My colleague Brett Pawlowski recently talked about important lessons drawn from the sports world: “Go where the ball is going to be,” and “Know what you’re going to do once you get the ball.” These are great ideas to keep in mind, particularly if you are tasked with implementing the new Perkins Act requirement about doing a Comprehensive Needs Assessment.

As you may have heard, the new federal Perkins Act (Perkins V) requires each local recipient of funds to conduct a “comprehensive needs assessment” every two years. Using the findings from that assessment, the local school system or college will develop an action plan and use of funds directly tied to those findings. Every dollar of local Perkins spending will have to link back to this needs assessment, so it’s a BIG deal.

The six topics you’ll need to dig into are:

• Performance on federal accountability indicators;
• Alignment to labor market needs;
• Scope, size and quality of programs offered;
• Progress toward implementing programs and programs of study;
• Recruitment, retention and training of faculty and staff; and
• Progress toward improving access and equity

Even though your school district or college may not have to officially conduct the assessment until the new Perkins requirements fully kicks in, it makes sense to get started now because there is a lot to cover.

Here’s a great tool from the Association of Career Technical Education to help you get started.  It has the “comprehensive” title “Maximizing Perkins V’s Comprehensive Local Needs Assessment & Local Application to Drive CTE Program Quality and Equity; A Guide for Local Leaders.” Click on this link to download a copy.

Many areas of the assessment deal with looking internally at your programs, student participation, and connections between secondary and postsecondary. The one which will take more legwork is doing the external analysis of the labor market to ensure your programs have a strong alignment with local and regional needs. The guide gives excellent tips about who to talk to, and what materials and resources to draw upon.

Once you’ve got the materials and contacts, what are you looking for?

Here are a set of questions from the guide to ask as you’re doing the labor market analysis:

• What industries are projected to grow the most in my local area? What occupations?
• Are my CTE program offerings broad enough to expose students to all the in-demand industry sectors or occupations in my region?
• How do my CTE program enrollments match projected job openings? Where are the biggest gaps?
• What are the emerging occupations in my area to which students should be exposed?
• What skill needs have industry partners identified as lacking in my programs?
• Which graduates of my programs are thriving in the labor market, and why?
• What opportunities exist in my local labor market for students with disabilities, English learners or other special populations?

While labor market data sources are a good place to start, there is no substitute for face-to-face discussions. You should plan on some talks with individual labor market and economic development experts, and several talks with small groups of employers from different industry sectors. The talks will be more to the point if you focus on individual sectors, rather than bringing everyone together in one big meeting. 

IDEA TO CONSIDER — To avoid wearing out your local employers with multiple requests from many school districts, you might band together with workforce experts, other schools, and colleges to conduct these meetings on a regional basis since the information you glean is going to be the same. You can start planning these meetings now.

Working with this guide over the summer months and planning actions for each area of work will give you an excellent agenda for the upcoming year. Even though it will entail a good amount of work, by getting started now and the early months of the Fall, you’ll be ahead of the game in doing this analysis. Starting up, revamping, and/or phasing out programs is a long-term proposition and takes strong political will and sometimes funding. You’ll need these external partners working with you to make any substantive programmatic changes.

By developing strong connections now, you’ll be able to make informed recommendations and decisions, and create a long-term strategy for better labor market alignment.

Good luck!

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.

Growing up, my Dad was a sports nut, and most of my life lessons came in the form of sports metaphors. Two that I heard often, and that stick with me to this day, are:

·Go to where the ball is going to be, not where it is; and

·Know what you’re going to do once you get it.

It seems to me that these are directly on-point for those working in the arena of CTE and Pathways.

Go to Where the Ball is Going to be

In baseball, you see the outfield shift left or right (or in little league, sometimes in) based on the hitting history of a certain batter. In basketball, you see people pick and roll to get free and ready for an open pass. We should adopt the same thinking.

In education, we have the luxury of a lag time between legislation being discussed and when it’s finally passed, and the components of that legislation is usually well-telegraphed. If you knew that the new Perkins Act was going to eventually pass, and you knew that there are several components (like increased employer engagement) with universal support, it makes sense to get ahead of the legislation and start moving in that direction. Similarly, we know that workforce changes are clear but gradual; as you think about aligning your programs to the needs of industry, take a look at the trends now to see what your programs need to look like in three years. That’s how long it will take to modify your courses and for new graduates to start emerging.

