Despite all the problems and challenges discussed in previous chapters, we are seeing solutions emerge in areas such as apprenticeships, new education technologies, and improving information systems. These solutions need to reach three groups of workers: new entrants to the workforce, incumbent workers who have jobs but need to upgrade their skills, and displaced or underemployed workers who have lost jobs or are stuck in low-end positions and need to find new skills to reenter the workforce or advance to better jobs.
In this chapter, we review nine models for new approaches to content delivery. Most concern educational institutions, some concern industry, and others concern broader system problems such as developing new education technologies. They apply to the different groups of workers in different ways.
Community or technical colleges play a leading role in the first four models, but partners from industry and/or government are also vital.
Frank Gulluni, in his eighties and semiretired, has seen it all.1 He began in workforce education in 1965 in Springfield, Massachusetts, an old industrial city in the Connecticut River valley, starting with what was then the relatively new Manpower program. The evening program “tore up too many families,” Frank says, because “trainees couldn’t both work during the day and leave their families at night.” So he developed instead the Massachusetts Career Development Institute, a day and evening program with a four-part approach: thorough vocational and academic assessment of students; changing attitudes and building a sense of self-worth and confidence; working on math, reading, and writing skills; and creating real opportunities for getting jobs by training in specific skills in machining, welding, health-related careers, and other areas. He found the students needed to “change their attitudes for the training to work, they needed foundations to build the training on.” In 1981, he testified about this Sequential Training and Employment Progression System (STEPS) system before Congress.2
Gulluni later moved his general approach to Enfield, Connecticut, another old industrial town, establishing a vocational education program in manufacturing at Asnuntuck Community College. He started with a program for dislocated workers who were jobless and in need of retraining and developed a for-credit certificate program in machine technology. Pratt and Whitney and a large segment of the American aerospace industry supply system were located in central Connecticut, so there were employment opportunities. To build in-depth, lasting career skills, he found these students needed “one thousand hours over a two-semester timeframe, thirty to thirty-five hours a week—not just the typical twelve to fifteen hours a week, community college schedule.”
When a Connecticut governor came to tour the program and saw students working on CNC machines, Gulluni could tell that the politician had not been convinced that manufacturing was part of a “real” college program or even integral to the state’s economic development strategy. So he had the governor sit down in a conference room with some twenty area manufacturers. The first employer told the governor he was cutting the sales and marketing efforts of his midsize aerospace supply firm because without skilled workers he couldn’t produce his products in the state. “You could hear a pin drop,” Gulluni recalls. “Nobody told that to a governor.”
Representatives from company after company, though, chimed in with the same message about the lack of skilled workers. By meeting’s end, the governor was convinced there were hundreds of skilled jobs that couldn’t be filled just from the employers in that room. Within a month, he proposed a $500 million program for state manufacturing training, equipment, and facilities. Four community colleges in different parts of the state, including Asnuntuck, were selected to become manufacturing centers, essentially replicating the Asnuntuck model. With a $25 million grant, Asnuntuck built a fifty thousand sq. ft. Advanced Manufacturing Technology Center, fitted out with the most advanced computer-driven production technologies. It opened in 2017.
Asnuntuck now offers three programs in advanced manufacturing technology skills for community college students, high school students, and incumbent workers. It’s rare to serve all these in a synergistic way. Frank Gulluni and colleagues are, in a way, attempting a trifecta by pursuing all three. These programs reach all the categories of workers identified earlier: new entrant, incumbent, and underemployed. Each program is reviewed in the following sections.
Asnuntuck offers a two-semester certificate program in manufacturing that can also lead to an associate degree in manufacturing. It accepts all those interested in the program; there are typically three hundred to four hundred students enrolled either full or part time and ranging in age from eighteen to sixty-five—including middle-aged career changers and many inner-city minority youth from the Hartford area. They are typically at the program six to seven hours a day for thirty-two weeks, participating for thirty to thirty-five hours a week. Asnuntuck is also in the third year of providing some three hundred prisoners approaching release with certificate and degree programs in a range of disciplines, including several dozen who spend approximately twenty-five hours a week on campus in the manufacturing program.
Regular students spend a quarter of their time in classrooms, a quarter in the computer lab, and the remaining half is hands-on learning in a major technical area—machining, welding and fabrication, electromechanical. They learn using state-of-the-art machine tools and other high-tech equipment and can extend the program by taking a third semester with even more specialized courses and equipment. There is a major need for technicians in the area, and graduates are often starting jobs at $40,000 to $65,000 per year. The manufacturing program has a 95 percent job placement rate.
Total tuition at this writing was $8,300 for Connecticut students and those who come from neighboring Massachusetts and Rhode Island; the Asnuntuck student population can afford the program because 85 percent are Pell Grant eligible and receive up to $6,000 toward their two-year degree program. The school stretches out payment periods for the balance. Eight- to nine-week internships in the second semester, which pay about one hundred dollars per day, bring in some of the additional tuition funding. Unemployed workers are covered by Workforce Investment and Opportunity Act (WIOA) funding from area workforce boards, which adds an additional $5,000 as needed on top of Pell grants. So the program is reaching both new entrants and the under- or unemployed.
Connecticut helps cover Asnuntuck’s costs for a program free to high school students, and a number of high school districts pay for their students to participate. It reaches into as many as ten school systems in the greater Hartford-Enfield area. Machining, welding, and fabrication are the skill focus areas.
High school students spend ninety minutes or more each weekday at Asnuntuck in a college-level program, completing six to eight community college credits annually, giving them a big boost toward completing associate degrees and certificates. To reduce transportation time and accommodate more students, other regional community colleges are also adopting the program. With additional sites, students can break into sections and rotate all day in different time periods for better efficiency in the use of facilities. Ultimately, Gulluni would like to see a thousand or more high school students a day in a web of high schools and community colleges modeled on what Asnuntuck is doing. There is a special need to reach inner-city students from Bridgeport and Hartford.
