Education and Workforce Innovation

Subject: Education & Workforce Innovation for Civic Tech

Researcher(s): PII, City of San Jose, City of Baltimore, Data-Smart City Solutions Program - Harvard University

Description:

Technological frontiers are redrawing the skill map for public-interest work. The ability to interrogate complex data, reason statistically, and collaborate with AI systems is rapidly becoming foundational. PII’s education and workforce innovation initiative prepares a new generation of civic technologists who can operate fluently in this environment—reading signals in messy datasets, posing the right questions to models, validating results, and translating analytics into policy and operational change.

Our academic programs combine rigorous instruction with embedded practice in city offices. Curricula span data acquisition and analysis, causal inference, geospatial analysis, and model evaluation, alongside responsible AI, governance, and reproducible workflows. Participants learn to treat AI as a collaborator rather than a black box: they design prompts and pipelines, audit outputs, and integrate model-assisted insights into decision processes while maintaining clear accountability.

The initiative is also a field laboratory. We study how these competencies alter individual trajectories and civic outcomes through mixed-methods and quasi-experimental designs. Measures include pre–post performance tasks, portfolio assessments, and longitudinal tracking of career progression; on the institutional side, we evaluate changes in agency capacity, decision quality, service delivery efficiency, and equity of impact. By coupling workforce development with rigorous evaluation, the program builds human capital and generates evidence on how data and AI proficiency can improve outcomes for communities.