Know What You’re Going to do Once You Get the Ball

You see it all the time in youth basketball: A kid breaks open yells for the ball (“I’m open! I’m open!”), then freezes once he actually gets it. He got open alright but had no idea what he was going to do after that.

In CTE, a little planning goes a long way. You might be hoping for an introduction to one of the big industry players; if it happens, maybe a chance meeting at an industry event, are you ready for it? Do you know what you want and what’s in it for your partner? Maybe you’ve argued for a big funding boost or a new resource; if you get it, are you really prepared to make full use of it for greatest impact? I’m not suggesting that you need a complete implementation plan for every whim or interest, but you do need to be ready to capitalize on opportunities as they come up (often unexpectedly).

Here’s to hoping that my Dad’s wisdom helps you think about how to get open and take the shot you want to take – it’s certainly been helpful to me.

Brett Pawlowski is 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.

Last week I was in Rapid City, South Dakota and had the privilege of attending the press conference where Rapid City Area Schools Superintendent, Lori Simon, and community partners announced the forthcoming development of Career Academies and related Career Pathways in the district’s two comprehensive high schools. The high school’s work is part of a full pathways system approach.

This approach includes career development across all grade spans, developing and acting on the Profile of a Graduate, Engaging Employer and Community Partners, Investing in Teaching and Learning, and building strong Cross-Sector Collaboration.

I’ve had the privilege of working with the leadership team and the pathways task force in Rapid City for almost exactly one year. They have done some really amazing work developing a thorough pathways implementation plan with the help of a community-based Pathways Task Force that met monthly, as well as created several pathways planning teams of teachers and community members.

This press conference was the opportunity to formally announce the work to the broader community and move into the early phase of implementation. The next phase involves specific curriculum development for the pathways, creating new academy advisory committees, continuing to ramp up employer engagement, and prepare the new freshman seminar and high school Grad Time (an advisory program). I give kudos to the many staff and community members who are making the work real in Rapid City!

Here are some links to the press release and some local news coverage of the press conference.

TV Coverage: KNBN News Center

RCAS Press Release

Rapid City Journal

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.

Back in December, I wrote a post about software that creates entirely new people from images of others, and the kinds of video effects people could make with some fairly standard off-the-shelf software. Bear with me for one more in this line.

Today it’s a new technology that can create video of people talking, all by sampling just a handful of photos – or even a single photo – to make a very believable experience (click here to watch a short video about this new technology). Some of the examples are downright scary, such as taking a single historical photo, or even a painting, to generate a video of that person saying whatever it is you program them to say. (They do it with the Mona Lisa in the video, hence the title of this post.) What’s scarier is that someone can log onto your social media account, download a handful of selfies, and create a completely believable video of you doing whatever they want.

Two things strike me about this.

On the education front, this screams out to me about the need for relevance. In terms of relevance with students, we need to remember that young people’s worlds are absolutely, completely different than the worlds we adults grew up in. If we’re going to connect with them, we have to understand what that reality is like and speak to it. In terms of instructional relevance, we need to remember that every industry – not just media – is seeing sweeping changes, and it’s up to us to stay current and keep instruction aligned with the reality that students will see when they enter their fields of choice.

Second, it feels like we’re moving into a post-truth environment. I know that sounds weird, but think about it: All of the things we were raised to trust can now be faked. Anyone can produce professional looking documents, and the resources we all used are now online, like the transition of the encyclopedia to Wikileaks (which is widely known to be changed by advocates, partisans, and corporate PR folks to suit their views). Pictures, which used to be worth a thousand words, are now raw footage for Photoshop wizards and video evidence can now easily be faked. Watch this video, supposedly from President Obama and tell me if you would have believed it if it hadn’t been flagged as a phony. In this kind of environment, skepticism is needed and media literacy – an essential life skill – is critically important. So please do what you can to help students build their internal filters and learn the critical thinking skills they’ll need to survive in the world.

Brett Pawlowski is 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.

