Skills Requirements

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The Job Skills of the Future, and of the Past

Sunday, March 25th, 2012

I have written much about the type of skills that 21st century knowledge workers will require in an era shaped by four forces:

  • Technology, which is eliminating growing number of traditional jobs and fundamentally changing the tools that will be available to (and the skills that will be required of) knowledge workers;
  • Globalization, where increasingly sophisticated knowledge-based jobs can be performed by increasingly highly-educated knowledge workers in lower-cost countries around the world;
  • The “New Normal” employment environment in which companies are reducing hiring and reducing benefits and job security by using contingent workforces—freelancers, contract workers and part-timers—to perform many functions that formerly were done in-house; and
  • Extreme volatility, where sudden, often unanticipated socio-political and economic events prompt rapid changes in our lives and work environments.

Knowledge workers who hope to thrive in this environment will require very different skills and a very different approach to and philosophy of work than their parents. They will, of course, continue to need deep functional skills in their chosen discipline, whether that be business, engineering, law or sociology. However, they’ll also require a broad range of complementary skills—what I call foundational skills—that will be required of people in all occupations. These skills which, as described in my October 30 article on Core Skills, include what I generally describe as high-level thinking, “Integrative imagination,” quantitative analytics, IT fluency and a range of soft skills, particularly around communications, teamwork and inter-personal sensitivity.

This month’s article draws on the work of three economists, MIT’s David Autor and Frank Levy, and Harvard’s Richard Murnane, who look at the role of two types of skills that will be particularly critical in helping knowledge workers protect themselves from, and capitalize on the effects of two of the most profound of the forces transforming the 21st century work environment—technology and globalization. These skills are:

  • Complex communication skills; and
  • High-level cognitive skills.

The Skills Matrix

Three primary articles by this trio of economists provide a framework for interpreting the very different ways in which the forces of technology and globalization will transform the U.S. Workforce. These articles are: Autor and Levy’s 2003 The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change; Levy and Murnane’s 2005/2006 How Computerized Work and Globalization Shape Human Skill Demands; and Autor’s 2010 The Polarization of Job Opportunities in the U.S. Labor Market.

 

The authors divide work tasks into five categories:

  • Routine Cognitive Tasks: Mental tasks that are well-defined by deductive or inductive rules. Examples include dealing with simple customer service questions, many kinds of administrative tasks and formulaic tasks such as evaluating applications for mortgages.
  • Non-Routine Cognitive Tasks (Expert Thinking): Solving problems for which there are no rule-based solutions. Examples include the practice of law and medicine, scientific research, architecting software, managing complex organizations, as well as some non-professional careers such as diagnosing tough auto repair problems.
  • Routine Manual Tasks: Physical tasks that can be described though the use of deductive or inductive rules. Examples include all types of assembly line jobs and the counting and packaging pills into containers.
  • Non-Routine Manual Tasks: Physical tasks that cannot be well described by a pre-defined set of If-Then-Do rules, or that require optical recognition and fine muscle control. Examples include driving a truck or taxi, cleaning a building, gardening and serving as a health care aide.
  • Complex Communication: Interacting with humans to acquire information, to explain it, or to persuade others of its implications for action. Examples include a manager motivating the people whose work she supervises, a salesperson gauging a customer’s reaction to a piece of clothing, a biology teacher explaining how cells divide and an engineer describing why a new design for a microprocessor is an advance over previous designs.

Routine cognitive tasks (which can be accomplished by applying defined rules) and routine manual tasks (that can be defined in terms of a specific set of movements) are most subject to computerization and, in many cases, outsourcing. Jobs based on these tasks, therefore, will increasingly disappear, at least in the U.S. and other high-wage countries. The vast majority of those that remain will provide little job security and will be subject to intense price pressures.

Non-routine manual tasks, meanwhile, are not generally subject to computerization. And since most of these services are site-specific, they cannot be readily outsourced. Most of these jobs, however, can be performed by people with relatively modest degrees of education and training and do not require particularly high levels of strength, stamina or hand-eye coordination. They, like those for routine tasks, will be subject to much competition and will provide low salaries and often, little job security.

Some of these jobs face an even greater threat in the future—information technology. Robots, for example, can already accomplish some basic non-routine tasks (such as vacuuming rooms while avoiding walls, furniture and pets). Google’s prototype self-driving car, meanwhile, has already driven several hundreds of thousands of miles with a driving record blemished only by a single minor accident (which was, reportedly, caused by human error). Although it will likely take years for future intelligent devices to achieve significant market presence, the future is already in the process of being outlined, if not actually written.

