Not a California state website. An independent project built from public data.
Camino · CA

California training programs, and what happened to the people who took them

Español (inicio)

Back to search

About these figures

This site publishes performance figures about named California training providers, in public, and puts them side by side. That is worth doing, and it is worth being exact about what the numbers are. Everything below describes where each figure comes from, who produced it, what it leaves out, and what to do if you think it misrepresents you.

Camino is an independent, non-commercial project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the State of California, the California Employment Development Department, any California workforce development board, or the U.S. Department of Labor. It uses California's open-source design system, which is why these pages resemble official state websites. They are not official ones.

Programs described here
3,266
Providers named here
584
Programs that report any outcome
2,057 of 3,266

Data snapshot: 2026-08-04

On this page

Where every figure comes from

Nothing here is original research, nothing is estimated by this project, and nothing is a prediction of its own. Every number on the site is copied from one of three public records and can be traced back to it.

Programs, providers, cost, length and outcomes
The U.S. Department of Labor's Eligible Training Provider performance report (ETA-9171), which states file under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act and the Department is required to publish. It is the source of every provider name, price, length, and every measure of what happened to the people who enrolled.
Pay, projected openings and job outlook
California's Employment Development Department: its long-term occupational employment projections for 2024 to 2034, and its wage statistics where the projections carry no wage. These are the state's own ten-year estimates for an occupation, statewide and for the areas it names.
Job descriptions and skills
CareerOneStop, the U.S. Department of Labor service that publishes O*NET's occupation content. It serves English only, which is why an occupation description stays in English on a Spanish page.

Each source, its licence, and the date it was read are recorded in the project's public provenance file, and the whole dataset can be rebuilt from those sources by anyone.

Read the provenance file

The outcomes are self-reported, and this site does not check them

Completion, employment and earnings are reported by each training provider to California, and by California to the federal government. This project reproduces what was filed. It does not audit it, cannot confirm it, and has no way to tell a carefully compiled figure from a careless one. A number here is evidence of what a provider reported, not proof of what happened.

This matters most in the direction people do not expect. The measures are not adjusted for who a program enrols. A program that takes people furthest from work will tend to report lower employment and lower earnings than one that enrols people already close to a job, and nothing in this data separates the two.

What a blank means

A missing value here means not reported or withheld. It never means zero, and it is never rendered as one. Under federal rules, results for small groups are suppressed so that individual participants cannot be identified, so a blank can equally be a program too small to publish safely as one that filed nothing at all.

Roughly a third of California's programs report nothing whatsoever: 2,057 of 3,266 publish at least one measure. That is a large enough share that hiding it would distort the whole site, so a program that reported nothing is listed with everything else and says so plainly. Absence of data is not evidence that a program performs badly, and this interface is built to keep those two ideas apart.

The earnings figure covers three months, not a year

Median earnings under this federal measure are earnings in the second quarter after someone left the program — a single quarter, roughly three months. It is not an annual salary and it is not a starting wage. It sits on the same page as an occupation's typical yearly pay, which is a different measure from a different source over a different period, and the two must not be read against each other.

What the comparisons claim, and what they do not

A rate on its own is unreadable: nobody knows whether 45% employed is good. So where a program reports a measure, it is shown against the median California program that reported the same measure. Programs that reported nothing are not in that median, which makes it a comparison among those willing to publish rather than a comparison against the state as a whole.

This site once labelled programs “better” or “worse” than typical against that median. It no longer does. The median pooled every reporting program regardless of length, and a four-week certificate and a two-year pathway are not comparable on completion — measured against programs of their own length, that label was simply inverted for about one program in ten. The figures and the median are still shown; the conclusion is yours to draw, because the comparison could not carry it. Where two programs are placed side by side, the marked cell is simply the strongest reported figure in that row; a row where fewer than two programs reported anything is left unmarked, because being the only one to file a number is not the same as being the best.

No comparison is ever built out of a blank. A program that reported nothing is never called below average, because there is nothing to compare and saying so would be an accusation rather than a fact.

When an occupation figure describes more jobs than one

California does not publish an estimate for every occupation. For some, the state reports the work only inside a larger occupation — the category above it, or a bucket the federal statistics use for jobs they cannot measure separately. Rather than leave those programs with no occupation figures at all, this site shows the larger occupation's and says so on the page, naming the wider occupation and the program's own occupation code. That applies to 135 of the program pages here.

One figure is deliberately dropped in that case instead of borrowed: the usual entry requirement. A median wage over a wider population is still an approximation of something a trainee belongs to. A credential is not — it is one answer assigned to the whole group, and on a group that mixes a master's-level occupation with a community-college certificate it is not approximate, it is wrong. Telling someone they need a degree they do not need, for the job they are training for right now, is the same class of error as printing a suppressed number as zero.

Known limitations

These are the things this site gets wrong or cannot yet do. They are listed here rather than discovered later.

If a figure here misrepresents you

This site names real organisations and publishes numbers about them, so there has to be a way to say it got something wrong. Please open an issue on the project's public repository, naming the program and the figure you are disputing.

Two outcomes are possible and they are worth telling apart. Where the error is this project's — a bad join, a mislabelled measure, a program attached to the wrong occupation — it will be fixed, and the correction is not conditional on who asks. Where the underlying public record is wrong, the correction has to go through the body that published it, since this site reproduces that record and cannot quietly diverge from it; the issue thread is a reasonable place to note that a correction is in progress, and that note will be honoured here.

Open an issue about a figure on this site

This is not advice

Nothing here is financial, legal, educational, or career advice. Enrolling in a training program is a serious financial and personal commitment. Use this as one input among several, and talk to the provider, to your local America's Job Center, or to a career counsellor before you decide.

Browse all occupations · Browse all providers