In my previous post (click here to read!), I talked about the folly of subsidizing postsecondary tuition for a student who hasn’t engaged in any type of impactful career development. What exactly, is impactful Career development? Based on reviews of research, literature, and practice (detailed in my book the Power and Promise of Pathways), the best model of career development is done through a K-12 incremental approach. In much the same way we say that today’s children are “digital natives,” a K-12 approach to career development would deeply embed “career literacy” in our next generation of American talent.

Here’s a graphic we developed to explain how career development advances through elementary school, middle school, and high school.

If you want to read the components more easily, I’ll list them out here:

Elementary, K-5

Career Exploration

Begin to —

• Understand concept of work
• Identify current & new careers
• Build excitement about personal career
• Learn the RIASEC career personality model (Holland code)
• Test and identify personal RIASEC codes
• See connection between careers and education
• Value high school graduation

Middle, 6-8

Career Exploration

Deepen understanding of —

• Personal interests and strengths
• Careers – interests & strengths
• Education and training factors
• Technical and employability skills
• High School courses aligned to career interests

Develop 1^st draft – Personal Career & Education Plan (MUST be revisited annually, and parents involved too!)

High School, 9-12

Career Immersion and Preparation

Engage in opportunities to —

• “Try out” career interests through CTE & other courses, career-focused work-based learning
• Earn industry-recognized certifications and early college credits
• Explore postsecondary options
• Participate in career mentoring
• Develop technical and employability skills
• Understand personal finances
• Consider aspects of building a business

Notice that each component continues while you start to add the new components. The grade levels are approximations with some blurry lines from one phase to the next. It’s the developmental sequence that is most important.

Postsecondary and Adult Education

For young adults and adults in postsecondary/adult education settings, these developmental components need to be highly compressed since you no longer have the luxury of a K-12 sequence. However, you want to make sure the foundations are solid before an adult learner locks in on a career plan. While you may move quickly through the Career Awareness and Exploration phase, you need to make sure there’s a thorough understanding of the RIASEC model and growing self-awareness of how to apply the model. Don’t short circuit the learning process with an assessment that “tells” the learner what kind of careers they should pursue. Without a good foundation, they make a choice out of confusion or desperation that doesn’t really fit and ultimately sets them back even further in terms of money and self-esteem. Help them discover and explore but even if you move quickly, cover all the concepts. While young adults may have intuited some concepts over time, but you can still bring much greater clarity and structure to their thinking and decision processes about careers by giving them a vocabulary and framework to work with.

Self-Assessment

Wherever you are, the time to start is now. Get together with some teachers, faculty, administrators, and community members to conduct a self-assessment. For each of these factors, ask “where is our school or program on a factor of 1-5?” Score the component as a “1” if it is more or less non-existent and score it as a “5” when every student is experiencing that component. Use your judgment to assign a 2, 3, or 4. 

Getting Started and Planning Long-Term

Identify the most likely starting point where you can get some traction and gain a visible short-term win within the next six to 12 months. Then use this simple model to plan a longer term Career Development for All approach for your students in a school district or adult-level program. As you plan this component of the pathways system model, it will also impact pathway program offerings, employer engagement, and development of your profile of a graduate.

TELL YOUR STORY

Please let me know if your district, college or adult education program has a story to tell about making real progress over a three to five year period with Career Development. I would like to interview and learn more. Could you send me a direct email with a few of the essentials:  What you’re doing, when you got started, and how far along are you on that 1-5 scale. You can contact me at Hans@Nc3T.com. Thanks!!

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 

Advisory boards can serve as the engine of a powerful CTE program or they can be an inconvenient obligation. They are what you make of them: The effort you put into them determines what you get out of them.

Except that’s not really true. You can put tremendous energy and countless hours into your board, but if it’s not set up effectively you won’t see much reward for your investment. It turns out that what you do, and how you do it, matter just as much – maybe even more – than how much you do.

Which leads to a very simple, but foundationally important question: Who owns your advisory board?

In too many cases, the program lead retains control of his or her advisory board by inviting members, setting goals, determining agendas, and running meetings. You might feel like you’re trying to take care of your business members, keeping their burden light. But what you’re really doing is denying them any ownership of the board or your program. As a result, they’ll feel (probably correctly) that they’re supposed to be passive observers, staying informed but not really having a voice.

