So far, this work has focused on workforce skill acquisition and the role of the education system. Just what skills are needed and what specific content will be required in workforce education to ensure workers have those skills are, of course, obvious questions to address. To make the answers as actionable as possible, it’s worth first reviewing two particular movements in education—competency-based education and the development of shorter-term programs with certificates—because of the promise they hold for dramatically assisting the ways in which skills can be acquired as part of workforce education. These movements complement and enhance the utility of each other, and each can also be enhanced by the possibilities of new online, digital technologies.
The first movement is competency-based education, a concept that originated in apprenticeship, technical, and military training and then moved into K–12 education, with a focus on outcomes that lead to student demonstration of proficiency in using relevant information, ideas, and tools.1 Along the way, a number of education theorists spelled out early concepts.2 The demonstration of particular skills and knowledge followed by ongoing assessments was the organizing key to modifying instruction practices around demonstrated outcomes. By 2015, the US Department of Education found the movement had reached into higher education, with perhaps as many as six hundred colleges and universities adopting the approach for some classes or larger programs,3 although that still represented only a fraction of college offerings.
Competency-based education means measurable learning targets in specific areas of competency that are made clear to students at the outset, with students receiving instruction until they fully grasp these concepts and skills.4 Competencies can be defined as observable and measurable standards for an area of skills, knowledge, and personal abilities. A skill is narrower, related to the ability to perform a particular task with determinable results. Continual assessments measure whether students demonstrate mastery of the area; once they do, they move to the next topic. The approach not only aims for the ability to recognize and repeat a concept after it has been taught, but also promotes cognitive mastery of a concept—the ability to evaluate it, comparing it to related concepts, and extend it in new directions. The competency approach divides an education area into bite-size, manageable pieces that complement each other and, when combined, enable mastery of a group of topics that amounts to understanding an overall field.
This approach requires additional instruction support that differs depending on students’ individual learning needs. The continual assessments are embedded throughout the learning cycle along students’ individualized learning pathways as they move at their own paces toward specific learning outcomes. Monitoring how students are performing all along their pathways is important to the model.5
The differences between traditional education and the competency-based approach are significant. The former is tied to fixed time periods, and students move on regardless of whether they have fully acquired the necessary concepts and skills. Learning targets are organized around grade levels set by age, not an individual’s learning capacity and development. Students who aren’t meeting academic or behavior standards can receive occasional targeted assistance, whereas they receive differentiated support all along, based on their learning needs, in the competency model. Traditional education assessments are used at set times, typically near the end of one of the fixed periods and to summarize content acquisition. Grades reflect completion of assignments and content-based test scores with corresponding student ranking; in competency learning, grades are used primarily to orient students and inform them of their position along their learning pathways.
Competency-based education is by nature instructor- and labor intensive, but with the addition of online features it can be less costly.6 Reflecting its training origins, this approach also appears significantly better fitted to educating for workforce skills than traditional education; in fact, workforce training has long used a variety of competency-type approaches implicitly. Workforce education requires a major dose of hands-on learning by doing, which by its nature matches competency learning patterns. It can be better shaped into modular units of varying length and knowledge intensity, with frequent skill demonstration and assessment to assure skill proficiency.
Stated more explicitly, a competency approach for trainees allows them to advance as they demonstrate fluency with each skill element. Learning targets are organized and paced to better fit the individual’s learning capacity and development, and trainees receive monitoring and support throughout based on their learning needs—and if they aren’t meeting skill standards, then they receive targeted help. Assessments are embedded throughout the training program, and performance evaluations are used to orient students to their progress along the training pathway.
Soaring student debt is making the expense of higher education increasingly difficult to manage (as noted in chapter 7), and traditional higher education schedules don’t fit work patterns well.7 Most students who leave degree programs do so because they have to earn money.8 These factors, along with the availability of online offerings, have spurred a significant shift toward nontraditional credentialing.9 In 2016, some 6 percent of adults had work-relevant, nondegree certificate credentials, and 21 percent had licenses.10 The number of learning workers—adults over eighteen that are both working twenty plus hours a week and participating in education programs—has now passed the number of traditional learners (“full-time” students), particularly after age twenty-four.11 Some 60 percent of certificate holders surveyed say their certificate was “very useful” in finding a job,12 and a 2019 report found that adults without a postsecondary degree who hold a certificate or certification have higher levels of full-time employment than their peers (85 percent vs. 78 percent) and have a median annual income of $45,000 versus $30,000 for those without a certificate.13 Those who attended a vocational or technical school are the most likely (77 percent) to have a certificate or certification.
