News Articles

Here's an interesting idea: internships for teachers. One of the major challenges we face in realigning our education system comes in upgrading the skills of teachers.

Teachers often have little experience in business, and initiatives like this one in Baltimore can help teachers understand how to connect their lesson plans and teaching strategies to the world of work. 

Here's an overview: 

The program is part of a local workforce development initiative. It aims to connect Frederick County Public Schools with businesses to work together in building the county’s future workforce.

The externship program is still in planning stages, but organizers hope to start a pilot program this summer with three positions for teachers at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick. The four-week externships will pay $7,500 and will be geared toward Advanced Placement biology teachers. Ideally, the externships should start right after July 4, Markoe said.

The program will continue to build from there, as soon as it receives an expected $100,000 Workforce Development grant, allowing for another 13 externships with large companies and agencies – from Bechtel and State Farm Insurance to Fort Detrick...

The externship program is just one of many initiatives coming out of the Frederick County Business Roundtable for Education – a new partnership between Frederick County Public Schools, Frederick Community College, The Frederick County Chamber of Commerce, Frederick County Economic Development and Fort Detrick. The partnership aims to bridge the gap between the business and education communities, allow businesses to reach students and essentially create a climate for building a 21st century workforce.

You can read more here. 

Mary Ellen Clark, WIRED Bio-1 and Aaron Fichter, Ph.D, Heldrich Center for Workforce Development take a look at how to measure the effectiveness of your implementation strategies.

Some of the key questions addressed include:

1. Are you feeling any pain over the time/resources it takes to collect data and report on it?
2. Are you confident the data you report is accurate

Bio-1 is in Central New Jersey, and comprises 5 counties and 4 workforce investment boards. Some initiatives they have focused on include: life science career campaign, career academies, residential programs, increasing bioscience workforce development with the 'Flak Jackets to Lab Coats' program to reintegrate returning vets into the workforce, enhancing linkages between education and industry via the web.

Metrics Steps:

Plan and Prepare (critical few, leverage/impact), Develop a Framework (strategy/alignment, balance, data collection), Development (Strategy ALignment,Balance, Op. Definitions), Deployment (Vertical alignment, accountability transfer), Collect and Analyze Data (Review Process, Actions, Project ID), Review Process (status, opportunities, projects), Plan and Prepare (Strategic Objectives, Development Team).

Operational Definitions:

Measure Owner: Who will report on this metric

Data Owner:  Who will collect and summarize data

Formula: How is this derived?

Benchmark/Goal: What is the target? If you have benchmarks from comparable regions include them here.

 Read more >>   Options >>  

There was a nice article in this week's New Mexico Business Journal about one component of the WIRED Initiative in that region.

A new initiative aims to address the looming work force shortage by helping connect New Mexico students and graduates who have left the state with job opportunities here.

The initiative is obtaining funding from a $50,000 seed grant from the French Family of Cos. and $400,000 that is part of a larger $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor. The program was initiated with a decision by French to donate $100,000 to the community in honor of its 100th anniversary, Swan said. The idea was to improve what he calls the "AIR quality" in Albuquerque -- shorthand for access, innovation and relationships.

The full article can be found here .

Today, a national dropout prevention summit takes place in Washington. The Department of Education is moving toward a standard reporting of dropout rates across the country.

More and more leaders are waking up to the opportunity to reduce dramatically the number of high school dropouts. There's probably no single more effective step we can take to boost long-term per capita incomes, as we move into an era of skill shortages. (Each drop out represents a lifetime earnings loss of about $300,000.)

Here's a new report from America's Promise Alliance. Download the report.

Clearly, old solutions to drop-outs (including pretending that the problem was not all that big) no longer work.

Can we innovate?

A strong demonstration of the need for skilled workers can be found in this article.  AT&T CEO states "having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill all the 5,000 customer service jobs it promised to return to the United States from India."  Read more at this link:  http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080327/tc_nm/att_workforce_dc

Skills for Scotland provides a clear, concise framing of a workforce development strategy. It's a good, short report that provides us some valuable perspective on workforce strategy. Download it here.

Here's the vision that frames the document.

Our vision is for a smarter Scotland with a globally competitive economy based on high value jobs, with progressive and innovative business leadership:

• Where people can work in teams, are creative andenterprising and hungry to continually learn new skills.They expect to realise their aspirations and are equipped to achieve their potential in a constantly changing world.People are motivated to contribute to Scotland’s future and are confident that they can do so.
• Where people are entrepreneurial and innovative; smallbusinesses are encouraged to grow and there is strong, coherent support for businesses of all sizes. Migrant workers and overseas students play a valuable role in an expanded workforce and economy.
• Where employers improve productivity by investing in their own staff and are able to access a skilled workforce that is increasingly literate and numerate with good ICT and problem solving skills.
• Where learning and training providers work as one system and thanks to wider use of technology and e-learning, barriers of geography and rurality have been reduced.

