Empowered Employment

What Ernst & Young LLP (EY US) can do for you

The global pandemic left constituents less satisfied with their quality of life and concerned about their ability to meet basic needs. At the same time, the resulting unemployment surge exposed aging processes and systems that no longer serve constituent needs. In response, we married our deep experience in unemployment tax with our customer experience design and technology modernization know-how to help states restore effective constituent employment services and take advantage of the moment to accelerate long-term transformation.

A different approach to employment innovation

Many states found themselves in a lurch during the pandemic because they had spent years employing the same approach to improvements in their departments of labor — improvements that did not keep pace with the times. Our approach to employment innovation relies on several simple yet powerful principles that can help states accelerate the pace of change to provide better service to their constituents, make life easier for employers and empower their employees.

Customer-centric, consumer-grade workforce experiences

Most constituents today have an expectation of digital service grounded in leading-class consumer platforms, even if experienced on mobile-only devices. Constituents expect digital services to be intuitive, frictionless, reliable and empathetic. States should design unemployment and workforce service platforms with the needs of the end user in mind.

Integrating support services

Constituents who are seeking unemployment financial relief typically need access to other forms of support as well. Government agencies have historically been siloed when it comes to organizing and providing the range of services that support the individual and family. States should seek to integrate these services, starting with unemployment and workforce services.

Flexible and resilient technology architecture

Many states still have legacy mainframes running at the core of their unemployment and workforce services systems and are desperate to modernize. A modernization program that’s incremental and modular — not depending on one big cutover replacement — can help make the herculean task more manageable. States should adopt leading practices such as platform-as-a-service (PaaS), service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud migration in their efforts to implement architectures that can continue to evolve with the times.

Our employment and workforce services