Reaching parents and area high school staff is an important component of making the high school program successful. Asnuntuck’s leadership is well aware that the job losses of the 2000s have given parents a negative image of manufacturing and that high school guidance counselors and principals have an outdated image of manufacturing. To address this, the college has a special one- or two-week program in basic manufacturing technology skills specifically for high school administrators and guidance counselors. They come out understanding that high-tech modern manufacturing has become a meaningful career pathway. Asnuntuck President James Lombella also wants to launch a major “train the trainers” program—a certificate program, or at least a special two-week bootcamp, that would update all the tech trainers in Connecticut high schools on career and technical education in advanced manufacturing.3
Asnuntuck has built a strong program for incumbent workers that includes the software and high-level skills area employers want. Annually, some 750 to 800 of these workers participate in an Asnuntuck course of study at the college or a company site. Pratt & Whitney, for example, hosts a one hundred plus–hour core skills program for more than 350 workers every two to three weeks, as many as twenty times each year. Companies in the area’s aerospace manufacturing association, as well as Sikorsky Aircraft sixty miles away, all use this program. More than two-thirds of all instruction (math, CNC, blueprinting reading, and metrology) happens at company sites, with time at Asnuntuck devoted to high-end machining or electromechanical course material on its advanced equipment.
Instructors from Asnuntuck faculty and smaller companies can come together to form a training consortium, sharing the program and its costs between firms. The area aerospace association arranges the courses and contracting for its 125 member companies. The incumbent worker program is also a way for Asnuntuck to market its regular college students for potential employment, and it works: local manufacturers participating in the incumbent worker program routinely hire from the regular college program.
Put simply, Asnuntuck’s three programs are mutually reinforcing, and with Asnuntuck’s tuition for its regular community college program covering only half of the college’s actual costs, the large incumbent worker program makes up much of the difference.
Gulluni argues that a key to the success of the three manufacturing programs at Asnuntuck is an understanding of the responsibility to educate for actual workforce needs. Too often in community colleges, he feels, instructors are not current with the latest developments and the equipment is antiquated. But at Asnuntuck, the private sector gives support at every stage, providing equipment and advice and helping develop curricula on the latest skills. For twenty years, the manufacturing program has had a close working alliance with the region’s aerospace companies and its area association, which keep the college’s offerings up to date; they want the students they are hiring to be fully prepared for their jobs on day one.
aMeeting with Dr. Axel Cramer, vice president of manufacturing, Eppendorf, Enfield, Connecticut, May 30, 2019.
Another key to the success of the Asnuntuck programs is the instructors. “We want career people from manufacturing,” Gulluni says, “who love manufacturing. Asnuntuck then can get them to a level where they can impart skills very well.” Asnuntuck has long been training its own manufacturing instructors, coordinating with Central Connecticut State University for help in teacher credentialing and training, and a number continue on there to get their teaching degrees. Two-thirds of the instructors are graduates of the Asnuntuck manufacturing program itself; they go to work for companies, where they can practice the most current skills, and then return to teach.
The school tries to bring back its very best students to teach, and also has retirees with specialty skills in the most advanced areas but who do not want to work forty hours a week. “At Asnuntuck,” Gulluni explains, “they can work ten to fifteen hours and really contribute and play a key role in the latest areas the companies are developing.”
Instructor Jose Marcelino’s story is typical.4 A printer when online entry was killing that business, he needed something else and came to Asnuntuck for retraining in the advanced machine technology program—using his savings and displaced worker benefits. That training enabled him to move quickly to earn $100,000 per year at an area manufacturer. But he wanted to help students, and so he came back to teach when he was invited to join the manufacturing faculty.
Community colleges can operate day and night for fifty-two weeks a year, with a program flexibility that is often outside the range of other kinds of schools. Asnuntuck uses that flexibility to go beyond the community college itself to run high school and incumbent worker programs that reach a wide range of people and ages with advanced skills and lead directly to high-paying jobs. It has already moved many thousands through these programs. This is a model that others could emulate.
Trident Tech, the technical college in South Carolina that developed a new youth apprenticeship program detailed in chapter 10, provides a model for how to reach new entrant workers. It tears down the wall between learning and work, deeply integrating the two by linking high schools, the community college, and area companies. Along with other programs in chapter 10—including Tennessee’s Career Pathways, Kentucky’s FAME, Michigan’s MAT2, and North Carolina’s and Wisconsin’s youth apprenticeships—Trident Tech’s program offers a number of lessons about organizing apprenticeships.
Effective youth apprenticeships connect community or technical colleges with employer groups, high schools, and state or local government, with one or more serving as critical intermediaries between high schools and employers. They can begin in a student’s junior year with courses in high school that emphasize science and math, technical courses at the community college, and part-time work at an area company during the school year and even full time during summers and holidays. Wages generally start at around ten dollars an hour and increase as apprentices build experience.
Apprenticeships of this sort shift students from the high school environment alone and add maturing aspects by putting them in new social and age contexts, studying with adults at the community college and working with adults at their companies. The programs can lead them directly into solid jobs and careers that can fund further higher education. They graduate high school with a diploma, credits that take them to near completion of a year of community or technical college, and a Department of Labor or other skill certification. If programs like this could scale, they could make a real difference in closing America’s notorious work/learn gap and shrinking the country’s high youth unemployment rate.
There are several key enablers of program success. The impetus often comes from area employers, small as well as large, driven by the high demand for skilled workers. Small employers in particular feel a skills pinch because they cannot always compete with “big brand” firms and lack the resources and ability to field their own programs for training. These apprenticeship programs generally enable employers to interview and select apprentices that would best fit their needs. Industry groups can help organize employer interest. Community colleges provide the glue, making and maintaining the day-to-day connections between business and high school actors, as well as forming the technical education programs. Industry groups can also help fund the community college’s tuition costs,5 as well as work with state or local governments to help with the paperwork that comes with being registered with the Labor Department (and the benefits that come with that).