Most effective advisory boards are owned by their business partners. That doesn’t mean they run your program – this is an advisory board, after all, not a deciding board – but it does mean that they are empowered to fulfill their role as guides and supporters of a program that is very important to them. Business people who own your board will take the lead on recruiting board members and business partners, setting ambitious goals, and playing the “critical friend” role which is so important in helping your program be the best it can be.

If you’re not sure who owns your board, ask yourself:

• Who is the chair?
• Who recruits new board members?
• Who sets and distributes the agenda?
• Who controls other board communications?
• Who is authorized to create new committees?
• Who actually runs the board meetings?

The answers to those questions will tell you who really owns your board. If it’s not a business leader, give some serious thought as to whether your board members are making the kind of contribution to your program that you need. If they’re not, put a business partner in charge – really in charge – and see what a difference that can make. 


Brett Pawlowski is 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 week I came across an article describing how 3 million senior citizens are still paying off student loan debt.

Click here to read it!

One individual featured in the article, now 76, incurred the debt when she was 59 years old. She still owes $40,000 in debt.

I have a very personal experience with this issue. My father retired from his career as a pastor in his early 60’s. He tried real estate for a couple of years then decided that law school would be a good challenge. Lo and behold, he paid for the endeavor with federal direct student loans. After completing law school three years later, he had a law degree, but honestly he was far too old to chart a meaningful career path in law. So, he got into mediation for renters’ rights. It was a great contribution, but something he could have easily gotten into with a short-term mediation training program. He was already an experienced pastor with a PhD in counseling. He didn’t need three years of law school!

Of course, when he enrolled in law school and applied for loans, NO ONE at the law school or in the federal lending program raised a red flag. Whoa, fella, are you really sure you want to take out this student loan debt and pay it off? Probably fearing an age-discrimination accusation, everyone just kept their mouth shut.

Tragically, dad was afflicted with dementia about two years into his mediation work, so he had to stop working entirely. After I was forced to take over his financial affairs, I discovered this big pile of student loan debt. I was shocked and angry about it. Ultimately, all his federal loan debt was “forgiven” – but that really means that all of us, as taxpayers, helped pay it off.

Now, presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are fighting over who can be more generous with government spending – offering to forgive lots of existing student loan debt and make four-year college completely free for low- and moderate-income students.

We do need to rethink how we pay for higher education, but their proposals would just throw money at the symptoms and allow the underlying problem to fester. Financial worries are not the only problem with college access. The large majority of students have no academic and career plan that is informing their college decisions.

I’m not suggesting we only pay for degrees in the STEM fields, because the skills developed in liberal arts degrees, when applied in the non-profit and for-profit settings, can be very valuable, but we need to create some guardrails. Things that protect individuals from taking on massive student loans without any sense of direction for how they will build and navigate a career. If we don’t create these guardrails, and just make everything government paid, then we just hide the problem.

Perhaps we should create new pre-requisite for any government-sponsored loan, grant or tuition payment. Not only should the student demonstrate financial need, but also have completed a personalized academic and career plan, based on some minimum criteria to show that the recipient is actually putting real thought into their post-secondary participation.  

Students already have to declare a college major to get financial aid, so we can’t just ask them to state a career objective. They actually need to complete an academic and career plan process, and that will probably take 20-30 hours to be meaningful. If they haven’t already done this prior to admission, maybe this has to be a first semester required course.

Warren blames the student loan crisis completely on government policy – you know that we’re giving tax breaks to billionaires but under funding higher education. Yes, over the decades, the onus for higher education funding has shifted from government to the individual, and student loans have made that possible. However, she’s missing the BIG contributing factor.

As a society we’ve made a fantasy out of the aspiration of college and university for all, saying that any form of college and any sort of college degree is equally valuable for every individual. If we’re really concerned about equity, then we need to make sure that every young person is getting high-quality career development to help them make the best possible personal choice for work and learning after high school.

As a policy matter, let’s put Career Development for all ahead of increased funding for post secondary education, and make sure the two are inextricably linked!

