This page brings together practical, ready-to-use resources created by the Strategies Center and its partners to support states and their partners in advancing direct care workforce efforts. Here you will find recorded sessions, one-pagers, and curated materials that translate key concepts into actionable guidance.
Lab Talks
The Lab Talk Series is a collection of short, expert-led recorded learning sessions that highlight real-world strategies, state innovations, and practical implementation lessons for the direct care workforce. Speakers include national experts, state leaders, and partners who share actionable approaches, tools, and insights to strengthen workforce systems. These sessions provide accessible, evergreen, experience-driven guidance for states at any stage of workforce development – supporting planning, partnership building, and sustainable system change.
Building a Statewide Training and Credentialing Infrastructure
This Lab Talk looks at how states can better align direct care training by building around shared core skills, more consistent standards, and making it easier for workers to carry their credentials across jobs. It highlights how a competency crosswalk can be used as a practical tool to strengthen training programs, with examples from Massachusetts and North Carolina.
- Recording and PPT slides coming soon
Self-Direction in Focus
This Lab Talk explores how self-directed care works across the country, including different program models, how many people are using them, and how they shape the workforce. It wraps up with practical steps states can take to better support and strengthen self-directed care and the workers who make it possible.
Creating a Campaign: Marketing Strategy to Expand the Direct Care Workforce
This Lab Talk explores how a coordinated branding and marketing approach can help attract more people to direct care jobs at scale. It highlights Wisconsin’s WisCaregiver Careers program, walking through how the campaign was developed from building the brand to launching a coordinated outreach strategy across TV, radio, print, digital, and social media that garnered more than 353,000 website visits and over 18,000 sign-ups.
Building Direct Care Career Pathways – Understanding Pathways, Ladders, and Lattices
This session features Jeannine LaPrad of PHI discussing state strategies to strengthen career progression in the direct care workforce. Topics include developing clear career pathways, ladders, and lattices; expanding access to training; and promoting portable, competency‑based credentials. Drawing on lessons from our Peer-learning Collaboratives, the session highlights examples from Michigan, Wisconsin, New York, and New Jersey, and emphasizes strategies to improve job quality and support worker mobility.