We need to define some terms here. A credential or certificate is generally offered by education or training institutions for skills or competencies. A certification attempts to validate a credential or certificate. It often involves a third party independent of the credential provider that confirms or accredits a demonstrated skill or competency. This is often through a testing or verification process and can be for a limited period—after which a recertification is required. A license is granted through a government-approved process and has legal status: a person can’t practice a particular skill, competency, or profession without it.
So-called nanodegrees and microcredentials are also evolving.14 Udacity, for example, offers a series of related online courses on data science, programming, and other areas for technicians that it argues can move a student from beginner to job-ready in seven to twelve months.15 MITx, MIT’s online course system, now offers MicroMasters certificates on the edX platform that are open to anyone, for completion of six to eight related courses in a growing series fields, from advanced manufacturing to supply chain management.16 MOOC courses offered by colleges and universities now include courses from some nine hundred schools; enrollment has grown over 900 percent since the first MOOCs in 2011.17 The Labor Department’s CareerOneStop, a job search site, offers 5,700 certification tests to users, from restaurant food preparation to childcare to wiring. Workers can take these tests to demonstrate their skills, presenting the test results as validation and thus side-stepping degree requirements. All these short, more bite-size courses and programs sit firmly within competency-based education. They amount to a new prehire certification mechanism.18
Academic institutions are increasingly offering digital credentials and badges (which are visual symbols of the credential), and the numbers are proliferating. This is making it difficult for both employers and employees to understand what they mean. Key lessons are emerging.19 For example, if schools offer only manual processes (websites and email) to collect credential assessment information from students, this in turn dictates that the credentials must be issued manually, so they can’t scale. Instead, assessment management and credential and badge issuance need to be integrated. Issuing credentials and badges not backed by academic rigor, including assessed evidence, frustrates employers and undermines their credibility. Tying them to established industry standards, when available, is important. Issuing credentials and badges that don’t match well to actual performance for work or internships is also detrimental to their value. Credentials need to cross-link to the evidence behind them, and this information must be easy for employers to access, not buried in learning management systems. Certificates are most valuable when subject to certification from an independent third party, such as an industry association or standards-setting entity, and when there is rigor in that process through an exam and periodic recertification to ensure continuing competency. While self-certifications and voluntary certifications can still be useful, third-party certification is an important step to help employers make sense of the accelerating numbers of certificates.
Despite these challenges, digital credentials, and the badges that often go with them, can play an important role in demonstrating workplace skills and competencies. They can be aimed at particular skills, offered on a timetable that helps working adults, and stacked with related credentials to show broader skill and career capabilities to employers. People without college degrees are the most interested in pursuing additional education and training,20 and graduates of both nondegree and graduate vocational and technical programs are those most likely to agree that their education has made them strong job candidates.21 The demand, then, for these kinds of programs appears to be in place.
These competency-based and compact credential program movements in education have each been supported by development of online digital tools. For example, the Labor Department has supported several online delivery tools to assist in the adoption of new workforce approaches and worker access to them. For instance, through a grant from the department’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) program,22 some seven hundred community colleges created a free and open online library called SkillsCommons that offers support materials for workforce development; it’s a major collection of workforce-related online resources, revised and adapted by individual institutions and industries.23
Three other Labor Department efforts, all developed by the Employment and Training Administration, should be mentioned. The first, mySkills myFuture, an attempt at a one-stop job search navigation system, has a number of features to help workers assess their skills and search for careers in areas that fit their skills.24 Next, WorkforceGPS collects resources on workforce education for a wide range of groups and organizations, such as workforce development boards, career education or rural services providers, employers, and state programs. The resources include materials on apprenticeships and skills training.25 Finally, there’s CareerOneStop, a website that includes a job search toolkit with information on occupational profiles, a personal interest assessment, a targeting system for seeking occupations, local training and apprenticeship finders, and information on growing job sectors. It also provides access to job certification tests. Users can create their own job search plans. It also contains focused information for older and displaced workers and other worker categories.26
The value of online education programs can be seen in the example of Western Governors University (WGU), which has a competency-based education approach in all of its courses.27 Formed in 1997 by nineteen states, its enrollment in 2019 was more than 110,000 students—older (average age thirty-seven; mean age forty-three) and mostly (61 percent) first-generation college students28—studying in sixty undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Nearly 80 percent of WGU students are employed full time, a significantly higher rate than for similar programs for nontraditional students; mentoring and having a job or internship are key to the success of the program.29 WGU demonstrates that online degree and credential content can work, particularly with work and mentoring scaffolding.
