Broken Links in the Workforce Development System: The Social-Human Development Need for Assessing Psychological Self-Sufficiency

The broken links in the U.S. workforce development system is that it focuses largely on bringing economic actors together to invest in education and training as inputs and to generate job match results as outputs in an employers’ market. Integrating Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory with psychological self-sufficiency (PSS) as a bottom-up system recreating process through productive practices of human actors is examined. The purpose of the study was to examine how the change in PSS affects one’s later stage economic self-sufficiency (ESS) outcome in workforce development. The study sample consisted of 350 low-income jobseekers from a U.S. federally funded health care career pathway education and training program called the Health Profession Opportunity Grant (HPOG). A multiple regression analysis found that PSS positively affects ESS while controlling for other sociodemographic variables. These findings guide the policymakers and service providers to invest more resources in building a culture of PSS to relink the workforce development system. We develop a case for assessing PSS to inform humanistic human resource development and management in helping individuals to switch from barriers to hope to achieve career goals in their lives. We propose further agenda for PSS research to be applied in industry-based employee engagement.