Workforce Development and Six Sigma

You may want to check into the Six Sigma work in Fort Wayne, Indianna as it may be a close fit to the kinds of things your doing.

Paula, unless your workforce needs include SS skills and you need an assessment tool I don’t believe SS can contribute directly.
You are essentially creating a registry of jobs and looking at the gaps between the job requirements and the current population or applicant population skill sets. It’s more a matching and ranking project than anything else – at the front end.
I suggest you consider building a skill set library; this job function ideally seeks these 12 skill sets, and so on through all the job functions you are dealing with. Then have applicants or current workforce complete a skills survey – then check gaps.
It’s a laborious task yet that is the core of what you are attempting.
Once gaps, or groups of gaps, are identified you can work with local trade schools, community colleges et al to develop “short course” training to fill the gaps.
I’ve been involved in a couple of these efforts and am sorry to say without much success. The reason being – it is a sizable task and typically there is no one willing to fund it to completion.
Good luck.

The only additional suggestion, which I should have included in my first post, is to limit your initial effort to perhaps 10 or so key job functions. That narrows the scope such that you can do it justice and has a higher probability of success. You will need successes to get the monies to take it to a broader job population.
Perhaps pick the sample jobs from a group of positions needed by firms that could afford to fund the effort going further.
Also, as you do achieve some success rally the local news media around it making it visible. If it becomes a story then city council, economic development groups (even the schools) et al may join in the effort.