A New View on Progress in Grads2Careers
When Billie Sun started at Baltimore’s Promise in late 2021, data collected on the Grads2Careers (G2C) workforce development program was “spread across a million different spreadsheets,” she said. Reporting on basic information — such as enrollment or completion rates — required manually gathering and checking data, a time-intensive and cumbersome process.
Today, a streamlined dashboard allows Baltimore’s Promise and its partners to easily review G2C referrals, enrollments, and employment outcomes, providing a clearer view of the program. G2C seeks to establish pathways for Baltimore City high school graduates who are not enrolled in four-year colleges into well paying, high-demand and high-growth occupations in the city and region.
An initiative of Baltimore’s Promise, Baltimore City Public Schools, and the Baltimore City Mayor’s Office of Employment Development, G2C draws data from a broad set of partners and participants.
Shortly after Sun started, G2C shifted to a new system, Salesforce. Workforce providers engaged with G2C can submit and track data into the system about their own participants. Salesforce allows G2C to roll up that information in accessible dashboards that help assess the program’s outcomes.
“Instead of manually putting everything together every month, [the dashboard] is getting that same information from Salesforce and automatically updating every day,” Sun said. “The G2C data team’s work now is more checking the quality of the data and fixing mistakes, here and there, rather than trying to get basic numbers. This gives leadership more accurate resources for data-driven decision making about the program.”
Sun, whose experience includes working for the Baltimore City Mayor’s Office of Performance and Innovation, has seen how data can inform vital initiatives. While working for the city, she supported data-driven efforts to efficiently divert 911 calls related to behavioral health issues to trained mental health providers. A dashboard for that program, which continues to evolve, is publicly available.
Sun said she can imagine various ways the G2C dashboard could expand or evolve, incorporating more qualitative data, such as feedback from G2C participants, and potentially offering public components that prospective G2C participants could use to evaluate options.