Nevada’s libraries have long been an important part of the state’s workforce development programs, and in June, the state’s Board of Examiners approved a new librarian-in-residence program for two municipal systems—the North Las Vegas Library District and the Carson City Library—that will boost those efforts. For two years beginning last month, these librarians-in-residence will facilitate an Individual Career Mapping (ICM) and Training Delivery Model program developed by the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED) with libraries throughout the state. The program includes innovative features such as hands-on virtual reality (VR) “field trips” and access to NCLab’s Career Readiness Assessment to build STEM skills. Each librarian-in-residence will dedicate 10 hours per month for ICM services at their home library, with their remaining hours used to support libraries throughout the state.

The program aims to enhance access to career exposure, skill assessments, training programs, and employer connections for underrepresented groups. “These efforts address crucial elements in the state’s workforce development challenges, which will help Nevada businesses access untapped talent and bolster economic growth in the Silver State,” Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford said in an announcement.

“In a knowledge economy, the fact that libraries are being leveraged this way just makes all the sense in the world,” Senior Workforce Development Leader and former Nevada State Librarian Tammy Westergard told LJ. Westergard, who will be serving as the librarian-in-residence for the North Las Vegas Library District, described Individual Career Mapping as providing “labor market literacy”—giving young people or people who have been out of the workforce a clearer understanding of the steps they need to take to land a job or establish a foothold in a career that they are interested in. “Literacies of all kinds are in our wheelhouse,” she said. “And through the tech tools that are used to advance labor market literacy, people’s digital literacy skills are going to improve” as well.

The problem with many workforce training programs is that they are so focused on teaching specific skills that they may fail to help students see the bigger picture, Westergard said. “This idea of helping people upskill—get the right skills and they can get the right job—is that the mapping part, the navigation part, the community colleges and formal training providers often skip over all of that. They just want to go straight into ‘There’s a new company in town, and they have this cool new machine, so now we have to create a training program so we can train a bunch of people to go use that particular machine.’”

Westergard has long been an advocate for the use of VR in education and job training, and this new program utilizes VR to enable participants to begin mapping out their goals. VR headsets can take program participants on 35 virtual reality “field trips” from educational and job-training VR publisher Lifeliqe to explore careers in fields ranging from advanced manufacturing to healthcare to information technology to skilled trades.

The state’s VR headsets are “like a mobile library that has a specialized collection that’s all about careers that are in demand in the state of Nevada,” Westergard explained. “There are over 1,000 of these headsets that are distributed in all of our public libraries and all of our academic libraries, and they all have the same collection.” Having this collection widely available throughout the state, at public libraries, community colleges, and other academic institutions, with librarians prepared to offer additional help, creates a “giant ecosystem of career coaches” in Nevada, Westergard said. And she believes the headsets and VR software are so intuitive that “it immediately leapfrogs people forward” in terms of confidence with technology. “There’s not a bunch of remediation you need to go through in order to get up to speed…. People can have limited digital skills, [but] just put on the headset and boom, you’re there.”

In addition, a group of nine Nevada students recently used library VR equipment and content to study for and pass the National Career Readiness Certificate (NCRC) test, Westergard said. Developed by ACT Education Corp., the company that provides the ACT (American College Testing) standardized tests for university admissions, the NCRC is a credential, developed with input from employers throughout the United States, that students can receive by taking and passing three ACT WorkKeys exams in Applied Math, Graphic Literacy (the ability to accurately read gauges, graphs, infographics, etc.), and Workplace Documents. An increasing number of employers that may have once required a high school diploma for entry-level positions now want to ensure that applicants are “work ready,” Westergard said. Employers “want them to show a certificate that says, ‘Yes, they are competent with those three domains.’” Those employers will give priority consideration to applicants with credentials such as an NCRC, she added.

Partnerships and advocacy efforts have helped ensure that the Nevada state government views the state’s public and academic libraries as effective partners in efforts like this current workforce development program.

Since 2015, “the governor’s office of economic development is on the record for advancing libraries and using them to not only level up our [state’s] digital literacy skills—which are super important to the economy—but also to build talent pipelines and be involved in workforce development,” Westergard said.

“Pathways to economic opportunity are too frequently blocked for minority and women populations, and the overarching goal of this project is to give those individuals agency for informed decision making over their career decisions,” Karsten Heise, who heads GOED’s Innovation Based Economic Development division overseeing the project, said in an announcement. “This project is based on a validated methodology developed by the GOED team, which at its core is integrating the state’s public libraries while reaching deep into underserved communities comprising minorities, women, veterans, people in homeless shelters, re-entry from incarceration, and at-risk youth between the ages of 16 and 24.”