This being said, a few non-routine tasks do require special training and skills and produce particularly high-value results—think for example, of gem cutters and professional performers and athletes. The relative handful of people who qualify for such jobs will continue to enjoy high levels of differentiation and will often be able to command high salaries. Indeed, globalization and the rapid growth of middle classes in developing countries, has the potential of increasing the demand and compensation for such services and, in some cases, of creating globally-branded superstars.

The Job Opportunities of the Future

Although a tiny handful of non-routine physical workers have the potential of earning high incomes and gaining good job security, they will be the exception. For the vast majority of people, the higher-probability route to a rewarding career will come from the other two job categories:

  • Non-routine cognitive tasks; and
  • Complex communications.

Non-routine cognitive tasks go far beyond the type of problem-solving skills that are typically taught in middle- and high-school classes. Most such teaching involves problems with rules-based solutions, which, as the authors explain, are relatively easy to teach and to test. These are the types of cognitive skills that IT-based tools are most capable of addressing. The challenge is to teach the types of higher-order cognitive skills for which computers are less well-suited—those for addressing problems for which “the rules are not yet known”

These, as explained by Irving Wladawsky-Berger, include two types of problem. Those for which:

  • The information is hard to represent in a form that computers can use, such as feelings or impressions derived from viewing body language; and
  • Rules are difficult to articulate. This can include “complex processes” (such as those required to learn to ride a two-wheel bicycle), “pattern recognition” (the solving of problems that cannot be expressed in deductive or inductive rules), “divergent thinking” (as in starting from existing knowledge to develop new concepts and to ask new questions); and the ability to exercise “good judgment” in the face of uncertainty.

Complex communications also includes a broad range of capabilities. At the most basic, it entails the ability to describe (in speaking and/or writing) complex phenomena and patterns in ways in which people can understand, the ability to ask questions in ways that prompt people to think of issues in new ways, and the ability to listen to and/or read and comprehend concepts. At a higher level, it involves interaction (simultaneously communicating, receiving and processing), empathy (as in understanding and addressing the feelings and motivations of others) and persuasion (especially in selling your ideas and motivating others to action).

How will these skills be incorporated into, and in some cases, redefine tomorrow’s jobs? How do employers communicate the need for such skills? Most importantly, how will these high-level skills be taught (not to speak of measured) in a society that is finding it so hard to teach even basic skills?

Then there is the longer-term question. Will/when/how information technology is likely to impact, complement or transform these high-level conceptual and communications functions—and what will this mean for individuals’ ability to use these tools to differentiate themselves and deliver high-value services?

Up to a few years ago, such questions would appear to be little more than remote speculation. Then came IBM’s Watson—the computer system that handily beat the reigning Jeopardy champions.

Although it will take years for “intelligent” machines to effectively displace humans in non-routine cognitive tasks, Watson has already demonstrated its ability to work across both domains—complex communications and high-level conceptual analysis. It, for example, not only showed that it could recognize natural language, but also interpret idioms, parse puns and to do it all in fractions of a second.

As for its role in conceptual tasks, one of the first commercial implementations of the new system is likely to be as a diagnostic tool to help (although certainly not replace) doctors in the diagnoses of illnesses. Rather than displace doctors, however, the diagnostic system will initially be used to complement them—reducing their need to research obscure combinations of symptoms, prioritizing diagnostic options and presenting doctors with better information from which they can make their final decisions. The same is true in the second major commercialization initiative, in customer service for financial services companies where it will initially support human agents, helping them anticipate customer needs and ask more probing questions.

But, as explained in my February 20 article on Watson, the role of Watson and its successors will only grow, as they prove their capabilities, as software is tuned and as adoption spreads into additional fields, such as financial analysis, supply-chain management and technical support. Consider, for example, the number of customer support functions that are already handled without human intervention, even without the help of Watson.

I will examine these and many other questions surrounding the skills required for the high-value jobs of the future in subsequent articles.

