Action: Create a system of competitive, one-stop, career development centers open to all Americans.10 Our nation's economic future depends on the quality of our workforce. Our individual futures, too, depend on whether we have marketable, flexible skills with which to adapt to the changing demands of new technologies. In a country where the average worker changes jobs seven times in a lifetime, those skills are more than desirable; they are crucial. Our government invests heavily in education and training. Together, 14 separate government departments and agencies invest $24 billion a year, through 150 employment and training programs.11 But we do not invest this money well enough. For one thing, our system is organized for the convenience of those who deliver services, not those who use them. For another, the system lacks competition and incentives for improvement. "The United States has a worldwide reputation for providing its youth extensive opportunity to attend college," the General Accounting Office noted recently. "However, our country falls short in employment preparation of many noncollege-youth." Unlike our competitors, GAO said, we have no national policy to systematically prepare non-college educated youth for jobs.12 Our system is badly fragmented. Each service -- from job referral to retraining -- is designed for different people, with different rules, regulations, and reporting requirements. Bewildered, often dispirited, job seekers must trudge from office to office, trying to fit themselves into a program. When they find a program, they may find that they aren't eligible, that it's all filled up, or that the classroom is across town. American workers deserve a better deal. Nowhere on the government reinvention front is action more urgently needed or are potential rewards greater. We envision a new workforce development system, focused on the needs of workers and employers. We will organize it around the customer -- whether an individual or a business -- then provide that customer with good information about the performance of different providers and plenty of choices. If we do this, career centers and training providers will have to compete for their customers' business, based on the quality of their services. Specifically, we propose one-stop career management centers across the country, open to all Americans -- regardless of race, gender, age, income, employment experience, or skills. (One-stop centers are also a key feature of the Workforce Investment Strategy the Labor Department is developing.) Our centers would offer skills assessment, information on jobs, access to education and training -- everything people needed to make career decisions. The centers would be linked to all federal, state, and local workforce development programs, and to many private ones (which are, after all, the source of most job-training money). Core services such as labor market information and job search help would be offered free. Some centers might offer other services, from comprehensive testing to career counseling and workshops, on a fee-for-service basis. These centers would help their customers get access to funds from any of the 150 programs for which they qualified. To make this possible, the federal government would eliminate or waive many rules and regulations that keep our workforce development programs separate. The centers would also be allowed to generate their own revenues, including fees collected from employers and employees would could afford to pay. Any organization, public or private, would be allowed to seek a charter to operate one or more one-stop career centers. The process would be performance-driven, with contracts renewed only if centers met customers' demands. The federal government would establish national chartering standards for the centers, but states and local employment boards would decide which organizations met the standards. Today, local organizations such as U S Employment Service and Service Delivery Areas get most of their federal funds almost as a matter of entitlement. They account for the money, but we do not hold them accountable for whether they spend it effectively. We would make funding for these new centers more competitive, opening the process to public and private, nonprofit and for-profit, entities. We would judge these centers in part by how many people sought help at them -- on the theory that centers attracting the most customers were clearly doing something right. But we would focus as well on what happened after the customers left. Did they enroll in meaningful training programs? Did they find jobs? Did they keep their jobs? Did they increase their incomes? Finally, we would give customers the necessary information to decide the same thing for themselves: Which training program would meet their needs best? We believe that the central problem in the Employment Service is not the line workers, but the many rules and regulations that prevent them from doing their jobs. Waiver of these antiquated rules will free up these workers to perform well. In order for state Employment Services to compete on a level playing field -- particularly after the negative effects of the last decade of spending cuts and over-regulation -- line workers must be given the opportunity to retool. The Labor Department should ensure that they receive the necessary training to enable them to participate in the process. The biggest single barrier to creating an integrated system of one-stop career centers is the fragmented nature of federal funds. The 150 federal programs have different rules, different reporting requirements, even different fiscal years. To synchronize these -- and to break down the walls between categorical programs -- the National Economic Council should convene a Workforce Development Council, with members from the Departments of Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services; the Office of Management and Budget; and other departments and agencies with employment and training programs. This council should standardize fiscal and administrative procedures, develop a standard set of terms and definitions between programs, develop a comprehensive set of results-oriented performance standards, and improve the qualitative evaluation of program performance.