News
Center Releases Report on Career Pathways in Transit & Transportation
Posted February 2014
Through the generous support of the Rockefeller Foundation, The Leadership Conference Education Fund, a non-profit organization affiliated with the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, awarded a seed grant to the Transportation Learning Center for the research, writing and production of a report on career pathways in transit and transportation: “Pathways to Equity: Effective Transportation Career Partnerships.” The report reviews the challenge presented by the significant number of frontline technical job openings projected in transit over the next decade. A combination of expansion and retirements will result in the need for the industry to hire and train the equivalent of 88 percent of today’s total transit employment—350,000 new workers in the next ten years. With this challenge, however, comes opportunity, especially for youth and adult community members in the areas transit serves. Public transportation jobs lead to family sustaining careers, as do jobs in the current growth area of transportation construction.
“Pathways to Equity” outlines two very different sets of collaborations, describing the methods and strategies used to create community-based pipelines into these careers. In Philadelphia, TWU Local 234 and SEPTA have worked together with education partners on a paid summer internship for high school Career and Technical Education students, while a collaboration with multiple community partners and employers has developed transportation career outreach programs and additional job opportunities. In Los Angeles, LA Metro, working with a long-standing and broad-based labor-government-contractor-community-education coalition, signed off on a Project Labor Agreement that creates support and training for and access to transit construction apprenticeships and jobs for community members.
The full report can be found on the Center’s website in the “Resource Center” section of the Center’s website, under “Publications.”
