By guest poster, Brett Pawlowski, EVP of the National Center for College and Career Transitions.

A relatively new think tank called Third Way has recently released an analysis on the national skills gap. Noting that others have provided very different views depending on the limited data sets they looked at, Third Way instead decided to get a broad look at several different fields by reviewing multiple factors including job fill rates, wage gains, education and credential attainment, employer surveys, and state analyses of labor supply and demand. Their analysis is provided here. (Look past the charts at the top; there’s lots of good data further down.)

In some cases their report lined up well with what people in CTE have been saying, while in others there was a real disconnect. And I was greatly surprised that, for a policy-focused think tank, they failed to look at the impact that policy has on workforce demand.

For example, I think everyone would agree that healthcare and social assistance is flashing a “code red,” but they failed to note that some of the greatest demand for workers is at the lower-end, with assistants that make minimum wage or close to it and require little more than a college degree. When I’ve looked at regional supply and demand in nursing for a few clients, on the other hand, it seems there’s actually an oversupply of people graduating from nursing programs compared to the number of new positions coming available.

They highlight a critical shortage of tech workers in the professional and business services category as well, but fail to note that the H1b program, which brings around three million people from overseas to the US in a tech capacity, are pushing down wages and making it hard for citizens to compete.

Manufacturing is the biggest surprise; whereas CTE organizations and the media highlight a critical lack of workers, Third Way only rates this as a “moderate” shortfall, ranking below education in terms of crisis levels. (Education is in crisis, according to Third Way, solely due to a lack of STEM educators.)

I would encourage people to look at this analysis, as it offers a fresh approach, but I would also caution people from accepting their results at face value – I think there’s a lot more that needs to be considered before you can have a truly comprehensive understanding of the skills gap issue.

Brett Pawlowski is the Executive Vice President of NC3T, the National Center for College and Career Transitions (www.nc3t.com).  NC3T provides planning, coaching, technical assistance and tools to help community-based leadership teams plan and implement their college-career pathway systems and strengthen employer connections with education.

This is an encore post from December 2016.

If you’re thinking about school-related goals for the new school year, you might be thinking, “Wow.  We really need to get better at connecting employer and other community volunteers to our pathways, CTE or STEM programs.”  Did you know there are actually 5 key strategies and almost 20 specific activities in which employers and community partners can be connected to your program?   Why do think you need to be clearer in communicating about these strategies?

Think about the last time someone invited you to do something with him or her?  Did they frame the question like, “Hey, what are you doing Friday night?”  Even coming from people I really like, I don’t like this question because all it does is raise uncertainty.  I may have modest plans for Friday night, but I really would rather know what you have in mind so I can decide if I want to change my plans.  This vague question encourages me to keep my cards close to the vest.

How you frame the question is especially important if you’re asking an acquaintance or someone you don’t know very well.  A specific invitation is much better.  For example, “Hey, I know that the Columbia Chorale is performing Handel’s Messiah on Friday night.  Would you like to go with me?”

Take this idea and apply it to that employer you’re trying to get involved in your program.  Are you going to throw out a really general invitation like, “would you like to help out our program?”  For a heavily committed businessperson, that’s really vague and it just raises lots of other questions.  For example, “ What time of day of the week will I have to volunteer?” How much time is this going to take? Are they going to ask me for money? Will this commitment go on and on for months and years?”

Instead, you should give them a specific invitation.  A good starting place is, “Can I invite you to come by our school next Wednesday morning and take a short tour of our program?  You’ll get to meet with a couple teachers and a few students.  It’ll take about 30 minutes.”  If that tour goes well, you can say, “we have a number of partnership opportunities, and they range from one-time, low-risk activities to more on-going activities and involvement.  Here’s a list of all the kind of opportunities we have in our programs.”

To help you start to provide more clarity about partnership opportunities, here are the five key strategies I’ve identified for getting employer and community partners involved.

1. Help Students Build Career Understanding
2. Facilitate Classroom Presentations and/or Lead Small Group Student Discussions
3. Assist Students with Career and/or Leadership Projects
4. Offer Experiences Outside of School
5. Support Program Improvement and Advancement

In future blogs, I’ll explain the 19 activities that fall within these five strategies.  Then you can start to adapt and flesh them out, creating a partnership job bank for your school or program.

If you start to get more specific and clear about how employers can connect with your programs and schools, you’ll find it’s much easier to get them involved.  Once they experience the good feeling of making a difference in a student’s life, you’ll not only have a committed volunteer, you’ll have an advocate and an ambassador for your program!

Hans Meeder is President of NC3T, the National Center for College and Career Transitions (www.nc3t.com).  NC3T provides planning, coaching, technical assistance and tools to help community-based leadership teams plan and implement their college-career pathway systems and strengthen employer connections with education.

By guest poster, Brett Pawlowski, EVP of the National Center for College and Career Transitions.

For several years, I helped put on an annual awards ceremony for principals in Tennessee. The awards were based on schools’ TVAAS scores (the state’s measure of value-added performance), with the highest-performing elementary and middle schools in the state receiving cash awards, banners, and publicity in a ceremony hosted by the state Secretary of Education.