The private sector has also been creating a series of online delivery tools to assist in workforce education and career development. For example, HoloPundits in Ohio provides virtual and augmented reality training materials for manufacturing and healthcare sectors, using guided feedback to users that fits competency education approaches.30 In software design and development, LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda), also now owned by Microsoft, offers some 1,500 courses as part of the LinkedIn system.31 There are many efforts ongoing; other examples of digital projects are noted ahead.
But how do we better alert workers to the kinds of training (and therefore jobs) that could be within their grasp? Academic research is beginning to yield these kinds of career-enabling online elements; two examples follow. For example, researchers from Arizona State University and LinkedIn have developed a system called NEMO32 to help with career move prediction, and a group at the MIT Media Lab has developed a prototype called Skillscape that creates clusters of skills using Labor Department data.33 These kinds of systems are important potential enablers to place optimal workforce education into the hands of workers.
Finally, new blockchain technology—just emerging—is helping address the major difficulty workers and students face when it comes to explaining their certificates and degrees to employers, who need to know whether they are valid, what they mean, and what their value is. This new technology allows workers and students to own and control their own secure records in ways that enable them to answer these questions. Institutions are beginning to authorize this blockchain approach,34 which also helps make credentials transportable.
We now come to the skills needed and the specific content (often called taxonomies) that will be required in workforce education to ensure workers have those skills. The US Department of Labor has created a series of training competency categories as part of articulating needed workplace education content:35
In the early 1990s, the Labor Department empaneled the Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS), which identified the following competencies and foundation skills: basic skills (reading, writing, arithmetic, mathematics, listening and speaking), thinking skills (creative thinking, decision-making, problem solving, seeing things in the mind’s eye, knowing how to learn, and reasoning), and personal qualities (responsibility, self-esteem, social, self-management, and integrity/honesty).36 Since then, the research behind the SCANS list has become ever more detailed.37
Industry has developed detailed general skill requirements as well. The common employability skills across sectors from the National Network of Business and Industry (NNBI) include personal skills (integrity, initiative, dependability and reliability, adaptability, and professionalism), people skills (teamwork, communication, and respect), applied knowledge (reading, writing, mathematics, science, technology, and critical thinking), and general workplace skills (planning and organizing, problem solving, decision-making, business fundamentals, customer focus and working with tools and technology).38 Each skill category (such as personal skills) is further defined with descriptions of each competency (such as initiative) being sought. The NNBI provides services to the company members that belong to the twenty-six major industry associations that make up the network, with materials advising them on how to create their own standards-based credentials and about industry-recognized credentialing systems they can rely on in areas such as advanced manufacturing.39
SCANS and NNBI list general skills needed for employment. Individual industry sectors have articulated their own sets of skills. For example, the Manufacturing Skills Standards Council developed a detailed set of skills for certified production technicians that covers the following areas: safety, quality practices and measurement, manufacturing processes and production, maintenance awareness, and “green” production.40 The MSSC provides both courses and assessments for employers and their employees, and the certificates are backed by the National Association of Manufacturers.
For our purposes, we have identified three critical areas in which content is required in workforce education systems: foundational academic skills, personal and interpersonal skills, and occupational skills. Let’s address each in turn.
Basic academic skills, in our context, are those that should be acquired in the K–12 education system but also that serve as a foundation for the follow-on stages of personal and interpersonal skills and required technical skills. In their now classic 1996 book Teaching the New Basic Skills, Frank Levy and Richard Murmane suggested that the traditional academic skills taught in the K–12 system at the time were insufficient for high school graduates in a period of technological change in the workplace and proposed a mix of general education skills and soft skills as foundational for nearly all occupations.41 What they called new basic skills would have high school students graduating with the ability to
They argued that students could acquire these basic skills if their education followed a group of principles that are also characteristic of good training management practices in strong companies: reach agreement on the problem; provide the right incentives and opportunities; train the frontline workers; measure progress regularly; and learn from mistakes.
There are a number of programs in the United States that mix basic academic skills into technical, occupational education. Some of these are highlighted ahead.