Experience suggests that while youth apprenticeships may work for major companies, they are too expensive for small companies. The mix of shared costs and organizing among the employers, industry associations, high schools, and community or technical colleges shows that a working partnership can help resolve this issue. While challenges remain—particularly solving transportation for students among high schools, community colleges, and employers—the overall emerging models could be workable in many communities.
Tennessee is another state that didn’t abandon its vocational schools, but instead repurposed them into affordable one- to two-year technical schools offering certificates and associates degrees. As detailed in chapter 9, there is a network of twenty-seven Tennessee Colleges for Applied Technology (TCATs), spread across the entire state, offering seventy career programs leading to certificates and associate degrees and also offering specialized training for larger area employers.6 The Tennessee Lottery helps fund skills grants that can help pay for tuition. Other state programs for new entrant and older workers provide scholarships to supplement other state and federal aid, making it possible for students to attend TCATs tuition-free.7
The twenty-seven TCATs combined have had remarkable success, far surpassing—at 81 percent—the state’s community colleges in terms of completion rates for certificates or degrees.8 Some 86 percent of TCAT graduates find jobs in their field of study. In surveys, nearly 100 percent of TCAT alumni and their employers rate the programs as “satisfactory” or higher. One particularly impressive feature of the TCATs is the system used to address the problem community colleges face nationwide: the high number of unprepared students needing remedial courses. Most schools first put inadequately prepared students into separate remedial programs in which they often they get bogged down, never moving on to college-level courses, which is a leading cause of the low community college completion rate. TCAT’s approach is to have all students take courses that prepare them for college-level work so that no one gets singled out as needing remedial help. At the same time, students start their technology CTE courses. All students therefore get right into their chosen career courses so they can see their career opportunities from the outset. Coupled with the known high job placement rate, this makes the career opportunity very real real—not some dim light at the end of a long remedial tunnel.
The TCATs call this the Technology Foundations approach. For the remedial work, all entering students participate in ACT’s WorkKeys/WorkTrain program (discussed in chapter 9), focusing on applied math, reading, locating information, writing, problem solving, and teamwork. Students have individualized learning plans and based on these have a mix of classes, online exercises, and access to mentoring at a learning lab. Each student pursues the foundations program at his or her own pace. This is a highly blended education model combining online and personal instruction; it’s competency-based learning, with students mastering a series of stages and skills.
The great majority of students complete their foundations programs shortly after their first trimester, and only a handful have not done so by the third trimester.9 When they complete it they take ACT’s online Career Readiness Certificate Assessment; the goal of the TCATs is to have all students with certificates at a silver and gold level.
The Technology Foundations approach, along with tuition assistance from the state, results in high certificate and degree completion rates across the twenty-seven TCAT colleges. With completion rates one of the most serious barriers to occupational education, it’s an approach worthy of emulation.
Valencia College, previewed in chapter 1, set out to reach some of the approximately three hundred thousand people in poor families in the Orlando, Florida, area, often Black or Hispanic immigrants. They were generally working but typically at lower-end, minimum-wage service jobs, in less than full-time jobs without benefits, and often holding down two or even three of these jobs to meet family needs. The two-year timetable for an associate degree or one year for a certificate simply did not work for this group. Night classes didn’t fit with family demands. These people had been left outside the education pipeline and without a path to the middle class.
The short program—Valencia’s response to the aforementioned issues—is an intensive ten- to twenty-two-week course, five days per week for eight hours, that offers industry-standard certificates in advanced manufacturing, construction, heavy equipment, logistics, and healthcare fields. Certificates in specific skills can be stacked for multiple certified complementary skills. The program also provides credits toward a Valencia associate degree; these credits are also transferable to the four-year degree program at the University of Central Florida. As this program scales up, it could start to make a real dent in area poverty and create new lives for many.
Key to the program is putting students rapidly into a hands-on learning environment, then into the workplace, with skills that promptly command a good wage. Valencia has built ties with area employers to ensure jobs for its trainees on the first rung of a solid employment ladder, with wages at twenty dollars per hour or more with benefits. After a service job at Florida’s $8.46 minimum wage doing seasonal work, this can bring families to a new level.
This accelerated workforce program doesn’t fit US Labor or Education Department financial assistance program requirements, but Valencia offers tuition subsidies. Area employers provide the training equipment for the manufacturing program, which is housed in a small repossessed factory.
How can promising short programs evolve? We need to open up a number of experiments to discover what kinds work best. Poor quality could undermine the whole effort.
There are numerous experiments. Project Quest, for example, has been successful in reaching poor and undereducated workers in San Antonio with training and job placement targeted to expanding area job sectors. One factor has been its funding support and services to students to help them meet family obligations while they train at the nearby community college.10
Legislation was introduced in Congress in 2019 to make short programs like these eligible for federal Pell Grant funding,11 which in effect would divert funding from associate and bachelor’s programs open to both nonprofits and for-profit education providers. However, the legislation needs accountability over these providers to assure students actually obtain employment in the fields they trained in.12 To a significant extent, education quality is assured when educators, students, and businesses work as equal partners, each with a clear stake in the outcome.13 Without the participation of companies that need trained workers and therefore have a stake in the quality of the program, students may be subject to poor but expensive programs. Experiments with short programs should definitely be undertaken to settle on the best approaches, and solid employer participation should be required.
We also need to ensure that programs lead not just to single jobs but toward careers. Valencia, for example, is careful to tie its short program to community college credit, make the credentials stackable, and make them possible routes to associate degrees. It has built into its short program an access path to longer-term and more in-depth skill training and a potential degree. Asnuntuck Community College, as another example, focuses on one- to two-year manufacturing technology programs that build lifetime skills, including an understanding of the underlying theory behind the skills for when equipment changes, as well as enduring foundational skills in reading, writing, and math. These kinds of approaches can ensure strong short programs.
