§ 41-30-110 — Purpose.

(A) The purpose of this chapter is to endeavor to reach the workforce potential of this State. It seeks to coordinate, align, and enhance all publicly funded workforce development services and centralize oversight of the entities that provide these services to enhance accountability, enhance transparency, and promote a customer-centric workforce system so that the opportunities available through it are easy to access, highly effective, and simple to understand, and to provide a mechanism to marshal workforce development resources and services to meet the immediate and future needs of specialized industry workforce demands and economic development commitments of this State and in specific areas of the State. Further, this chapter seeks to: (1) deliver value-added services to business customers by collaborating with them to address skills shortages in priority industries and in-demand occupations; (2) provide for broader dissemination of information to help students, parents of students, and job seekers make career choices based on an awareness of jobs, skills in demand, and related educational pathways; (3) develop methods for coupling workforce training with a continuum of services to assist those who are struggling to overcome workforce participation barriers; and (4) address obstacles unique to those in rural areas. (B) To achieve this purpose: (1) a unified comprehensive statewide education and workforce development plan is established; (2) all entities performing publicly funded workforce development-related functions are required to comply with the obligations under the plan; and (3) their compliance will be monitored and, when necessary, compelled by the Office of Statewide Workforce Development, and such reports will be made publicly available in order to further transparency and better inform workforce development spending and policymaking.

Legislative History

HISTORY: 2023 Act No. 67 (H.3726), SECTION 2, eff May 19, 2023. Editor's Note 2023 Act No. 67, SECTION 1, provides as follows: "SECTION 1. This act may be cited as the 'Statewide Education and Workforce Development Act'."