The Alabama State Department of Education (ALSDE) is requesting $3.25 million over four years from the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences (IES) to support a multi-agency project to complete the infrastructure development for the Alabama Terminal for Linking and Analyzing Statistics (ATLAS) on Career Pathways. The proposed infrastructure will merge data from systems developed independently by the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education (DECE), ALSDE, the Alabama Community College System (ACCS), and the Alabama Commission on Higher Education (ACHE) with the Workforce Longitudinal Data System (WLDS). The WLDS is a system containing data from all partner agencies charged with implementing the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), and the system is managed by the Alabama Department of Commerce. The Alabama Department of Labor (ADOL) also shares unemployment insurance (UI) and labor market data with the WLDS.

This award will allow Alabama to complete the development of the Alabama Terminal on Linking and Analyzing Statistics (ATLAS) on Career Pathways and the Alabama College and Career Exploration Tool (ACCET). The ACCET will serve as an online dashboard, digital resume, and one-stop tool to provide students with information at all phases of career and college exploration through workforce participation, to provide adults with opportunities to obtain employment in high-demand jobs through training that results in the attainment of industry-recognized credentials at minimal cost; and will reduce the cost of the hiring process for employers by allowing them to recruit employees who have earned credentials required by their respective industries. The ALSDE will serve as the key partner and fiscal agent for the grant; however, most of the funds will support the completion of the ATLAS on Career Pathways and the ACCET, which are both coordinated through the Governor's Office of Education and Workforce Transformation (GOEWT), Division of Education and Workforce Statistics (DEWS).

The funds allocated through this grant will allow Alabama to accomplish the following goals:

• To complete the development of ATLAS on Career Pathways through a secure platform by linking data from early childhood, K–12, higher education, workforce development training and data concerning workforce participation to identify successful career pathways that lead to family-sustaining wages in occupations that are in demand at the regional and state levels.
• To complete ACCET as the AlabamaWorks! online dashboard, informing individuals about educational and training pathways that lead to long-term, successful careers in Alabama.
• To provide data to support the efforts of Governor Ivey's Strong Start, Strong Finish education initiative to ensure that all Alabamians have access to a seamless education-to-workforce system that connects education from pre-k through the workforce—with a focus on closing achievement and attainment gaps among special populations.
• To develop an inventory of reports, requiring data from multiple partner agencies, that will be developed as the iterative reporting cycle of ATLAS, under the supervision of the P20W Council, to include provisions for assisting partner agencies with federal reporting.
• To support the Alabama Committee on Credentialing and Career Pathways (ACCCP) by providing the data necessary to identify high-demand, high-wage, and fast-growing career pathways at the regional and the state levels; and to incorporate Alabama's Compendium of Valuable Credentials into the ACCET to support competency-based career pathways that utilize credentials of value as signals of the mastery of one or more competencies demanded by employers.