Beyond community and technical colleges, technical or comprehensive high schools could also play a role. At Diman Regional Vocational Technical High School in Fall River, Massachusetts, students complete five semesters of technical and academic high school courses in one of eighteen fields and then are considered ready to start skilled jobs in their selected career areas as part of a co-op work program that begins in the second semester of their junior year. Some 80 percent are placed into co-op jobs; juniors and seniors alternate between working full time for their employers for two weeks, doing homework online at night, and spending two weeks in school completing their academic and specialized technical courses. There’s a 90 percent retention rate for co-op jobs.
In effect, Diman is running an apprenticeship program comparable to Charleston’s Trident Tech. At Diman’s ninth annual job fair in April 2019, seventy-nine companies and organizations packed the school gymnasium. Hundreds of students jostled about. In the bustle, employers were clearly vying to employ co-op students, who they pay, on average, $412 weekly.14
Some 70 percent of Diman’s graduates go on to community college and/or four-year college. Nearby Bristol Community College certifies Diman technical courses for college credit; dual enrollment means Diman students graduate with a high school diploma, a year of community college credits, and skill certifications in a career area. Students often continue after graduation with their co-op employers at $50,000 or more a year, complete community college at night, and move on to Bridgewater State University or UMass Dartmouth, where they have guaranteed transferability to pursue four-year degrees—working at high-paying jobs all the way through and avoiding piling up student debt for an uncertain career path.
Diman has a large business advisory council of area employers and subcouncils that advise the eighteen program tracks and drive the curriculum. Let’s look at three of these tracks:
Diman students run a high-end restaurant, as well as the daily school lunch program. Landscape architecture students run the school’s campus and have teamed up with other programs to build a new stone outdoor terrace for the restaurant. The auto mechanics program is continually repairing a fleet of cars. Students trained as FAA-rated commercial drone pilots are operating drones. There are also major good deed projects: various building programs recently rebuilt the Fall River Water Department’s ancient hot-water heating plant with modern boilers, new piping, and an energy-efficiency system; others raised a new roof on Fall River’s Rowing Center; and the Diman health and dental assistant program provided dental advice and treatment for 140 Head Start students.15
Among the dedicated faculty, 70 percent are Diman graduates. Demand for admission is high, and the process is rigorous: for the 2016–2017 school year, the acceptance rate was 47 percent. Some 98 percent of students graduate.
Diman demonstrates that there’s a place for vocational or career and technical education in the American education system—and that it doesn’t have to reinforce the former view that such education is a dead end for poor and minority students (as discussed in chapter 3).16 While many states gave up on this kind of education,17 Massachusetts did not: the state rebuilt it and has thirty-eight schools across the state that vary in size and programs. “What we wanted to do was create a student who was able to go out and get a job but also able to get accepted into a four-year college or university,” explains David Ferreira, executive director in 2014 of the Massachusetts Association of Vocational Administrators. “The idea was to make sure all students were both career and college ready.”18
This approach has largely succeeded; the academic quality of Massachusetts vocational high schools is now on par with its traditional academic high schools. In 2016, the graduation rate was 9 points higher than other high schools, the dropout rate was one-third of other schools, and two-thirds of vocational education (voc ed)/CTE graduates were going on to postsecondary education. Some 4,400 students were on voc ed school admission waitlists.19 Studies have shown higher incomes accrue to graduates of CTE programs, and a 2015 study of Massachusetts regional vocational schools showed that low-income students were 32 percent more likely to graduate than students in traditional high schools.20 Graduates of the Massachusetts technical schools are far more career-ready than other students.
There are other lessons from Diman: emphasis on academic performance must be kept high and made to complement technical skills; instructors and equipment must be kept current with developments at the cutting edge of industries; business advisors must be involved in developing the curriculum; and the curriculum should be coordinated with community colleges for joint credit to ease entry to postsecondary education. Diman provides a good example of how these kinds of schools can erase the historic barriers between learning and work and enable both good careers and higher education entry.
How useful, though, is the vocational/CTE school model if many states have dropped it? It seems unlikely, but not impossible, that at a time when most states have been cutting back their education commitments, these states would actually start funding and creating new secondary CTE schools, which require not only classrooms but extensive technology and equipment. But as many areas, particularly urban areas, continue to create a plethora of new schools through charter school programs, perhaps they can explore new technical schools as well—particularly given the pressing need for skilled workers. States throughout the country are showing renewed interest in technical schools.21 Organizing a political base among parents and employers to advocate for this might be necessary.
Massachusetts offers a possible middle way. The state has been creating “comprehensive high schools,” an old model being renewed,22 to address the long waiting lists for existing vocational high schools and the fact that fifty-two municipalities don’t have access to those schools. These new schools focus on both traditional academic subjects, such as English, science, math, languages, and social studies, and on technical skills. They expand their electives to reach a wider range of students seeking vocational education, offering business technology and finance, machining, information technology skills, early childhood education, and so on. These schools can also offer vocational programs operating as a school within a school.
Chicopee Comprehensive High School, for example, offers vocational programs in twelve areas, including business and IT, culinary arts, design and visual communications, electrical, machining and metal fabrication, joining, and others. The machine tool program has a fleet of advanced machining equipment housed in a large, new floorspace; it offers a range of hands-on courses that move students from simple milling and grinding machines to computer-aided manufacturing, computer drafting, and advanced CNC machining. Seniors do co-ops at area manufacturers and earn community college–level credits. After the regular school day ends, underemployed and displaced workers use the facility, working with skilled instructors in a cooperative effort with the area workforce development board, which offers machining courses to these workers.
While it can’t offer quite as rich a program as Diman, Chicopee Comprehensive represents an alternative approach.
Some companies and industry associations have been taking the lead in developing new training or skill certification programs. Model 6 highlights some examples.
Ginni Rometty, the first woman to serve as IBM’s CEO, passionately pushed her major corporation toward workforce education for new entrants during her 2012 to 2020 tenure. Some of this may stem from her own background. She attended Northwestern University on a scholarship funded by General Motors; her single working mother couldn’t afford college tuition. She interned at companies in her junior and senior years.