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Solutions to STEM Skills Mismatch

Saturday, February 25th, 2012

My December 26, 2011 blog, Expanding the Ranks of STEM Professionals, examined some of the realities and the myths behind the much discussed skills mismatch in the U.S. labor force; a mismatch characterized by a surplus of people looking for jobs, but a shortage of people with the skills for which employees are looking. This is reflected in an economy in which there are more than four unemployed workers for every job opening, but also thousands of unfilled positions (primarily technical) for which employers have been unable to find people with the required skills.

In a nutshell, the disagreement, as I explained in last month’s article, boils down to three interpretations of the shortage problem:

  1. We are not educating or training enough STEM professionals;
  2. We are educating/training enough people, but employers are not paying them enough to attract them from jobs in fields such as management consulting or investment banking. This problem is exacerbated by U.S. government policies that make it difficult or unattractive for U.S.-educated, foreign-born citizens to stay in the U.S. and by increased aggressiveness of emerging country companies (especially Chinese and Indian) to recruit and attract top university graduates with offers of permanent visas, comparable salaries, attractive benefit packages, and the promise of interesting, resume-burnishing overseas work; and
  3. We are educating/training enough people, but many have insufficient functional skills (in their specific discipline) or broad foundational skills (communications, cognitive, etc.) to be hired in STEM jobs.

Although proponents of each of these interpretations disagree on many things, they generally do agree on two issues:

  1. Our K-12 educational system is not doing a good job at teaching STEM fundamentals (and thereby not preparing students for college-level work in these fields) or in creating the type of curiosity and excitement required to motivate our best and brightest to become engineers and scientists;
  2. Employers, who are cutting back on their own training programs, will accept only graduates who can fill a current need or otherwise deliver immediate value.

In Search of “THE STEM Solution”

We certainly don’t and possibly never will, fully agree on all of the specific “cause/s” of the STEM skills mismatch problem. However, most agree that the tech industry is having trouble getting the number and quality of people that it needs. Many agree that the reasons for this are two-fold:

  • The imitations of our K-12 education system; and
  • A dearth of corporate training programs;

I, along with virtually everybody else who examines the education-to-career pipeline, fully acknowledge that K-12 education is at the root of many of our problems. Unfortunately, none of the experts seem to be able to agree on the cause of this problem, much less on its solutions. Even if they could agree, the educational system is highly unlikely to get additional money (or probably, even avoid additional cuts) from state and local governments. Moreover, even if we were to identify the magic bullet, and could afford to develop and shoot it, it would probably take at least half of a generation to begin seeing meaningful results.

Compared with fixing the K-12 educational system, improving corporate training programs should be a piece of cake. After all, big companies already know how to provide training. Some, particularly those with large operations in India and China, already provide extensive education and training programs to compensate for the big gaps in these countries’ educational systems. Although smaller companies may not have such capabilities, even they can retain specialists to develop and administer programs that are tailored to their needs. The “only thing” that it will really take to address these needs is money. This too, however, will be a very tall order in the current era of economic uncertainty and unrelenting belt-tightening.

Moreover, even if we identify solutions to, invest in and address both of these potential issues, what if the underlying problem—companies’ inability to find people suited to fill specific STEM job openings—is not resolved?

Plugging the Leaks in the STEM Pipeline

There is no question. We absolutely must work to fix the K-12 educational system—for the good of our society, as well as for our companies. I would also love to see a recreation of many of the traditional corporate training programs. Ideally, I would particularly like to see U.S. companies go further, as by creating programs of the type that are widely used in India—whereby companies establish their own schools in which all new recruits are brought up to a common, base level of capabilities and then provided basic training in the specific disciplines to which they will be initially assigned. Such programs, could be used both, for new graduates (whichever level of school is appropriate for the anticipated positions) or for current or displaced employees who need to be retrained for new jobs.

In reality, however, such hopes are little more than pipedreams, at least in today’s economic and fiscal environment. Although we can certainly hope for progress in each of these areas, there are a number of generally smaller, more incremental steps that have the potential of at least alleviating part of the core STEM skills mismatch problem. For example:

