Guest Commentary written by

Alysia Bell

Alysia Bell is president of UNITE-LA

Ask a Los Angeles employer whether they’d give a young person their first real shot at a career and most would say yes.  Ask them to pull it off across a maze of disconnected programs, agencies and contracts, and the yeses would likely grow quieter. 

The willingness is there. So is the vision. 

California’s new Master Plan for Career Education, for instance, promises every young person a clear route from classroom to career. The state’s regional K-16 collaboratives connect high school to college to jobs in growing fields. 

A July budget trailer bill, Senate Bill 172, made the state’s Regional Economic Development Initiatives office a permanent part of the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development, commonly called GO-Biz. And California Jobs First is helping regions reshape their economies.

Clearly California’s challenge isn’t vision; it’s coordination.

In Los Angeles County, the scale of the challenge tells the story. The region trains a quarter of California’s students across 80 school districts, 21 community colleges, five CSU campuses and seven workforce boards. 

Each engages employers separately. 

A hospital or utility willing to host young interns, for example, must navigate separate onboarding protocols, insurance requirements and “employer-of-record” contracts. For learners under 18, questions about labor law, supervision and liability turn eager employers into cautious ones. 

None of this reflects a shortage of willing partners. The people and programs are here; they simply pursue similar goals through separate systems, leaving employers to stitch the pieces together.

Students face barriers, too. Many must weigh unpaid internships against their obligations to jobs, family and school. And funding for paid, work-based learning is scarce. 

The Golden State Pathways Program, for instance, can’t cover student wages. And the Learning-Aligned Employment Program committed the state to paid, career-connected experience for college students — but budget pressures cut it short.

Regional partners are taking up the mantle. Last year, nonprofit UNITE-LA served 5,302 Angelenos, engaged 68 employers and made 193 private-sector job and internship placements. 

Its L.A. Regional Cleantech Career Academy has opened doors for 281 young adults over three years. In 2025 alone, 99 young people completed paid cleantech training; nearly 90% came from communities long underrepresented in the industry.

Work-based learning pays off even for younger learners. UNITE-LA’s Tech Pathways Academy served 97 high school students last year, alongside L.A. Trade-Tech and West L.A. College. They earned college credit and industry-recognized credentials in class and with employers like Snap and Accenture.

The experience highlights two lessons:  First, employers are eager to take part when a trusted intermediary handles coordination, compliance and onboarding. Second, one word makes all the difference — paid — a paycheck lets students who can’t afford to work for free take part.

None of this happens by accident. It happens because a regional intermediary does what no single entity can do alone: gives employers one front door; standardizes the paperwork; braids public, private and philanthropic dollars into student wages, and ties work-based learning to education pathways. 

Where that connective tissue exists, employers show up. Where it doesn’t, they say “maybe next year.”

California has assembled the pieces: California Jobs First, the K-16 collaboratives and the Master Plan for Career Education. The task now isn’t inventing new programs. It’s connecting the ones we have, so employers and educators stop navigating a dozen initiatives that share goals but not rules or timelines.

California can maximize its regional momentum by investing in that connective tissue — the intermediaries and sector partnerships that bring employers, colleges and workforce agencies to one table. 

While the state has rightly invested in apprenticeships as the gold standard of earn-and-learn efforts, true economic mobility necessitates a full continuum of paid, work-based learning opportunities to gain experience without sacrificing a paycheck.

A new administration will soon shape the next phase of California’s workforce strategy. The boldest move isn’t launching something new; it’s accelerating what’s already working. 

Regions have spent years building the partnerships and earning the trust these plans require. They need continuity, not reinvention. The vision is written. The partnerships are established. Now California just has to scale it and turn every employer’s “maybe next year” into “yes, this year.”

Editor’s Note: CalMatters CEO Neil Chase is a member of UNITE LA’s board of directors.