Isaiah Baldissera is Product Manager at the Project on Workforce. His role is focused on designing, building, and managing the Project's online tools and platforms. He is also responsible for data visualization design, and growth of the Project's audience through all of it's digital channels.
Prior to joining the team, Isaiah launched several education-technology startups centered on helping young people find their career paths. He also ran a social venture incubator, where he helped early-stage entrepreneurs plan, build, and finance their startups. Isaiah holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from Simon Fraser University, and a Master of Education Technology from the Harvard University.
Selected Research & Projects
The College-to-Jobs Map — Visualizing data on colleges and employment
The College-to-Jobs Initiative aims to bridge the gap between higher education and employment amidst rising student debt and skepticism about college value. Focusing on public colleges, HBCUs, and MSIs, it offers a College-to-Jobs Map merging data on colleges, job trends, and employment, alongside a Playbook detailing strategies to enhance student-workforce connections.
This working paper describes the Workforce Almanac, a first-of-its-kind effort to understand workforce training at a system-wide level. To demonstrate the kinds of analysis possible, this working paper compares the presence and types of short-term, post-high school workforce training providers in different U.S. regions and states. Some of our findings include: Of the nearly 17,000 workforce training providers in the U.S., only about one-third are eligible for federal WIOA funding. This suggests that at least two-thirds of workforce development providers operate outside of WIOA, the primary federal law funding workforce development. The Midwest and Northeast are the most served by workforce training providers, while the South and West are the least served. For every 100k workers, the Northeast has 11 providers, compared to 10 in the South. For every 100k unemployed people, the Midwest has 296 providers, compared to 256 in the West. The number of workforce training providers serving the labor force across states varies widely, from 6 per 100k workers in Connecticut to 32 per 100k workers in Maine. The makeup of workforce training providers serving communities in different states also varies widely. Some states, such as Massachusetts, rely heavily on apprenticeship sponsors, while others, such as Maine, Wyoming, and Alaska, rely more heavily on WIOA-eligible providers.
Navigating Public Job Training | Report
This report describes and analyzes the more than 75,000 “Eligible Training Provider” (ETP) programs in the United States. ETP programs are job training programs deemed eligible for funding under America’s primary federal workforce development law, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). Among other functions, WIOA funds vouchers for unemployed or underemployed workers to enroll in job training services. The vouchers are typically used to support enrollment in short-term, non-four-year-degree programs that connect to "in-demand employment” opportunities in a regional economy. Under the law, each state and territory must maintain a list of pre-approved programs that eligible individuals may select from. The programs on these lists (commonly known as “eligible training provider lists” – ETPLs) comprise our primary unit of analysis.