The widely used American College Testing (ACT) WorkKeys system of curriculum and related assessments for basic academic and personal workplace skills exemplifies many of the Levy and Murmane concepts.42 Its applied math course builds ability to apply math principles to problems faced in the workplace; its graphic literacy course includes the ability to find, understand, present, and use information needed in the workplace; and its workplace documents course builds the ability to apply written information. Problem solving, using actual workplace problems, is built into all three. The courses also measure soft skills relevant to most jobs.
ACT’s web-based KeyTrain interactive training program builds on the content, progressions, and assessments of the WorkKeys system.43 KeyTrain courses move to the next applied level in areas such as electricity, mechanics, and business writing, and also addresses personal characteristics such as dependability and emotional stability. There is also a classroom training element users can apply. ACT’s courses can lead to its National Career Readiness Certificate (NCRC) for essential workplace skills, which is recognized by thousands of employers.
ACT also offers a service in which licensed job profilers meet with employers to get background on jobs to be profiled and help set out job elements that correspond to WorkKeys assessment scores, creating a standard for the job. This creates target scores for applicants to meet to qualify for the job. These profilers also collect training manuals, annual reports, newsletters, and other information about the company, as well as information on the job itself and how it serves the company. These are built into the job profile and tied to the WorkKeys elements. Some fourteen states have participated in ACT’s job credentialing system, using WorkKeys as part of their involvement.
ACT has used experts from a range of fields to develop its assessments and then field test them to assure their validity, particularly their ability to predict success in a range of occupations.44 It has a monitoring and evaluation process to help ensure their ongoing effectiveness. Based on its program evaluations, ACT has found that individuals who complete the WorkKeys certification are more likely to possess job-related cognitive skills and successfully complete training programs, leading to better job performance.45
The application of WorkKeys at Phifer in Tuscoloosa, Alabama, offers an example of how employers use and view the WorkKeys program.46 Phifer, which manufacturers aluminum and fiberglass screens and designs fabrics for outdoor use, faces significant competition in finding qualified employees in North Alabama with its growing manufacturing sector. In addition, its job profiles need continual updating because of changes in production technology and processes. So the company worked with ACT WorkKeys to develop job profiles with skills that were measurable and then, working with a local community college, developed the training to fit these profiles. This resulted in a five-week program in which participants earned the WorkKeys NCRC.
Phifer has also faced relatively high turnover and has needed higher-level employees to meet the technology advances. Using ACT WorkKeys improved hiring, identifying high turnover positions to focus on. The job profiles enabled much better assessment of applicants, so the right employee tended to be matched to the right job. That cut turnover from 17 to 5 percent annually—a major cost-saving move that more than paid for the program. The company believes it now has a validated hiring model, with predictable outcomes thanks to hiring candidates with the WorkKeys credential.
The company also uses ACT’s KeyTrain for applicants, with its scoring system, and applicants have to score high enough to match the job profile; if they don’t, they can retake the assessment and get targeted instruction on skills where they need to score higher. In effect, then, applicants can train to become qualified applicants. Because half the firm’s workforce is approaching retirement, the company also needs to develop and move up current employees to fill openings. So the company also uses WorkKeys to identify promotable employees.
All told, Phifer’s return on its workforce training investment has been a $2 million reduction in training costs, a 25 percent cut in training time (through improved retention), a 40 percent improvement in the quality of applicants, a 33 percent reduction in orientation time, and a 15 percent increase in workforce punctuality.
Phifer adopted an approach of getting buy-in from managers and employees across the company for the new system, and it has led to implementation of a number of Levy and Murmane’s recommendations for basic skills. As part of this effort, the company participated in organizing a manufacturing network with fourteen area companies that also leverage ACT WorkKeys solutions and use a “community” approach to building employee talent. The result is one of the ACT WorkReady Communities, which use ACT WorkKeys and the NCRC system. The company also serves on the area’s Labor Department–supported workforce investment board.
Other examples of WorkKeys being used come from colleges in Alabama and Tennessee. Alabama’s Community College System is adopting WorkKeys and ACT’s NCRC system statewide to address employers’ need for a stronger employee pipeline.47 The state’s community colleges are also adopting the MSSC standards as the accepted regional system for evaluating manufacturing skills. And the state and its community colleges are pushing ACT-type foundational skill training preparation down into the early stages of high school, as well as looking at it for use in prisoner education.
In Tennessee, the state’s twenty-seven Tennessee Colleges for Applied Technology (TCATs, formerly known as Technology Centers) are also demonstrating the utility of ACT’s WorkKeys and KeyTrain programs. TCATs provide rigorous one- to two-year technical education programs with high completion (for a range of diplomas or certificates) and job placement rates, yielding relatively high wages.
