WebStudy Foundation helps regions build workforce capacity to keep pace with continuous change.
We design and facilitate a structured process, called CapacityWorks™ for educators and employers to reveal what silos hide, align priorities around real job demand, and build the capacity to offset the gap anticipated by 2030.
Think Together. Act Together. Align Today!
A no-obligation exploratory conversation
about your region’s future
40% of businesses can’t take on more work because they can’t fill the jobs they already have.
Each region’s labor force participation gap can be reduced when employers, educators, workforce leaders, economic developers, and funders stop solving the same problem separately — and start deciding together what comes first, where, and when.
Regions already have labor market data, workforce plans, employer advisory meetings, grant initiatives, and strategic reports.
What’s missing is a process that helps priorities converge around what employers actually need before decisions on which intiatives will have the greatest impact
Employers cannot grow without qualified workers.
Educators and training providers cannot stay relevant if learners cannot turn skills into real jobs.
Credentials. Career pathways. Apprenticeships. Skills-first initiatives.
Fragmented initiatives are the symptom.
Disconnected decision-making is the cause.
Coordinated efforts result in collective impact.
We don’t facilitate conversations about alignment—we design the conditions that make alignment possible.
Participants don’t simply attend another talking head conference. CapacityWorks™ is a series of working sessions for five sectors to align, prioritize, and coordinate efforts. With shared understanding, educators produce job-ready graduates, employers fill vacancies, economic developers attract new investment, workforce agencies improve better placements, and funders maximize stronger returns.
Through structured small-group dialogue and real-time synthesis, they experience a different kind of conversation, one where guarded perspectives become openness, listening replaces defending, and patterns emerge. As participants see their own collective thinking take shape during the session itself, fragmented perspectives give way to shared understanding.
Proven methodologies turn conversations into collective action.
Decisions and Dollars Are Still Moving Separately
Problem #1: Separate decision-making.
The people who teach and the people who hire rarely decide what’s needed together – each sets priorities on its own, then finds out afterward whether they matched.
Problem #2: Funding reinforces separate decision-making.
Dollars move to individual programs before a region has agreed on what employers actually need. And funding itself rewards that pattern: Workforce Pell and endowment support are both more likely to keep flowing where training and hiring stay closely aligned – funders want to see shared ownership of what’s needed next, not evidence it was assumed.
That’s why workforce initiatives are at risk of becoming late-stage coordination failures – good funding, discovered too late to have been aimed at the right thing.
Traditional workforce funding wasn’t built for the speed, complexity, or interdependence of today’s labor market. Too much of it still reaches programs before a region has aligned around what employers need, which learners are being prepared, and what should come first.
The result is familiar: well-funded activity without coordinated impact.
Built From Both Sides of the Workforce Challenge
WebStudy Foundation was founded by Gisele Larose after decades of experience on both sides of the workforce challenge—employers seeking talent and educators preparing it. Colleagues in organizational development, educational technology and workforce development joined her in her research.
After years of studying why workforce initiatives struggle to scale, we reached a simple conclusion: the problem is not a lack of programs, funding, or good intentions. The problem is that organizations shaping the future workforce rarely make decisions together.
That insight led to a simple mission: help regions move from fragmented planning toward coordinated action.
The future isn’t waiting. Our systems are.