  • Employers can work with state and local governments to develop and continually update an online jobs guide, using a companies’ best estimates on which and how many positions are likely to be available over the next year, the next three years and the next five years, as well as the types of skills, qualifications and/or certifications individuals will need to prepare for these jobs. The postings should also provide anticipated compensation ranges, the schools and programs that train people for these jobs, and examples of potential career paths.
  • Employers can partner with schools—particularly two-year colleges and universities—to jointly develop curricula, courses and materials for teaching the skills that will be needed for these jobs. Employers should also provide volunteer instructors, tools (computers, software, machines, support, etc. on which students can get hands-on training and practice), and, where appropriate, create meaningful internships, apprenticeship or sandwich year programs.
  • Schools, local government organizations, companies and labor unions can invest in training and building networks of “career navigators” who can help students or transitioning workers assess their interests and skills; match these to colleges, curricula and career pathways; and guide clients through college planning and the college-to-career transition. Some non-profits, such as CAEL, already help companies, local governments and labor unions create such programs. It is also working with other organizations to develop an online training and certification process for these navigators.
  • Governments and unions could make it easier for companies to put people though through company-run or company-sponsored training programs, test-hire them at low or subsidized rates for defined periods and easily dismiss those who do not meet expectations.

Most importantly, all students and employees must take much greater responsibility for planning, preparing for and managing their careers and for continually upgrading their skills. They must seek out and proactively work with career navigators to identify and prepare for careers that match their interests and skills, and that are likely to offer strong long-term employment opportunities. They must select schools and employers that offer the educational and training opportunities that will prepare them for these careers. They must, though coursework, reading and extra-curricular activities, develop the foundational skills, as well as the functional skills they will require. And, in the current era of perpetual uncertainty, they must continually assess the long-term trends in their own and other potential career paths and industries, identify needs and opportunities for changes, and continually update and supplement their skills to ensure they will can provide higher and higher levels of value to current and future employers.

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Helping Colleges and Universities Educate Tomorrow’s Knowledge Workers

Sunday, November 27th, 2011

My last blog reviewed some of the IBM Almaden Co-Evolution conference’s primary conclusions around the shape of the American job market, especially:

  • The state of today’s jobs market;
  • Where the new generation of jobs will come from; and
  • The types of skills these jobs will require.

This blog examines some of the conference’s follow-on conclusions, particularly around:

  • The capabilities and limitations of colleges and universities in helping students learn these skills;
  • How they will have to evolve to accomplish these goals; and
  • The type of cooperation—with primary and secondary schools, businesses, non-profits and governments—that will be required for colleges and universities to prepare knowledge workers for jobs that will be increasingly defined by the combination of globalization, technology and the growth of self-employment.

The Changing Role of Colleges and Universities

Colleges and universities are generally viewed as the primary, although certainly not exclusive source of many of the skills—both functional and foundational—that will be required for tomorrow’s jobs. True, the foundations for these skills must certainly be laid in secondary and even primary schools. Businesses, meanwhile, must help employees hone and refresh these skills. Most importantly, individuals will have to take primary responsibility for attending the schools, selecting the classes, choosing an employer and selecting the combination of extra-curricular activities that will help them develop these skills. For most, however, post-secondary institutions will remain as the single most important linchpin in the individual’s education-to-employment pipeline.

Many conference participants, including a number of university professors and administrators, concluded that few schools were currently fulfilling their missions. Their indictments and recommendations were generally in line with those of Clayton Christensen’s team’s February 2011 Disrupting College report.

Thousands of colleges, suffering from a type of “Harvard-envy”, short-change students by trying to simultaneously accomplish three primary missions: knowledge creation (research); knowledge proliferation (teaching); and helping prepare students for careers. While Harvard and perhaps one or two dozen other universities have the endowments and the cash flow to fund quality required for each, the vast majority of schools lack the resources and the skills to perform each of these tasks well.

Rather than trying to do all, most schools should focus on their core missions of knowledge proliferation (teaching) and preparing students for careers. They must also do so more cost-effectively, delivering quality education in a way that students and their families can afford without going deeply into debt. This will require the use of additional, more leverageable sources of learning, such as that from peers and tutors, and especially from learning technologies—including the potentially disruptive enabling technology of online learning. This will help free instructors from creating and even delivering lectures, provide them with insight into individual student needs and allow them to focus more time on addressing each student’s unique needs.

These schools, however, must also do much more—not only to prepare students for careers, but also to make them more “employment-ready” upon graduation. This requires deeper coordination with the private sector, not only in identifying the skills that are required for success in their companies, but also in providing more opportunities for “experiential learning” in which students have the opportunity to combine classroom, book and online education with experience in working on real-world problems, both in school (as in inter-disciplinary research centers) and in companies (as through apprenticeships and internships). Schools must determine how to give credit for these real-world experiences and also to apply (once they are developed and generally agreed upon) quantifiable metrics that assess educational outcomes. They should also, according to the Institute for the Future and my own research, specifically integrate the teaching—and especially the learning and reinforcement—of variants of the Institute for the Future’s ten foundational skills specifically into college curricula.

