In 2008, NOVA and the Sunnyvale office of the California Employment Development Department (EDD), launched a bold initiative to drastically change service delivery for job seekers and employers at the CONNECT! one-stop in Sunnyvale. CONNECT! is one of 12 California one-stop and workforce investment board systems that adopted the ISD approach in 2008 as a pilot project.

For customers, this Integrated Service Delivery (ISD) model was designed to provide a broader range of workforce services available to a greater number of job seekers and employers.

For NOVA and EDD staff, the change meant trying to integrate staff functions between two agencies with similar missions but often competing and non-complementary funding streams, mandates and cultures.

Seeking greater objectivity and desirous of both qualitative and quantitative data, NOVA hired consultant Hilary Goodkind, Ph.D., to lead this research effort. In December 2009, she facilitated a total of five focus groups composed of employer and job seeker customers as well as NOVA and EDD staff. She then validated those data with an online survey of job seeker customers.

NOVA Economic Stimulus Manager Luther Jackson also interviewed NOVA and EDD staff as well as representatives of 11 other California workforce boards that also launched the ISD model. The result is this comprehensive review of this integrated service delivery model available for download below.

• Full report (PDF: 1.7MB)
• Executive Summary (PDF: 0.7MB)

For more information on this report or the program itself, please contact Luther Jackson at ljackson@novaworks.org.