The TCATs began as the state’s vocational/career technical education high schools, evolved into a postsecondary education system, and became part of the state’s higher education institutions. They have overcome the common problem that faced community colleges nationwide—poor preparation of students coming from high schools and the pressing need for remedial programs. They have achieved program completion rates that range from 61 to 87 percent across schools, and job placement rates from 76 to 92 percent.48 Overall completion rates, according to Tennessee Reconnect in 2020, were 81 percent and job placement rates into positions in the student’s field of study were 86 percent.49
All entering TCAT students participate in an ACT WorkKeys/KeyTrain Techology Foundations program, which includes applied math, reading, locating information, writing, problem solving, and teamwork. Instructors set up an individualized learning plan with each student, who pursues the WorkKey/KeyTrain curricula at her or his own individual pace. The learning lab is open five days and some evenings each week for students to work on their programs and consult with foundations instructors. Lectures and group activities supplement the program, in a highly blended education model. It is competency-based learning with students mastering a series of stages and skills.
The great majority of students complete Technology Foundations a little after their first trimester; only a handful have not done so by the third trimester.50 They then take ACT’s online NCRC assessment. The TCAT goal is for all students to have certificates at a silver and gold level, the two highest. In 2010, of the 4,250 TCAT students completing the certificate, 30 percent were gold and 57 percent were silver.
The Technology Foundations competencies are fully integrated into the occupational and technical training programs students are undertaking in parallel. It is a self-paced, competency-based program geared to individual students, which helps those who have not done well in the past in classroom settings. Foundations instructors build relationships with students and communicate with them frequently, building learning communities that match the online curriculum.
The high completion rate for these developmental and basic technical skills and the high job placement rate are testaments to how well it works and to employer satisfaction with graduates.51
Washington State’s Integrated Basic Skills and Training (I-BEST) is another program that mixes basic academic skills into technical, occupational education.52 It has come to be recognized nationally as a model for offering foundational skills.
Initiated by the state’s community and technical colleges, I-BEST uses a team approach to teach community college students basic literacy, employability, and college-readiness skills so they can move through school and into jobs faster. I-BEST rejects the traditional community college notion that students with learning gaps must get through a sequence of precollege basic education and remedial courses before they can start working on certificates or associate degrees.
Rather than having to postpone their career and work goals until they catch up on academic basics, I-BEST students get the academic help they need while studying in the career field they choose. Each I-BEST course has two teachers: one provides technical job training; the other teaches basic and complementary reading, math, and English language skills. These catch-up studies make more sense to students because they can be seen in a career-enhancing context.
Compared to students who first enroll in remedial courses, I-BEST students are three times more likely to earn college credit and nine times more likely to earn a certificate or degree.53
The US Department of Education has identified postsecondary math as a major barrier to degree completion. Nationally, 60 percent of incoming community college students are placed into at least one developmental math course annually, and yet only one-third complete the developmental math sequence and only 20 percent complete a college-level math course over three years.54 Men, older students, African American students, part-time students, and students in vocational/CTE programs are less likely to progress. The issue affects four-year colleges as well. Thus there are many specific efforts underway to address foundational math skills—including these innovative programs:
These promising programs, along with the ACT programs noted earlier, offer new routes to tackling foundational academic skills. While these math programs offer significant curriculum reforms to help clear a critical bottleneck in higher ed, the ACT program takes more advantage of online and blended features. Blended learning can enhance foundational skill efforts. A Joyce Foundation evaluation, for example, found that while online programs alone were not that helpful in teaching foundational skills to adult learners, a blended model offered real benefits.60 Online tools for basic reading, writing, and math augmented face-to-face instruction, with adult students improving over time in their ability to work independently using online tools. Online programs were best used to supplement and enhance the classroom for this group, which was not experienced with online learning, and also assisted instructors in evaluating and supporting different student capabilities
Even before personal computing and the internet were pervasive, Levy and Murmanes identified “the ability to use computers to carry out simple tasks such as word processing” as a basic skill. Since 1996, when their book came out, the need for digital skills has grown substantially—as the 2017 Brookings study cited in chapter 7 showed.61
Based on a survey of two thousand employers, LinkedIn has identified twenty-five digital skills companies increasingly want, from cloud and distributed computing and web architecture to software control systems, user interface design, and data presentation.62 A 2018 UK government report offers an “essential digital framework” that matches specific digital skills to broader areas of work tasks, including communication, handling information, transactions, problem solving, and so on.63
The education system has not adjusted to the scale of the challenge in teaching these skills. Larger-scale use of new online technologies offers a way out of this dilemma. For example, in 2014 Georgia Tech was the first university to offer an online master’s program in computer science; this well-reviewed program had more than 8,600 paid enrollees in 2019.64 IT company certificates and university online computer science MOOC courses now abound.
