The Department of Labor announced Angela Pate from Gainesville, Florida, has been appointed to its Workforce Information Advisory Council (WIAC). She will serve as a Training Services Provider representative. Pate currently serves as the Chief Information Officer for CareerSource North Central Florida (NCFL), President & CEO of Focused Management Solutions and Startup Quest®, and Chair of the Board of Directors at OwnForce. The Council met for the first time Wednesday, July 12 in Washington, D.C.
The 14-member Council will provide recommendations to Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez, working jointly through the Assistant Secretary for Employment and Training and the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, on workforce and labor market issues; innovative and new approaches to data collection and policy; and workforce development, planning, and programming. The Council was created under the Workforce Innovation & Opportunity Act signed into law by President Obama in July 2014. Members of the committee are national leaders in workforce and labor market information.
Pate has been a consistent advocate for the role of innovative data strategies to guide policy creation. Over the past several years, she has advocated for the recognition of self-employment as a positive outcome in the workforce development system. She was listed as a contributor to 10 Strategies for a Workable Future, a white paper published by the Palo Alto-based Institute for the Future, to better understand new growing work-based digital platforms in the new sharing and gig economies.
Pate has also recommended an update to the Contingent Worker Supplement (CWS) to the Current Population Survey (CPS) at national forums such as the Department of Labor Future of Work Symposium. The Contingent Worker Supplement tracks non-traditional employees and independently-employed individuals many of whom now use work platform technologies like Uber, Upwork, OwnForce and others. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez announced earlier this year that an updated CWS survey will be conducted again in 2017. As a member of the Council, Pate plans to advocate for similar data-driven initiatives to inform future policy creation.
Pate was recommended to the Council by Santa Fe College Vice President of Economic Development Dug Jones. In the nomination letter, Jones cited Pate’s experience in “developing large scale data systems that track [self-employment] outcomes,” including Startup Quest®, co-created by Pate and UF Florida Innovation Hub Director Jane Muir. The program attracted the attention of the World Bank which recently invited Pate to present results of the program and its expansion to nine Florida communities to global economists as a model for self-employment training for economic development.