IBM’s interest in apprenticeships came in significant part from its 2011 participation in Pathways in Technology (P-TECH), a program from ninth grade through community college that connects high school directly with college and aims at putting technology at the forefront of the student experience.23 It began in Brooklyn, New York, in a P-TECH school of one hundred students within a larger city high school, and now includes some two hundred schools in eleven states.24 The underlying idea was to fill a gap in the education ladder between high school and college, with a school within a school approach that is more financially manageable and flexible than creating separate, new institutions.
P-TECH students focus on STEM and information technology courses while in high school, take classes at New York City College of Technology (City Tech) and other campuses, and then can earn an associate degree there at no cost. They have the option to go on to complete four-year undergraduate degrees or move into work. Students also undertake internships at IBM and at other P-TECH partner companies, which also provide mentors. The only entry requirement is an interest in IT and a willingness to attend additional classes to complete both regular high school and IT requirements.
Soft skills—leadership and teamwork—are taught from the outset through group learning; the program’s hard skills courses are directly relevant to real problems students are tackling. Students start going to college classes early on in their high school career, easing the transition.
With the number of four-year graduates holding computer science degrees far below the market demand, IBM has begun hiring at the associate degree level, which is why the company is hiring P-TECH graduates. The program is providing comparable talent.
Drawing from its experience with the P-TECH program, IBM has been developing an apprenticeship program. It has developed fifteen different apprenticeship tracks for careers in growing fields, including software engineering, data science and analytics, cybersecurity, mainframe system administration, creative design, and IT program management. It began at IBM’s mainframe (servers) business unit, which had an aging workforce and needed new talent; since then, IBM apprenticeships have grown at twice the expected rate.
The website for those interested in an IBM apprenticeship boldly states: “No degree? No problem!”25 The company is seeking to create “new collar workers” with solid technical skills. IBM went through the process of using the Department of Labor’s registered apprenticeship system; it used some Department of Labor funding to create the required learning plan and objectives, and the education is competency-based. It’s allied with collaborating community colleges for associate degrees and certifications, but all the training is internal to IBM. Several hundred apprentices work with IBM employees on the job in three locations around the country (with more planned); they are paid less than full-time employees but have jobs and are both taking courses and working. The apprentices commit to at least two thousand hours in competency-based training that they can complete in less time.
IBM apprentices join a cohort of apprentices from a number of business units in an IBM locality. In the opening weeks, they learn about the company and are introduced to the skills they will learn in the apprenticeship. With managers and mentors, they develop a personal skills roadmap to learning, demonstrating new knowledge and competencies, hands-on applications, and working within project teams. Digital credentials validate skills at milestones. The retention rate for apprentices is very high.
aComputer and Electronics Show (CES) Press Release, “CTA and IBM Announce Apprenticeship Coalition to Help Close U.S. Skills Gap,” January 8, 2019, https://www.ces.tech/News/Press-Releases/CES-Press-Release.aspx?NodeID=20769cf6-315a-435f-a70e-ba05c7ce76c4; Cat Zakrzewski, “Technology Companies Turn to Apprenticeships in Tight Labor Market,” Washington Post, January 8, 2019.
IBM’s is not the only new employer-led apprenticeship program, but it is an example of what could evolve in the tech sector. It’s particularly interesting because it’s an employer’s attempt to move non-college-degree students into a field—computer and information technologies—dominated by college degrees, where there is now high employer demand and a major talent shortfall.
Apprenticeships now reach less than 1 percent of the workforce; for this effort to scale, we need more than one-off efforts by single companies. Much more industry collaboration is required for sharing best practices and content. IBM’s example with a group of companies is a positive and instructive step (see “Consortium” box).
Developing skill standards is a critical step for educating and hiring the manufacturing workforce needed in the coming decade.26 The process of taking a technical occupation area and identifying component skills and systems to teach them, developing effective assessments, and providing corresponding certifications, plus making these into living systems that incorporate ongoing developments, is a massive one. But it’s crucial to education and training. The lack of standards certification in a given occupation area can be frustrating: educators don’t know what to teach, employers don’t know how to evaluate potential employees and current employees, and employees don’t know how to qualify for jobs and can’t transfer their qualifications to other firms or areas.
The Manufacturing Skills Standards Council (MSSC) has become the leading certifying body for the nation’s frontline manufacturing production and supply chain logistics technicians.27 It offers a nonprofit, industry-led certification, training, and assessment system based on industry-defined and federally endorsed standards. It’s the only certification organization in the manufacturing industry accredited under the international ISO system and has had the support of the National Association of Manufacturers, the leading industry association.28 Its certifications enable both new entrant and incumbent workers to demonstrate they have the required skills for increasingly technical manufacturing tasks.
MSSC has two broad certification programs. Its Certified Production Technician program incorporates a host of tasks within five modules: safety, quality practices and measurement, manufacturing processes and production, maintenance practices, and green production. The Certified Logistics Technician program has two levels and includes tasks such as global supply chain logistics lifecycles, material handling equipment, quality control principles, computing skills, packaging and shipment handling, inventory control, and safe handling of hazmat materials. Both certifications have systems for online assessments, support online and blended learning courses, and include a supporting system of certified instruction organizations and trainers. MSSC has begun a skills development effort centered on the suite of advanced manufacturing technologies now beginning to enter manufacturing firms, including practices in artificial intelligence, robotics, data analytics, and computer control programming.
The IT sector has been able to develop skill certifications for key occupation areas, the automotive repair sector certifies qualified mechanics, and the medical sector has long had certifications for doctors and nurses. The ongoing MSSC project in manufacturing could be critical for meeting that sector’s expected workforce skill demands. Without an educated workforce, and standards to meet for educating that workforce, new technology areas simply can’t grow.