In addition to basic foundational skills, a number of personal and interpersonal skills are critical. These are the kinds of common “soft” and social skills relevant to employability across sectors, as identified by the National Network of Business and Industry (as discussed earlier): personal skills, including integrity, initiative, dependability and reliability, adaptability, and professionalism; and people skills, which we call interpersonal skills, such as teamwork, communication, and respect. Others have added to or altered that list. LinkedIn asked two thousand companies about the soft skills they need most; employers identified leadership, communication, collaboration, and time management as their top four.65 Surveys by the Center for Third Space Thinking at the University of Southern California have identified five core soft skills—adaptability, cultural competency, empathy, intellectual curiosity, and 360-degree thinking; the center then developed programs to teach these skills.66 And as we already mentioned, the Labor Department’s SCANS foundational skills include both personal and interpersonal skills.
aDavid J. Deming, “The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market,” NBER Working Paper 21473, June 2017 (revised), https://www.nber.org/papers/w21473.
However, there is a deep problem in assessing such personal and interpersonal skills: while the sought-after skill can be identified by surveys and analysis, the education interventions to teach it often cannot be or haven’t been adequately tested and therefore cannot be fully validated. For example, a 2017 National Academies study, “Supporting Students’ College Success,” pursued a topic related to workforce skills, the soft skills students need to succeed in college.67 These soft skills overlap with those sought by employers. However, of the eight skills identified, the report found research substantiating effective interventions for only two. The report called for more research on the needed assessments.
This same challenge of testing affects the personal and interpersonal skills employers seek: assessing and testing are necessary to enable sound training interventions to evolve. While testing has developed in concrete skill areas such as visual literacy and visual data needed in the performance of many jobs—ACT has been a leader in creating job-related testing in these areas—more personal competencies have been harder to correlate.
Merrilea Mayo, author of numerous workforce education studies, has summarized key personal and interpersonal skills set out by employers:68
Overall, there is an evolving story of measuring and training for the personal and interpersonal skills employers often cite as priorities for their employees. While progress has been made in identifying sought-after skills, the ability to test and therefore train for them remains a mixed story. This problem makes it difficult to prioritize among them for training. That, in some sense, brings us back to whether the college graduates employers hire are prepared in these soft skills. The effectiveness of colleges at soft skill education is the subject of an ongoing debate.
While liberal arts colleges have argued they prepare their students effectively in the kinds of skills just discussed, an Association of American Colleges and Universities survey suggests there are problems.81 Of 501 business executives and 500 hiring managers from companies in a range of sizes, regions, and sectors, 63 percent had overall confidence in colleges and universities, and 70 percent of expressed broad satisfaction with the ability of recent college hires to apply skills and knowledge they acquired in college. But the survey revealed significant gaps between key personal and interpersonal skills these executives and managers prioritized and their views about the preparedness of recent graduates in these skills. For example, while 78 percent identified analytical reasoning as a very important skill, they considered only 34 percent of recent college graduates well prepared in that area. There were significant gaps in many other areas as well, including self-motivation, the ability to work independently and to work in teams, and complex problem solving. These results suggest that educational institutions have some distance to go in conveying the soft skills employers desire.
Personal and interpersonal skills, then, are clearly important to employers in the skills training equation—but the specifics of that training are still developing. Progress on how to test for them will help with better training design.
Our third category, occupational skills, puts us back on firmer validation ground. Because occupational skills—which vary by sectors and occupations—often require significant learning by doing using the actual equipment technologies and practices required in the workplace, they are easier to test for and measure.
The Labor Department has a number of tools to help in understanding occupational skills required for particular jobs. The CareerOneStop site of the department’s Education and Training Administration, mentioned earlier, provides career information on nine hundred occupations, available online through the O*NET system.82 Its occupation profile descriptions include what employees in a particular job do, what a typical day’s work is like, the outlook for jobs by area, projected employment levels, the range of typical wages, education levels of those in the field, certifications available to demonstrate the skills required, apprenticeship opportunities, knowledge and physical abilities required to perform the job, related opportunities, and links to area job openings.83 The ETA’s building blocks are skill pyramids that detail foundational academic skills and personal and interpersonal skills, in addition to details on occupational skills needed for different jobs, and are available online for twenty-two industry occupational areas.84
The Labor Department also supports a nationwide network of workforce development boards that sponsor training programs in local communities under the Workforce Investment and Opportunity Act, as discussed in chapter 3.
