Building Maine’s Comprehensive Workforce and Talent Strategy

In September 2019, the State Workforce Board embarked on a process to gather input into a new strategic vision and strategy for Maine’s workforce system. This strategy was created to provide a roadmap to foster collaboration among the public, private, nonprofit and education sectors to help achieve the goals outlined in Maine’s 10-year economic development plan:

• Grow the average annual wage by +10 percent
• Attract 75,000 people to Maine’s talent pool

Download the Plan (PDF)

The 2024 RESET

• Download the document (PDF)
• Three months after the Maine 2020-2029 Economic Development Strategy (hereafter referred to as the 10-year strategy) was released, the first Covid case was detected in Maine. A lot has happened since then. The original plan gave Maine a roadmap to address the immediate impacts as well as invest in improvements of the long-standing systemic challenges. The Governor, working with the legislature, invested $400 million in federal recovery funds into workforce training, the green economy, broadband, and infrastructure.
• This update reaffirms the vision and 7 strategies of the original Plan. However, it revises and adds 57 new actions for implementation. The actions are based on current market data and inputs from discussions with hundreds of Maine people during 2023. Many of these actions are extensions of work that was initiated in the last few years. While the work has started it needs to be sustained to achieve long-term goals.
• Maine used a collaborative process to establish the vision, goals, and strategies represented in the original plan, and this collaboration continued into the creation of Maine’s Economic Recovery Plan during the pandemic and now with the refresh of the 10-Year Economic Development Plan. The SWB was directly involved in the revisioning of the 10-year plan, with the intent that the plan should reflect the state’s unique workforce and economic development characteristics and challenges, as well as the ideas and solutions of the myriad stakeholders that comprise Maine’s workforce development system.
• Building on the previous work, the SWB cohosted seven statewide visioning sessions with the Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD) to gather input into the review of the State’s 10-Year Economic Development Plan and Workforce Strategic Vision. These sessions were also cohosted with the Local Workforce Development Boards and Local Economic Development Districts. The SWB and DECD also joined nearly 40 additional partners and stakeholders at their own events and meetings to solicit their thoughts moving forward. In coordination with DECD, the SWB released an update to the State’s 10-Year Economic Development Plan that embeds an updated workforce vision that aligns with the SWB’s goals in March 2024.