Cross Domain Educational Collaboration

Although colleges and universities are certainly critical links in the education to employment pipeline, they are not the only contributors. Primary and secondary schools must teach basic skills and provide a solid foundation for and passion for lifelong learning. They should also extend their current missions to provide solid groundings in the types of foundational skills that all employees—especially knowledge workers—will require in the new economy.

The private sector also plays a critical, but unfortunately diminishing role in educating their workforces. But although overall private sector investment in employee education rose slightly in 2010 to $52.8 billion, or $1,041 per learner, it has generally been falling since a high of more than $60 billion in 1999. Even so, a number of companies including Boeing and IBM (both of whom presented on their employee development efforts at the conference) continue to invest heavily (see, for example, my 2009 report in IBM’s Role in Creating the Workforce of the Future).

These and a number of other companies also work closely with schools, and invest in them—from primary to post-secondary—to help them develop curricula, fund teacher and instructor training, and develop workshops and internships to provide students with real-world learning experiences. Many companies, as discussed extensively in my blog, have partnered with secondary schools to improve IT education and train teachers on effective use of technology, with community colleges to prepare prospective employees for specific jobs and with universities to develop courses, curricula and entire degree programs.

Although such bilateral partnerships are certainly important, the conference concluded these are just the start. Corporations and schools must also partner with:

  • Foundations, such as Gates and Illuminata, to define desired course outcomes and develop metrics;
  • Non-profits, such as the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (both of which presented at the conference) to create pathways to help individuals create the educational experiences required to prepare for and advance their careers; and
  • State and local governments to identify the types of businesses they wish to attract, identify the resources and skills that will be required to attract employers, encourage and help local schools provide the required education and training and ideally, create online databases that help students and workers identify jobs and careers that will be available, the types of skills that will be required, and how these skills can best be learned and developed.

Although the Federal Government could, at least in theory, play an important role in identifying, mapping resources and coordinating efforts, the reality is that most economic development and education policy is done at a state and especially a local, rather than a national level. The most effective education-to-employment pipelines will probably require close cooperation by and deep commitments from mayors, university presidents, local business executives and local Chambers of Commerce.

 

Summary

U.S. colleges and universities must undergo huge changes if
they are to prepare graduate for tomorrow’s jobs—and do so at a cost that both
the students and the county can afford. For many, it will require a fundamental
rethink of their missions and their established practices. It will also require
much closer collaboration with the businesses that are likely to hire these
graduates.

 

 

Posted in Community/Other Colleges, Job and Career Opportunities, Other Schools, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Universities and Grad Schools | 1 Response »
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Tomorrow’s Jobs Require Tomorrow’s Skills

Monday, November 14th, 2011

 

At the end of September, IBM’s Almaden Research Center sponsored a conference on the future of jobs, the skills required for these jobs and how colleges, private sector companies and governments can individually, and in partnership, prepare people for these jobs.

The conference, titled Regional Upward Spirals: The Co-Elevation of Future Technologies, Skills, Jobs and Quality-of-Life, attracted participants from each of these sectors and from a number of think tanks. All focused on themes surrounding:

  • The growing shortage of educated workers;
  • How technology is transforming jobs;
  • Skills required for the jobs of today and tomorrow;
  • The role and challenges of colleges and universities in preparing a new generation of knowledge workers;
  • The role of the private sector in educating, training and helping employees refresh existing and develop new skills;
  • The need for partnerships among private and public sectors, academia and non-profits in closing the nation’s “skills gap;” and
  • The need to equip policymakers with better tools to model quality-of-life improvements generation over generation in regions, as infrastructure, skills, jobs change together.

The U.S.’s Growing Skills Gap

IBM’s Chief Economist, Martin Flemming, kicked off the conference by putting the current recession into historical perspective and aligning it with economist Carlotta Perez’s Waves of Technology Change, postulating that the economy is now in the transition between the installation and deployment phases of telecommunications and IT—between the initial implementation of these technologies, toward their use in fundamentally transforming business processes and societal institutions. Although such transitions typically result in slower investment and growth, this effect is now being compounded by our attempt to emerge from the financial recession.

