About 

The River Parishes Workforce Development Board (WDB) focuses its efforts on aligning the many facets of its workforce system to focus on improving the lives of citizens by supporting our businesses and strengthening our economically diverse communities.

Technology, globalization, and deregulation are the powerful forces driving economic change. The River Parishes WDB is committed to ensuring that its workforce is positioned to respond in this new economic reality and environment of constant pressures. The board realizes that the workforce must possess those broad skill that are valued in this economic world: flexibility, cross-training, multi-tasking, teaming, and project-based work. These changes all presume that ability for a worker to learn and re-skill continually throughout a career. New career structures and pathways have to be constructed outside individual employment organizations and across whole industrial sectors and regional labor markets to help meet these challenges.

The River Parishes Workforce Development Board concurs with and is fully committed to support the state’s key workforce investment priorities, which are:

1. To strengthen Louisiana’s workforce system so that it is fully aligned with the state and regional economic development priorities.
2. To develop a workforce system that consistently meets current and prospective Louisiana employer’s’ needs for a trained workforce by being easily accessible and quick to respond.
3. To develop an agile workforce system that can mobilize quickly to meet the needs of employers or industries who are experiencing rapid growth in employment.
4. To develop a workforce system that is prepared to meet the needs of all business customers, including entrepreneurs, small businesses, and women and minority owned businesses.
5. To continue toward towards a workforce system that offers easy to access, quality training programs to Louisiana citizens, including adult learning and basic skills upgrades, that will allow out people to acquire, retain and succeed in careers that improve their standards of living.
6. To embrace the concept that workforce development is a lifelong process by strengthening the links between our workforce system and our ongoing educational reforms including pre-K programs, school accountability, high school redesign, and adult learning to more closely align the skills delivered by our education systems and the skills needed by our industries.

Workforce Development Board Members and Executive Committee Members

Meetings