Merit America to Build New, Responsive Sectoral Training Pathways

Sectoral training programs offer a diverse education and training pathway outside of traditional degree programs. They address the needs of both employers seeking qualified workers and individuals seeking career advancement. Ascendium’s grantmaking supports strategies like sectoral training that create more options for learners to get on a path to living-wage employment in high-growth, high-demand fields.

Merit America provides workforce-aligned programming and robust coaching and support for their learners, most of whom are adults in low-wage jobs. Their programs are fast — typically between 10 and 25 weeks in length — and include a flexible course schedule. The programs Merit America offers are also intentionally aligned to high-growth and high-demand fields nationally, ensuring that learners who complete the program are competitive for good jobs. As one of the fastest growing sectoral training providers in the U.S., Merit America also has a plan for ambitious scaling based on promising and early evidence of the effectiveness of their programming.

Ascendium recognizes Merit America’s closely aligned mission to achieve economic mobility for learners and workers from low-income backgrounds at a national scale — and with urgency. Because of this, we recently made a $20 million grant to Merit America to support their efforts to provide high-quality technical training to more low-income learners and workers and offer new program tracks in fields such as human resources, semiconductor and advanced manufacturing, and supply chain and logistics. Jobs within these industries offer unique opportunities for upward mobility as a result of significant federal investments through the CHIPS and Science Act and the Tech Hubs Program.

Our grant also supports the launch of Merit America’s new Opportunity Coalition, which allows learners and workers to complete these new sectoral training programs at no upfront cost through zero percent, outcomes-based financing. The Coalition represents an expansion of Merit America’s efforts under the Google Career Certificates Fund, which also uses outcomes-based financing and has demonstrated promising early success in increasing program completion.

Across our grantmaking, we strive to work with our partners to build evidence that will support their continuous improvement and paths to scale. Merit America shares that commitment and engages in ongoing research and evaluation of their sectoral training programs. These evaluations generate evidence about effective practices and approaches that can reach more learners from low-income backgrounds and allow for the expansion of training pathways into fields that provide further career opportunities.

“Ascendium’s expanded partnership with Merit America reflects our shared belief in the importance of ensuring economic opportunity is achievable for far more learners from low-income backgrounds,” said Maryann Rainey, senior program officer at Ascendium. “We’re excited to learn from Merit America as they build new pathways to upward mobility.”