 

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 

 

ORIGINALLY POSTED FEBRUARY 2017

You’ve heard of the elevator pitch, right? It’s the idea that you get on an elevator, and someone asks you, “what do you do?” or “what are you working on?”, etc.  You have the length of an elevator ride (30 seconds to a minute) to explain what you do or what your idea is – in a way that makes sense to the listener.

This is far easier said than done; but it is incredibly important to do, especially if you want to explain your work around pathways and draw other people into the work with you.

Michael Hyatt, in his book “Platform. Get Noticed in a Noisy World” says that an elevator pitch should contain four components:

1. Your product name and category
2. The program you are attempting to solve
3. Your proposed solution
4. The key benefit of your solution

I spent some time recently trying to explain the elevator pitch for my latest book.  Since the book is all about pathways and pathways system, essentially it’s a pitch for the work around pathways.  Here’s the 30-second pitch for pathways that I came up with:

1 (product name and category)

Hi, I (my organization) is working on a very important education and workforce strategy — the Power and Promise of Pathways.

2 (the problem)

Too many students don’t understand how education connects to their future, or how to make good decisions about careers and college. 

3 (the proposed solution)

In the Pathways System approach, students learn about career options; they see the world of work; they try out career programs, and they learn to make smart decisions.

4 (the benefit)

Through this approach, school starts to make sense, student work harder, and they make smoother transitions to college and good careers, which leads to a better life.

You may have noticed that this 30-second version really focuses mostly on the education perspective. I created a longer version (1 minute) that also touches more on the employer perspective and the value for adult learners and communities.

So, how would you make your elevator pitch?

• What is your “product” name?
• What is the problem your working to solve?
• What is the proposed solution?
• What are the benefits?

Here’s a link to the video by Hyatt explaining the concept.

By the way, I wrote an entire book on this topic before I actually created this very useful elevator pitch!  Don’t make the same mistake! You will find this exercise incredibly beneficial for bringing clarity to your work and helping others understand the essence of the pathways movement.

 

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

 

Over my career, I’ve worked with lots of organizations – businesses, schools, and nonprofits – who focused obsessively on product or service quality. “Build a better mousetrap,” they reasoned, “and the world will beat a path to your door.”

But I’ve learned that this can be a dangerous mindset: Building a better mousetrap in no way means that you’re going to be successful in the mouse-catching business. Here are a few other mousetrap quotes that I would counter with:

Before you build a better mousetrap, it helps to know if there are any mice out there.

– Anonymous

It’s very easy to fall in love with a product or service without considering whether it meets a real need. You could build the best broadcasting program in the world, but there’s not much point if there are no broadcasting jobs in your area, and/or if you can’t find any students interested in becoming broadcasters. Before you start inventing, think about the needs and interests of your audience.

Innovation is a mousetrap. The first innovator usually gets whacked, but the second one gets free cheese.

– Reed Markham

Being first is great for visibility: We all remember the first man to walk on the moon, for example, but not many people remember the second. (It was Buzz Aldrin in case you’re curious.)  However in business, and in education, being the first to create something involves a tremendous amount of groundbreaking work, dealing with lots of nay-sayers, and tripping over lots of unexpected hurdles. It can be far more productive to go find the innovators, learn from their pioneering efforts, and get up to speed at a fraction of the time and resources.

If you build a better mousetrap and don’t tell anyone about it, your competitor with the lousy mousetrap is still going to get all the business.

– Brett Pawlowski

I worked on an unprofitable magazine back in the 90s. Every time we received an infusion from our chief investor, the publisher directed it toward improving the product; such as getting new technology or hiring better writers but never into finding new subscribers. As a result, our readership dwindled, serving fewer and fewer readers with better and better content. Even the best mousetrap is useless if no one knows about it. Sometimes the best approach, as Guy Kawasaki says, is “ready, fire, aim” – get out there with something good enough and look for real-world feedback before you invest more time in developing your product or service.

What’s the takeaway for educators? Quality is important, but it can’t happen in a vacuum. Make sure you’re meeting a real need; make sure you’re not reinventing the wheel (or the mousetrap); and put your efforts into action, with as wide an audience as you can find, so the world doesn’t pass you and your unknown initiative by.

 

 

Brett Pawlowski is 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.