The credential movement has been particularly important to occupational skills. While two- and four-year degrees remain the most likely pathways, an influx of credentials is adding new opportunities for certificates, digital badges, occupational licenses, and employer certifications. This system can be online, blended, or in the classroom, with new learning providers, from community colleges to employers to online firms and, more recently, colleges and universities. The hold of traditional educational institutions over education is gradually changing. However, the morass of credentials has created its own problems, as noted in chapter 6. It has become very difficult for students and workers to navigate among the options they now have.
The Lumina Foundation has been working to create new systems of credentials.85 Between 2016 and 2018, it worked with the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW) to build learning-based credentialing systems in a project called Connecting Credentials, negotiating and forming a shared space for credential providers.86 Credential Engine runs a complementary effort aimed at making all credentials transparent, shifting credentials into a functioning, information-based market.87 It estimates there are some 334,000 credentials in the United States alone, and its website allows anyone to search and compare types and levels of credentials, with detailed information about the content and quality indicators for each. Hundreds of organizations are on its registry, and it has support from a series of foundations and organizations, including Lumina. The plethora of certificates and credentials underscores the importance of independent, third-party certification systems, particularly in occupational skill areas.
So-called on-ramps are a new institutional element, available particularly to assist in developing occupational skills. These are new education and training intermediary organizations that can connect adults without postsecondary degrees to credentials that can be acquired quickly and lead directly to employment. Strada Institute identified nine model on-ramp programs in various regions that perform a combination of functions: finding and enrolling participants; providing intense, short-term education and training aimed at specific occupational pathways; wraparound support to ensure participant success combined with continuous mentoring; and a direct route from occupational training to actual job placement.88 These functions are largely separated in our current system, but are brought together in the on-ramp model. Each step is aimed at overcoming the series of uncertainties workers face about career pathways, childcare and transportation costs, and employment outcomes.
The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL) is an organization of education providers, employers, and cities, states, and regions focused on career education for adults. It is tied to the Strada Education Network and aims to increase emphasis on adult learners, to increase opportunities and remove barriers to help working adults find and complete new work credentials, and to strengthen experiential learning and nurture new models for adult occupational education.89 Supporting institutions that can serve as on-ramps is one of CAEL’s basic approaches.
Apart from these overall efforts at credentialing and on-ramps, each occupation area has its own occupational skill sets. In manufacturing, for example, community colleges and states that retain vocational/CTE education institutions provide manufacturing education. There are now many online course offerings in manufacturing skills from companies such as THORS,90 180 Skills,91 and Tooling U-SME.92 NIMS, the MSSC, 93 and NIST’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership, through its network of state programs, offer manufacturing skill education courses and programs as well. The new technology fields within advanced manufacturing, such as digital production, biofabrication, and advanced materials, are particularly critical because there is no established education system to train for them. Some of the new advanced manufacturing institutes are working to fill this gap.
At least some start-ups are entering the manufacturing skills landscape, as well. Tulip, of Somerville, Massachusetts, is attempting to bring the industrial Internet of Things (IoT) and supporting analytics to the manufacturing floor and its workforce.94 Its Manufacturing App Platform combines intelligent hardware sensors, computer vision, assistive user interfaces, and applied machine learning, along with a training system, to enable its new digital production system. Its customers include large manufacturing firms worldwide; installation of its manufacturing operating system platform at a Merck plant reduced training time by 57 percent overall.95 Tulip’s technology blends human-operator-focused technology with industrial IoT technology and software, bringing data analytics on a continuous basis to employees, measuring time and efficiency at each stage of the production process and enabling improvements in human-machine interfaces. The training system was built into the process changes. While veteran employees previously had to take a break from their production jobs to train new employees, the system enabled largely self-training in the assembly process, dramatically cutting the time the experienced employees had to spend on training tasks.
Manufacturing training programs abound:
The coming shift in the manufacturing sector to adopt advanced manufacturing technologies (see chapter 4) will require a host of new technical skills. A number of the advanced manufacturing institutes are working to identify these skills and beginning to develop training curricula for them, but this process remains in its early stages. A new system still has to be developed for this next level of skills. While manufacturing may be among the first sectors affected by the oncoming suite of new technologies, particularly in information technology areas, other sectors, from health to retail, will also be affected. A major content task ahead will be developing the new training curricula these new technologies will require.