The US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, the nation’s largest business organization, has the ability to reach companies of all sizes and sectors in every region. Its Talent Pipeline Management (TPM) Initiative, introduced in chapter 9, is designed to enable business-led efforts allied with other stakeholders to implement new training systems and curricula.29 The program reaches both new and incumbent workers to help upskill the workforces at two hundred partner employers in twenty-six states.30
The training side, called TPM Academy, offers both in-person and online training for workforce leaders to learn the TPM approach. It’s backed by a customized curriculum that serves as a toolkit for participants. A web-based tool activates the six TPM strategies embedded in the program to streamline the data collection and visualization needed for sound program construction. It provides a framework for employers that can be customized to their particular needs in building high-performing talent pipelines.
The TPM Academy works through five steps:
Once the new system has been implemented, the talent supply data system provides continuing information to allow improvements and adjustments. Overall, the TPM program offers constructive help to employers of all sizes trying to formulate workforce solutions.
Another workforce coordination space available to some employers is working with unions. While unions currently make up only 6 percent of the overall private-sector workforce, some significant sectors remain unionized, including construction, manufacturing, aerospace, utilities, and healthcare. Industry-union workforce education collaborations can bring in groups of employers. For example, the Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership is an industry-led and worker-focused effort, with state, federal, and community participation and foundation support, that provides short-term training for skilled manufacturing, construction and healthcare jobs in the Milwaukee area.31 The program’s construction element, Big Step, works with the construction trades’ joint apprenticeship programs in the region and has significantly increased the entry of minorities and women into skilled construction jobs in the area and helped meet overall needs for skilled workers.32 Another example is the Culinary Academy of Las Vegas, which had trained some 42,000 workers for skilled jobs in that area’s hospitality sector, from professional cook to baker to wine server. A collaboration between the area’s numerous hotel and casino employers and the culinary and bartenders union locals, it has emphasized reaching large numbers of minorities, youth, and displaced workers through small classes of fifteen or fewer and expert instructors from industry, using a large, specialized training facility that also operates a “hands-on” restaurant and catering service.
An underlying feature of the employer-led efforts described above—creating apprenticeships, establishing industry skill standards, and helping employer groups form training programs or coordinating training with unions—is that they are collaborative. Employers face a strong disincentive to work with other employers because they compete with each other for talent. This barrier to collective efforts amounts to a market failure. Yet shared programs can significantly lower training costs and risks. The solution is for groups of employers to coordinate their workforce efforts, and each of these programs provides an example. This will be crucial in scaling employer efforts.
The economic fallout from the coronavirus will make companies, particularly small companies, less willing or able to adopt a workforce education role, although pressures to upskill the workforce will still be ongoing. This will propel more of a workforce support role for government. Yet efficient and well-designed workforce education requires companies to be involved in the content and its delivery to ensure that it fits actual workplace needs. So the collaboration model discussed here, involving government (particularly local and state, with federal support), with strong company input and involvement, will become even more central to workforce education efforts. Employers, smaller employers in particular, will be less likely to undertake them on their own.
One of the deeper problems in workforce education is that the major federal programs supported by the Departments of Education and Labor are not well connected and don’t reach incumbent workers easily. But because the federal programs are the major source of funding for state workforce programs, they drive how states organize their own programs: state implementation follows federal patterns. The result is a disconnect at both levels.
States, though, are essential workforce actors. The ongoing effort in Florida to bring together manufacturing and workforce programs and community colleges (see chapter 1) is a good working model for how these federal programs could be better linked. Another is in Massachusetts, where the state government has tried to connect this range of programs at the state level in response to employer concerns about the lack of a trained workforce.33
In 2015, the governor of Massachusetts created a “skills cabinet” with the secretaries of the three departments involved in workforce matters. The Department of Education covers all public education in the state, which includes vocational technical high schools, community colleges, and the state university system. The Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development focuses on unemployed and underemployed workers, managing workforce boards and MassHire, the state’s unemployment and job placement employment service; it also supports the state’s apprenticeship program and its new intern program.34 The Department of Housing and Economic Development is the state’s economic development agency; it encourages firms to locate in the state and supports a range of programs, including ones in entrepreneurship and R&D, and also supports the MassTech Collaborative, which focuses on innovation infrastructure and talent for the state, including an innovative advanced manufacturing initiative.35
The skills cabinet meets biweekly and makes program decisions jointly; all three member departments must approve any new workforce-related program from the constituent departments. The focus is on advanced manufacturing, healthcare, and information technology, which the state sees as the critical future job sectors for Massachusetts. Between 2015 and 2018, the cabinet awarded $52 million in Workforce Skills Capital Grants to 188 vocational technical high schools, community colleges, traditional public high schools, and companies to bring the latest technology and equipment to each to expand skills training programs.36 A major initiative has been to develop workforce strategic plans in the state’s seven economic regions.37 Each involves a planning group of regional stakeholders—state agencies, community colleges, vocational technical high schools, workforce boards, and industry leaders—with each region’s workforce board serving as a lead organizer.
Massachusetts has committed $100 million in cost sharing with the federal government and industry to fund five of the nation’s fourteen advanced manufacturing institutes, each of which is located in or has program elements in the state. No other state has such a broad commitment to these institutes. The Massachusetts Manufacturing Innovation Initiative (M2I2) program, a part of the MassTech Collaborative, supports these institute efforts and helps provide advanced manufacturing equipment and training through regional partnerships involving universities, community colleges, and companies.38
The M2I2 program is also coordinating an effort by the three state agencies to develop a new state plan for a system of advanced manufacturing education, coordinated across state education and workforce institutions and the manufacturing institutes and aided by a 2020 Defense Department ManTech grant. It is a pathbreaking example of Massachusetts’s commitment to meeting future skill needs.39 It will require a new curriculum centered on new technologies such as robotics and photonics, aided by online delivery, to be implemented in the state’s community colleges, technical high schools, state universities, and manufacturing employers. There is no existing system for educating for the new advanced technologies entering the workplace, so this example may well be the first systematic attempt. This program, which will reach incumbent as well as new entrant workers, could be a critical state model for what the nation needs to undertake.
