circles because employers might not be keen on paying people back, and there are worries about predatory arrangements with workers.

The authors see potential for these programs to create more access for jobs that might not be touched by traditional financial aid. “When they’re seeing their demand dry up and, say, they used to be able to finance that with one of those federal student loans . . . maybe fill that gap using outcomes-based repayment,” Socolow said at an event at Georgetown last week.

But they also warn about inconsistency in approaches and terms. They note the importance of tailoring the programs to the desired outcomes, including who is repaying and why, and flag how important it is to carefully screen workers for fit. The latter is a key distinguishing factor for some workforce efforts I have seen in the past decade, which can try to wedge workers into fields they might not be interested in because there might be jobs in demand. The authors also urged policymakers to take steps against predatory practices that could impact workers from lower-income backgrounds.

The paper also has some interesting observations on supportive services, or help with things like childcare and transportation that can get a worker to and through training. It notes workers are more likely to get that kind of help where unmet labor needs are more severe, which makes sense.

But “stipends and supports cost more money,” Holzer told me in an interview. “The employers . . . don’t want to do it unless they know they’re going to get really good workers out of it, which in turn makes it hard to scale to a more disadvantaged population.”

These programs are explicitly not the pay-to-train programs for retraining and apprenticeship that the Trump Administration has spent a quarter billion dollars on in the past year. But in speaking to Holzer and Socolow last week, I found my brain floating back to those funds.

I have heard about employers of all sizes complaining about the shape of those funds not meeting their needs. It suggests to me that better targeting for those dollars—and better tailoring to specific industry needs—might be the best approach for future funds. That’s hard to translate into federal spending policy that has to be one size fits all because of availability of funds.

But Holzer also cautioned that it’s “early on” for these types of programs. He emphasized the need for more “rigorous” evidence on these models.

“Before [policymakers] invest a lot of dollars on whatever the model is, including the models they like, let’s have some rigorous evidence on it before we really shift gears and invest a lot,” he said.

Something noted to me by Apprenticeship World in recent months is that the Department of Labor seems to be under pressure to do “AI apprenticeships,” but officials at the Department didn’t seem to have much in specifics about how.

On Wednesday, DOL hosted (and streamed) an event called “Building the AI-Ready Workforce through Registered Apprenticeship.” The event had an interesting roundtable conversation about AI with some experts in apprenticeship, and DOL announced two new resources for AI and apprenticeship.

The first is the “Tech Registered Apprenticeship Innovation Network,” which appears to be a mailing list for future events and sharing information about AI-related apprenticeship stuff. The second was the “AI in Registered Apprenticeship Innovation Portal,” which is mostly a collection of pages with general information about how AI works and broad suggestions for connecting AI to apprenticeship. The portal also links to DOL’s recently announced AI literacy training as well as other free, pre-existing AI materials produced by companies like Microsoft and Google.

That’s a whole lot of something, but it’s also not exactly providing a ton of specific direction or tangibility to an area where employers (and apprenticeship programs) seem more than a little overwhelmed.

This is an area where I really feel for agency officials. DOL already has taken submissions for a contract for an organization to help it put more AI into apprentice-type places, but it hasn’t yet awarded a winner. National Apprenticeship Week is all confabs. If you’re going to throw a confab like Wednesday’s at Labor—which seemed to be the biggest event on DOL’s calendar for the week—agency officials had to announce something. It found two of items with adequate levels of something.

I think agency leaders also have a limited playbook from the White House, which is primarily “defer to industry” and “don’t look like you’re telling industry what to do.” Within those strict parameters, it’s really hard to address the complex policy problem AI presents in the workplace, especially if you don’t have a ton of resources to spend. And if industry itself doesn’t know what it’s doing, then there’s really not anything you can point toward to beyond the little bit you’re allowed to say.

Speaking from experience, a better fit would be how-to guides and more practical policy guidance that takes employers beyond what they can read in the news. The former seems unlikely to make it through the Trump White House. I’m not sure any decisionmaker in Washington is ready to do the latter.