As with manufacturing, programs in other occupational areas are growing. Daniel Bustillo, director of the Healthcare Career Advancement Program at the Service Employees International Union, has noted that although healthcare jobs are expanding, larger-scale on-the-job training is hampered because there is no fifty-state system of hospitals; hospital systems are very local and regional.100 This decentralization makes on-the-job training more difficult to implement, and it must have a smaller scale and regional focus. Despite these problems, he noted that approximately a thousand healthcare employers now offer joint labor-management training efforts in which his union participates.
Training in healthcare is not just for young, new employees; for example, training for minority group women already in the system at lower levels to move up should be a major component of health training. The emerging system requires mentor skills, too, so mentoring is also a training need to make new on-the-job training approaches work. Bustillo noted there is still a stigma on vocational education that is solved by a collaborative effort with a community college around a degree or certificate.
Fairview Health Services in Minnesota has a program that enables working two-year-degree nurses to stay on the job and keep earning while they obtain bachelor’s nursing degrees. This makes them eligible for positions with increased responsibility and compensation.101 In nursing, this is a crucial step; the four-year degree opens up many professional opportunities. The two-year-degree nurses often have been out of school for many years but are a pool of talent to fill a significant gap in needed four-year registered nurses (RNs). The Fairview program has 125 two-year RNs that are part of an on-the-job program, and it is working with a network of Minnesota higher-ed institutions. The program has a high retention rate because it is creating new job opportunities. Fairview is now looking at extending this program to other medical training areas, including for medical assistants, surgical technologists, and nurse practitioners.
Online credential programs in the health field are evolving as well. For example, the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), which has long offered tested certifications in health information fields, is now offering a certificate for professionals in health informatics.102 This reflects the advent of big data and analytics for health to enable better analysis, diagnostics, and outcomes. The online classes are self-paced to fit readily into student schedules and learning patterns. The credentials AHIMA (and other organizations) now offer enable creating what amounts to a new and much-needed allied health profession, with certified informatics professions serving a new role on medical teams.
aLinda Argote, Presentation, National Academy of Engineering Workshop, “Preparing the Engineering and Technical Workforce for Adaptability and Resilience to Change,” November 3, 2017; National Academy of Engineering, Adaptability of the US Engineering and Technical Workforce (Washington, DC: National Academies of Sciences, 2018), 29–31; Linda Argote, Organizational Learning, Creating, Retaining and Transferring Knowledge, 2nd edition (New York: Springer, 2013).
The programs noted in the preceding discussion amount to only a tiny fraction of the occupational skill offerings from the more than 334,000 credential and degree providers. The challenge in this field, as noted, is to navigate through the system. The availability of content, of course, does not solve the content-delivery problem. While we seem to be developing a Tower of Babel of occupational skill content, corresponding reforms in institutions to deliver it have not caught up.
If we are to change our workforce education system, it will be critical, of course, to get the content right. Three areas are priorities: foundational academic skills, personal and interpersonal skills, and occupational skills. The development of competency-based learning has a lot to offer. This approach divides an education area into more bite-sized, manageable pieces that can be assessed. The pieces complement each other, and when combined they enable mastery of the group of topics that represent the overall field.
The emergence of certificates and credentials fits this competency-based approach. There are now shorter education programs that better fit the time available to adults already in the workforce, who can’t leave their jobs to seek a traditional degree (for whatever reasons) but need to find more promising career opportunities. New online delivery tools can be tailored to fit competency-based approaches.
Foundational academic skills are being addressed through a host of programs, and some are working well. Employers are increasingly emphasizing the importance of soft personal and interpersonal skills—which create challenges because not enough progress has been made in developing tests that show proficiency, and absent validated tests it is difficult to design an appropriate training program to convey a skill. Occupational skills represent a more established territory: because so much of workforce education is learning by doing, we can better validate training to work. The complication is that we have a plethora of content providers providing a relentlessly growing level of content, both in classes and online. We’re missing a navigation system to tie the right content to individual student and employee needs (as chapter 6 discusses), and we still haven’t developed the skill content for a new range of technologies that will be entering the workplace, in both production and services occupations. Finally, we need better content-delivery mechanisms. That is the problem confronted in the next two chapters.