AIM Photonics Academy, a manufacturing institute workforce program that has already developed online education courses and modules for educating engineers and technicians in photonics, is assisting in developing these plans. Because it cost-shared their programs, the state is involving four other manufacturing institutes as well; they can contribute know-how on their new technologies and how to educate workers to use them. Overall, this new effort seeks to lead the state’s production industries into a position of competitive leadership. An education system for new advanced manufacturing technologies that includes curricula, courses, and modules to be used in education institutions and industry will be another first, and a potentially important new national model.
Massachusetts has strengthened its vocational technical high schools, is bringing new technical skills programs into traditional high schools to create comprehensive high school programs, and has used its MassMEP manufacturing partnership program—which brings new technologies and processes to area manufacturing—as a coordinator for training programs for small manufacturers. The state’s Workforce Training Fund offers grants to employers to upskill their incumbent workforces. In other words, Massachusetts has developed a suite of new organizational and program elements that integrate education, workforce, and economic development at the state level, making up for the disconnects in these programs at the federal level.
The state does all this by bringing together employers, education institutions, and state resources—a key three-way connection. Employers need to be involved in designing and funding workforce programs and in finding jobs for graduates. Classroom education must be integrated with opportunities to apply new skills in real or simulated settings, and training must focus on career pathways, not just skills for a particular job.40
The Massachusetts solution to the federal workforce program disconnects is to fill the gaps.41 The state grasps that strong workforce development efforts need to be the at the heart of state economic development efforts: they will be key to growing companies and keeping them in the state, as well as attracting new ones.
American labor markets lack a good information system, as detailed in chapter 6. We need job skill information, with supporting credentials that connect to job openings data, are tied to rich data on training and education options, and that in turn are structured to fit needed skills and job requirements linked to the training systems themselves. We need an online navigator that integrates workers, employers, and educators and helps them sort out their best options within a data-rich environment.
There are signs this missing navigator is evolving. Federal agencies, industry associations, and the private sector could play key roles. Two projects, both still works in progress, are noted here as examples for how progress could be made.
The 2014 Workforce Investment and Opportunity Act requires the Labor Department to build a new and much larger workforce and labor market information system and provides a full framework for organizing it.42 A subsequent advisory council developed detailed implementation recommendations, including recommendations for better identification “of in-demand occupations and industries” and to “fill a career awareness gap” for workers. Its report recommended building new databases from unemployment wage records; expanded information collection on occupations, skills, and credentials; a new career awareness education framework; and better information on the changing nature of work. Improved data sharing, new involvement by states and other agencies, and new analytics were also recommended.43
Meanwhile, the US Census Bureau in 2019 created a jobkit site that compiles government job information sources and is also developing more data on postsecondary school employment outcomes.44 NSF undertook in 2019 a new National Training, Education, and Workforce Survey.45 And the Commerce Department and the White House, also in 2019, created an American Workforce Policy Advisory Board.46 Income and employment data from the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service, and other Commerce and Labor Department agencies, given appropriate data privacy protections, could also contribute to a new information system. Federal agencies could aggregate their data and allow the private sector to build specialized information systems from it in a public-private model.
The Labor Department’s O*NET online system already provides workers with valuable data about occupations and their prospects nationally and by region.47 If this new system, including data from the other agencies, can be created, the combination would be a major step toward a workable information system.
In 2018, the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, with support from the Lumina Foundation, formed the T3 Network to link businesses, community colleges, technical standards organizations, employment experts, and technology firms with a data system available to all.48 The network of 150 organizations, including federal government agencies, is organized around four tasks: developing open data standards to harmonize and enable interoperability for skill competencies and worker and student records; identifying gaps in the standards for employment, earnings, and student records; developing tools for shared competency and skill statements for participants in labor markets; and developing protocols for workers and learners to access and use their skills data and competencies through blockchain and distributed ledgers. The project is taking on complex data gathering and organization tasks across public and private sectors. It could enable a better labor market information system.
The US Chamber of Commerce Foundation also began its Job Data Exchange (JDX) project in 2018.49 The idea was that if employers provided much clearer job information, labor markets could better connect worker skills and qualifications with job openings. The National Association of Manufacturers and the US Labor and Education Departments participate in JDX, as do state organizations and some major employers, including Walmart and Microsoft. They are working on pilot projects in six states to develop standardized, structured data for web posting of jobs and create human resource systems for transferring job data.
Sound information systems will require public and private sector collaboration; these programs attempt to do this. Neither T3 nor JDX are likely to grab headlines. But like the Labor Department’s information efforts, they are undertaking the difficult, complex work with data, standards, and systems needed for progress on a job navigation system.
Developing and implementing new education technologies will be important to scaling new workforce education efforts. The US military provides an example of what is possible, and universities could play a significant development and dissemination role.
Chapter 1 details work by the Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division on training programs using virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) in online gaming simulations and run on high-end gaming computers and touch screens. The navy is now shifting a substantial amount of its training for advanced equipment on ships, on submarines, and at air bases into these online systems, and they are increasingly in place at navy training centers and are moving into the fleet, beginning with aircraft carriers. The systems require that software be developed for each type of equipment, but the online hardware platforms are commercially available and the costs have become quite manageable—in the $10,000 to $15,000 range.
The new VR/AR technology enables realistic training without risks to the actual equipment and while ensuring the safety of new operators. It enables significant learning by doing, which makes it a major step forward in training. Preliminary findings by the navy indicate that the level of skill that can be acquired through these VR/AR simulations is quite close to actual hands-on learning. The other US service branches are moving rapidly to shift their training to these technologies.
Industry is further behind. While industry is beginning to use VR/AR for tasks such as inspections, it’s still a long distance away from introducing it at scale for training—in part a reflection of industry’s still limited commitment to training. This shifts responsibility for obtaining training to individuals and publicly funded community colleges. While the online equipment could make training much less costly for community colleges—they wouldn’t have to acquire full factory floors of advanced manufacturing equipment—they do not have the resources or capabilities to develop the required software. But once the software is developed, it could disseminate rapidly online.