Here is the next one article that profiles a union leader from Philadelphia. Cheryl Feldman demonstrates the vision required to implement sector-based models of education and training. 

Specifically, the approach emphasizes portable skills, credentials, and linkages to college wherever possible.

Here's an excerpt from her interview. 

Q: I've been reading about something called sector training. What is that?

A: [Sectors] are clusters of employment and career opportunities within an industry - health care . . . life sciences . . . manufacturing.. . . In the past, workforce development may have had training programs that really didn't drill down into a particular sector. . . .The sector initiative involves . . . really doing an assessment on what the needs of that sector are. From a workforce-development perspective, that incorporates not just the front-line workers, but what are the career-ladder opportunities?

Q: Hasn't a lot of workforce training just been getting people in the door, and then neglecting them in low-level jobs?

A: Absolutely. . . . The best sector initiatives are really approaching a strategy for changing those low-wage jobs into family-sustaining jobs - with health benefits and pensions - that are connected to career ladders.

Q: Give me an example.

A: The residential workers who are working in mental health and mental retardation. . . . There are very few credentials required. And there are no career ladders. . . . You get in that job, and with some exceptions, . . . there's really not anywhere you can go. We have an industry-partnership stakeholder group involved [in] creating a degree program that hasn't existed previously, that gives college credits for our behavioral-health technician program.

Q: After they've done all this work, what are they getting?

A: Two [partner] employers have agreed that the result of this work will be promotion, creating career ladders in direct patient-care delivery.

I encourage you to repeal article. Read more.

In an earlier post, Carrie Snyder highlighted the new workforce reform plan of Louisiana's governor Bobby Jindal. I've chased down a copy of the plan.  You can download it here.

Senator Voinovich (R-Ohio) has introduced legislation to amend the Workforce Investment Act to promote the principles of Wired (Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development). The proposed legislation would establish the three new voluntary programs within the WIA framework.

The bill, called the WIRED Act:

• Authorizes states and regions to work with a governor (or governors in the case of multi-state regions) to submit WIRED plans for approval by the Secretary of Labor. The plans must be aimed at crafting targeted workforce development programs that provide enhanced job training and related employment activities in the region. They may include complementary economic development activities. If approved, the plans could allow states to combine a number of different federal workforce and economic development funds;  
  
• Authorizes the Secretary of Labor to award supplementary grants to assist in implementing a WIRED plan or to carry out other regionally-focused workforce development activities; and
  
• Authorizes the use of formula funds available to states and local areas under WIA to carry out regionally-focused workforce development activities without going through the entire WIRED approval process. As stated earlier, some of this vital funding is currently going unused because of the inflexibility of the WIA program.

You can read more about the Voinovich bill here.

You can read the text of the legislation here.

Washington State announced its Generation 3 Wired grant earlier this week. In a ceremony at the New Market Skills Center in Tumwater, Washington State's Senator Murray, Senator Cantwell, and U.S. Representative Brian Baird attended, along with representatives of the governor's office, county commissioners school board members and, importantly, representatives from the business community.

the Wired grant will be administered through a five county consortium, five-county group, the Pacific Mountain Workforce Consortium.

Read more.

Two weeks ago, the Department of Labor awarded Oakland Community College in Auburn Hills, Michigan with $1.9 million grant for a nanotechnology lab on its campus.

The idea of developing a nanotechnology center started more than a year ago when Auburn Hills campus officials were working on their academic master plan.

"We looked to where future jobs were going to be, where Michigan is headed and how we could build off the rich technology base here," Dolly said.

Miller and Tahir Khan, the interim dean of technology, began working on the curriculum last summer, Dolly said. Plans for an associate's degree in material sciences -- the discipline nanotechnology falls under -- are in the works.

Oakland University and Wayne State University have also partnered with OCC in the endeavor so students can transfer to finish degree programs in material sciences there.

The grant includes enough money to train 400 existing employees in the region and 50 new hires. Read more.

Late last year, the Urban Institute produced an important report, called "America's Forgotten Middle Skill Jobs". The report may be important point that the demand for jobs in the so-called "middle tier" of skills will remain strong. These are jobs that require postsecondary education but less than a four year college degree.

About half of our national employment falls in the jobs in the middle-skill range. At the same time, about 45% of all job openings between 2004 and 2014 will fall into job categories in the middle skill range.

The authors of the report highlight the fact that policy often focuses too much on the 25% of jobs that require a four year college degree in above.  Not enough attention is paid to these middle skilled jobs which comprise almost half of our workforce.

A recent article in Maine highlighted the importance of middle skilled jobs in that state.  Read more.

You can download a copy of the Middle Skill report here .