For those not familiar with value-added assessment, it seeks to remove those variables that the school has no control over, like poverty and students’ academic proficiency at the beginning of the year, and measures their progress from year to year as compared to how well they would be expected to perform based on their previous history. If a student is expected to make eight months of academic progress over the course of a year based on their track record, and instead makes a full year of progress or more, they produce a very high value-added score. If they’ve consistently made a year’s worth of academic gains in the past but post less than that this year, they produce a low TVAAS score.

It’s not without controversy – not everyone agrees with its use or its accuracy – but it’s supposed to be a measure of true academic progress, compared with traditional proficiency scores that correlate strongly with poverty rates. The idea is to measure what the school brings to the student, and not what the student brings to the school. And whether or not everyone agrees with its use, it is an official state measure, so it’s supposed to be important to administrators.

I got to know several of the repeat winners over the years, and sometimes asked whether they were inundated with calls from other principals seeking to learn how they performed so well. And each year, I was surprised to hear that no one had actually received such a call. (There may have been one or two exceptions over the years, but hardly the flood of interest you would imagine.)

What I learned from them – and what I’ve confirmed time and again with others over the years since – is that the people who are getting exceptional results are eager to share them, and disappointed when they don’t get that opportunity. My advice for you: If you hear about someone doing great work in your field, get in touch with them. Take them to lunch, meet them at their school, or ask for a tour of their program. I can almost guarantee that they’ll be thrilled to hear from you, and that you’ll learn from the single best source of knowledge: Someone who’s already excelled at something you want to do.

Brett Pawlowski is the Executive Vice President of NC3T, the National Center for College and Career Transitions (www.nc3t.com).  NC3T provides planning, coaching, technical assistance and tools to help community-based leadership teams plan and implement their college-career pathway systems and strengthen employer connections with education.

This is an encore post from September 2016.

We have a business start-up problem, and there’s something Pathway Programs and Pathway Systems can do to help. According to a World Bank researcher writing a report for The Center for American Progress, the rates of individuals in the U.S. starting businesses grew significantly in the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s. At the beginning of this period, about 3 percent of Americans started a new business every year, and it grew up to 5 percent. But since the early 2000’s, that percentage of new business start-ups has stagnated and even fallen. If previous trends had continued, we would now have 1 million more entrepreneurs than we actually do in the United States.[i]

It seems likes it is getting harder or riskier to start a business. Now, the average person starting a business is older than in the past (47 years vs. 41 years), has more college education (67% vs. 60%) and also needs more savings/capital than in the past.

These are mega-trends that I’m sure are driven by many forces. But it is holding the middle class back from job creation and income growth. And it reinforces the need for stronger entrepreneurship and micro-enterprise training across all our nation’s career pathways and career-related programming.

Traditional career technology education programs, in large part, were built primarily around technical skills as well as developing general workplace employability skills. But during the heyday of American industry, we had an expectation that individuals would work for large organizations. So traditional CTE programs were focused on developing “workers,” not business owners.

For many career technical education programs, the only real place that entrepreneurship was emphasized was inside some of the business education programs. Now, this dynamic has changed a bit, although I don’t know if there is any definitive research. I have seen and heard about career-related programs having units around entrepreneurship and small business management relating to the particular career areas – such as starting a hair salon, a restaurant, or doing estimating for a construction company.

While progress has been made, I suspect there is still massive room for expansion of entrepreneurship training. Even for the students that don’t have the natural temperament or interest in becoming an entrepreneur themselves, they may very well work in a micro-enterprise (1-3 people) or a very small business (fewer than 10 people), where they will be interacting with the business owner/founder on a day-to-day basis. Every “worker” in these small enterprises needs to think like a business owner and understand how their work intersects with sales, marketing, customer services, human resources, and strategy — identifying opportunities for new business growth. I’m blessed to have colleagues in NC3T that think this way.

So, we may still need stand-alone entrepreneurship training for individuals who are highly enterprising by temperament and who just want to be in business — any type of business. But many others are drawn first to the career and skills; these folks need to understand entrepreneurship within the context of a particular career or occupation. To address this important need, our schools should create entrepreneurship strands that connect to and support all of our career-pathway and CTE programs.

To further this work, we have included entrepreneurship and small business concepts into the integrated definition of Career and Life Readiness that NC3T uses with its pathway system implementation sites.

So, as we pursue our motto of “Every Learner with a Dream and Plan,” we should remember that part of that dream and plan is for every learner to think about and consider how to one day be a business owner; the dream and plan is not just to find economic opportunity for oneself, but to offer it to others too through a growing and thriving enterprise!

[i]Mondragón-Vélez, C. (2015, May 21). How does middle-class financial health affect entrepreneurship in America? Retrieved from https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/report/2015/05/21/109169/how-does-middle-class-financial-health-affect-entrepreneurship-in-america/

Hans Meeder is President of NC3T, the National Center for College and Career Transitions (www.nc3t.com).  NC3T provides planning, coaching, technical assistance and tools to help community-based leadership teams plan and implement their college-career pathway systems and strengthen employer connections with education.