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By Melissa Riccio, Director of Capacity Building, Center for Employment Opportunities
What does it mean to be "job ready" when the workplace you are returning to may look nothing like the one you left? For people who have spent years, or even decades, incarcerated, preparing to return to work can mean learning much more than how to write a resume or prepare for an interview. Today's job seekers are navigating online applications, virtual interviews, digital onboarding, new workplace applications, automated hiring systems, and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. For older adults returning home, that learning curve can be especially steep.
That challenge led the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) to partner with Next 50. Next50 supports independence and dignity for older adults, particularly those with limited incomes and disabilities. Supported by Next50, CEO developed Building Forward, a new workforce readiness course designed specifically with older adults preparing for reentry. The course is being made available on tablets in prisons with the support of Edovo, whose platform reaches incarcerated learners in 1,500 prisons and jails around the country. The response was almost immediate: within a week and a half of launch, almost 700 learners have already taken the course. That number keeps growing.
Building Forward was designed around a simple idea. Older incarcerated learners are not starting from scratch. They may have been away from the traditional workforce for years, but they bring decades of life experience with them. They have solved problems, worked with different personalities, managed responsibilities, learned new skills, and adapted to difficult circumstances.
The course begins by helping learners identify transferable skills like reliability, communication, problem-solving, leadership, and patience, and then helping them understand how those strengths translate into today's workplace. From there, Building Forward tackles the realities of finding and keeping a job today: workplace communication and professionalism, digital literacy and practical technology skills, developments in the hiring process, and artificial intelligence.
We also made a conscious decision not to assume prior knowledge. Building Forward explains terms many of us use every day without thinking twice about them. What's a browser? What's the difference between a website and an app? What is multi-factor authentication? Why might an employer's computer system reject a resume before a person ever reads it? These may sound like small things, but they aren't small when knowing the answer determines whether someone can successfully apply for a job.
Bringing CEO’s Expertise Inside
Creating the course was one challenge. Getting it to people before they return home was another, and that's where CEO's ongoing relationship with Edovo has been so important.
Our partnership with Edovo gives CEO the ability to bring workforce development and reentry expertise directly to incarcerated learners through technology already available inside correctional facilities. That allows workforce preparation to begin earlier. CEO traditionally meets people at a critical moment, shortly after they return home from incarceration. Through Edovo, we have an opportunity to begin supporting job seekers before release.
Building Forward is the latest example of what that partnership can make possible. Its early reach demonstrates the potential of combining CEO's workforce and reentry expertise with Edovo's ability to deliver educational programming directly to incarcerated learners at scale.
For CEO, the value of that reach isn't simply the number. Every person who learns how an online application works before they need to complete one has one less unfamiliar system to navigate after release. Someone who learns what multi-factor authentication is before a new employer asks them to use it has one less surprise on their first day. Someone who practices talking about their skills before sitting across from a hiring manager has had an opportunity to prepare before the stakes are real.
That is why we see our continued partnership with Edovo as an important part of extending CEO's expertise beyond the walls of our physical offices. It allows us to reach people earlier in their reentry journey and creates opportunities to think differently about where workforce preparation begins.
Designed with Experience
Building Forward also reflects something CEO has learned over decades of working alongside people returning from incarceration: good reentry programming has to be designed with the people who will actually use it.
That was intentional throughout the development of the course. In addition to drawing on CEO's expertise in reentry, workforce development, fair chance employment, and employer practices, we held focus groups with CEO staff and CEO participants to hear directly from people with professional and lived experience. Their feedback helped shape everything from the topics we included and the language we used to the assumptions we needed to avoid and the places where learners might need more explanation or time.
That input influenced not only what we taught, but how we taught it. We intentionally designed the course so learners aren't penalized for needing more time or encountering something unfamiliar. For us, that's an important part of effective program design. Expertise isn't just knowing the subject matter. It's knowing how to translate that knowledge into something useful, accessible, and relevant to the people you're trying to reach.
What's next?
Building Forward is also helping us think more broadly about what digital reach can make possible.
This is just one piece of a growing body of digital learning, tools, and resources we are developing to help people prepare for employment and reentry while they are still incarcerated. As technology and AI continue to reshape the labor market, we also have an opportunity to use those same tools to expand access to high-quality workforce preparation at a scale that traditional service delivery alone cannot reach.
Our next phase of work will build on what we're learning, develop additional digital inreach offerings, and make resources like Building Forward publicly available so people who were released before the course launched, or who did not have access to it while incarcerated, can benefit as well.