Online videos themselves are a powerful new tool for education now coming into increasing use, but they can be further enhanced. Who is in a position to develop the VR/AR and gaming software for the learning-by-doing aspect of training? Industry could do it for equipment now in use but will have trouble developing training for advanced technologies that are not yet widespread because there isn’t yet a market. Technology and equipment providers might fill the gap, but only for their own products. VR companies such as Oculus are only beginning to offer consumer games, much less education programs. Universities, many of which have now implemented extensive online courses, might take on this role. Clemson and MIT are two examples of universities adopting online technologies; chapter 8 detailed the emerging education technologies and their potential importance.
Clemson University’s Center for Workforce Development, discussed in chapter 7, has worked with South Carolina’s system of technical colleges, with support from NSF’s Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program, and developed a system of online courses in high-end manufacturing skills.50 These modular courses can be readily adopted in classes at technical and community colleges, enhancing rather than replacing face-to-face learning. The course materials fit the MSSC skill standards (discussed earlier) and can lead to MSSC certifications.
Notably, VR/AR features are also being built into course modules.
Our colleagues at MIT Open Learning have a growing list of accomplishments.51 Working with MIT faculty, they have now produced more than 170 MOOCs available online around the world and involving millions of learners. Because Open Learning believes blended learning is best—it can optimize both online and face-to-face learning—it has also been running boot camps to match up with a series of its MOOC courses. Students who complete MOOCs are eligible to participate for a fee in boot camps that often consist of a week of intense group learning. Boot camps allow face-to-face and learning-by-doing features to be added to online education.
MIT’s long-standing OpenCourseWare system posts course materials and a growing number of lecture videos for nearly all MIT courses; more than three hundred million learners worldwide have used it. MIT and Harvard partnered to lead the creation of edX, a major online course platform that hosts MOOCs from more than 130 universities around the world, with many millions of learners. MITx, the institute’s online course system, is also developing new certificate programs. Its low-cost MicroMasters programs group sequences of courses, including in manufacturing and supply chain management, and reach 850,000 total enrollees. Students can qualify to come to MIT or more than three dozen other cooperating universities to complete a full master’s degree in supply chain management on an accelerated schedule, with full credit for the MicroMasters courses.
MIT also now has an xPro suite of online courses developed for particular companies that want to train their technical and engineering staff. Boeing, for example, wanted to develop a common understanding of systems engineering across its workforce of thousands of systems engineers in many countries educated in different concepts. So it supported Open Learning to develop foundational systems engineering courses. These courses are also available to non-Boeing students. And Open Learning has already worked with a number of community colleges that use its MOOCs as modules in their courses. It aims to start including VR/AR simulations in its courses, and the MIT Game Lab has already developed a group of educational online games.52 MIT Open Learning is also working with nine other large universities to develop a digital credentialing system for both online course certificates and university degrees.53 The schools are working to create the standards for a trusted, distributed, but shared infrastructure for issuing, storing, displaying, and verifying academic credentials. Using blockchain and strong cryptography to prevent fraud, credentials can now be owned and displayed by the credential holder—representing a democratization of transcripts. It will also enable much richer and detailed credentials, potentially reflecting particular competencies the student has learned and making the system much more useful to employers trying to understand the skills and competencies that are actually behind a degree or certificate. It could help open new pathways for individuals to become what they want to be, as well as a serve as a protected validation system underpinning online credentials.
In addition, MIT is home to the AIM Photonics institute’s education and training programs. AIM has already developed MOOCs posted on the MITx and edX platforms for photonics and optics skills at the engineering and technician level and is working on more. It is also working with the state of Massachusetts and in cooperation with MIT Open Learning on the statewide advanced manufacturing education system noted earlier; online courses will be an important feature. It recently received a grant to develop VR/AR training modules for photonics.
Table 11.1
New workforce education delivery models
| Delivery model | Stakeholder roles | Examples | Groups of workers reached | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New entrants | Displaced/underemployed | Incumbents | |||
|
1: Synergistic “trifecta” for high schools, community colleges, and incumbent workers |
Community/technical college (lead); employers, high schools, state (supporting) |
Asnuntuck Community College (Enfield, CT) |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
|
2: Youth apprenticeships |
As above |
Trident Tech (Charleston, SC) |
✓ |
||
|
3: Fixing the two-year college completion rate |
As above |
Tennessee Colleges for Applied Technology |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
|
4: Intensive short program for skills and certification |
As above |
Valencia College (Orlando, FL) |
✓ |
✓ |
|
|
5: Technical and comprehensive high schools |
State (lead) |
Massachusetts |
✓ |
||
|
6: Employer workforce programs |
Employers (lead); industry associations (supporting) |
IBM, MSSC, US Chamber of Commerce Foundation |
✓ |
✓ |
|
|
7: Unifying workforce programs across a state |
State (lead) |
Massachusetts |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
|
8: New labor market information systems |
Federal agencies, industry associations, private sector (lead) |
US Department of Labor; US Chamber of Commerce Foundation |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
|
9: Introducing new education technologies |
Universities and employers (lead) |
US Navy; Clemson University (SC); MIT (MA) |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
The work at Clemson, MIT, and other institutions suggests university models that could play a role in supporting entry of new online technologies into education and training, particularly for advanced technologies still in development and on which universities are working. Because online learning can scale quickly, a small number of schools can take leading roles. That’s how MOOC platforms developed. The work at the Naval Training Center and other military training centers provides examples of what the new technologies can accomplish in training.
The nine models for workforce education delivery explored in this chapter reach the full range of affected workers—new entrants, underemployed and displaced, and incumbents. The models require different institutional leads. Table 11.1 summarizes the models.
Together, the models amount to approaches that states, education institutions, and employers could adopt, filling significant gaps in the current workforce education system. They are complementary: no single model is adequate for the full range of workforce challenges, but a combination could have a significant effect. There are also implications from each program for federal education and labor programs. These policy implications are explored further in the final chapter.