Publications and Reports

A report on the process, products and outcomes related to the first National consortium for development of training for public transportation maintenance employees.  This joint labor-management effort set a proven model for multiple other similar consortia.  Products include - instruction ready courseware, a nationally recognized apprenticeship program for transit maintenance elevator/escalator maintainers and train-the-trainer program.

The purpose of this report is to serve as a guidebook, offering information that transit agencies can use to establish mentoring as a training method with guidance, suggestions, and examples to implement or expand upon existing mentoring programs. It is based on a generic mentoring guidebook developed by the USDOT, modified and enhanced to reflect transit maintenance applications.

What are the major issues facing public transportation’s frontline workforce today? Looking out over the next decade and beyond, where should agencies, unions, and the industries that support our nation’s public transportation sector focus their attention to have the biggest impact on those issues?
In Making Connections 2017, we will attempt to answer these questions on a macro level through broadly focused plenary sessions which look at public transportation’s ongoing challenge to recruit, train and retain its frontline workforce and a forward-thinking vision of the future of public transportation.
Then we will drill down to help identify specific solutions to major industry challenges in our workshop sessions. There we focus on frontline workforce development and training from several angles.
We hope Making Connections 2017 will be a forum to discuss these challenges to transportation and exchange ideas to help formulate joint solutions that best serve the needs of transportation administrators, employees and most importantly, riders.

This guidebook is developed by the Transportation Learning Center working with Jobs for the Future for the Department of Transportation and the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education.

This Guide outlines the steps that transportation industry stakeholders can take to develop or expand Career Pathways to focus on the skills, competencies, and credentials needed for high-demand jobs in the transportation industry and its subsectors. Specifically, this Guide: 

• Provides a rationale for change, by describing the increasing need for skilled workers in the transportation industry and concerns over the prospect of a skilled worker shortage over the next 10 years if nothing is done;
• Identifies the potential of Career Pathways systems for addressing the skill needs of the current and future transportation industry workforce; and
• Describes a process for developing Career Pathways in transportation. 

The Department of Labor selected the Transportation Learning Center as a Green Jobs funds recipient because the Center has been at the forefront of addressing the issue of insufficient training in the transit industry and building constructive partnerships between labor and management to address this critical issue. The grant succeeded in creating new training approaches and providing training to thousands of workers in key transit occupations, with a consistent focus on greening the economy and our communities.

The Green Jobs Training Partnership is built on the Center’s successful model of creating and supporting labor-management partnerships to plan and deliver transit training that provides instruction based on national standards. The Partnerships plan and carry out training, to help transit employees obtain the skills they need to stay current in an industry that is ever changing.