A representative from McKinsey Global Institute then honed into our current employment problems by outlining some of the key findings of the group’s recently published report, An Economy that Works, explaining, for example, the unprecedented toll this recession has taken on jobs. This toll is particularly steep among those in low-skill/low-pay and mid-skill/mid-pay jobs. However, the unemployment rate among college graduates is still relatively low (4.2% according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report) and the number of college graduates with jobs has actually grown by more than 1 million over the last two years.

In fact, many companies are unable to find all the educated workers they need—at least those with the skills they require. Forty percent of companies have had job openings for six months that they have been unable to fill due to lack of the proper skills. This is particularly true for specialized technical skills in science, engineering, computer programming and other areas of IT.

This skills mismatch, is likely to get worse before it gets better. McKinsey estimates that if the economy does improve, employers will face a shortage of about 1.5 million workers with college degrees (especially STEM degrees) by 2020. At the other end of the education spectrum, there will be a surplus of almost 6 million workers without high school degrees.

Skills Requirements

Just what skills are employers looking for? Clearly, as has been discussed endlessly over the last decade, employers have a deep, apparently endless need for STEM skills. Silicon Valley, as we always hear, has been continually ratcheting up the salaries (not to speak of the benefits) it provides the most promising computer science graduates.

Companies including Dow Chemical and IBM are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing curricula, funding courses and sponsoring research projects and fellowships in areas including chemical engineering and business analysis, respectively. At the conference, McKinsey highlighted the need for math and analysis skills by projecting a need for almost 3 million people (including more than 150,000 highly-trained “data scientists”) to extract business insight from “big data”.

In its An Economy that Works report, McKinsey groups these and hundreds of other job opportunities into six primary segments of the U.S. economy that it claims, will account for 70-85 percent of the up to 22.5 million new jobs (assuming strong growth) the country will create over the rest of the decade: healthcare (by far the largest), business services, leisure and hospitality, construction, manufacturing and retail.

There is, however, a caveat to even these projections. As Irving Wladawsky-Berger discuses in his blog on the conference, University of California Berkeley professor John Zysman discussed the ways in which “the algorithmic revolution” (the ability to codify activities underlying services and embed them into software) is fundamentally transforming the nature of mid-skill services jobs. The componentization of continually higher-level services functions, for example, is already making it easier to automate and offshore these functions.

Meanwhile, new innovations, such as IBM’s “Watson” has the potential of bringing this algorithmic revolution up into specialized realms of qualitative research and even expert knowledge. One of its first uses, for example, is likely to be in medical diagnostics, such as where a doctor can input lists of symptoms, medical histories, and a broad range of other relevant information to identify possible illnesses and recommended treatments. This, as I discussed in a previous blog on Watson, is only the first step in transforming medicine and the nature of knowledge jobs across all domains, and in changing and upgrading the types of skills tomorrow’s knowledge workers will require to ensure long, engaging and rewarding careers.

Just what skills will be required? Although each industry, and each job within it will certainly require specific combinations of functional skills, another presenter, from the Institute for the Future, cited its report, Future Work Skills 2020 to posit ten more generalized, foundational skills that will be required of most knowledge workers:

  1. Sense-making: ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed;
  2. Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions;
  3. Novel and adaptive thinking: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based;
  4. Cross-cultural competency: ability to operate in different cultural settings;
  5. Computational thinking: ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning;
  6. New media literacy: ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication;
  7. Transdisciplinarity: literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines.
  8. Design mindset: ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes;
  9. Cognitive load management: ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques; and
  10. Virtual collaboration: ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence.

Meanwhile, in another IBM conference on Leadership being held the same week in New York, Tom Friedman set the skills bar even higher, claiming that “Everyone has to bring something extra, being average is no longer enough. . . Everyone is looking for employees that can do critical thinking and problem solving . . . just to get an interview.  What they are really looking for are people who can invent, re-invent and re-engineer their jobs while doing them.”

This leads to yet another change in the job market that will require even more skills of tomorrow’s knowledge workers—companies’ growing reliance on part-time, contract and freelance employees as an alternative to hiring full-time employees. This means that more and more of tomorrow’s knowledge workers will, whether they want to or not, have to run their own companies or partner with others to create small business services companies. Not only will they need the skills required to manage a business, they must also have the skills required to work independently. Most importantly, they will need the sills to continually market and sell themselves, their ideas and their unique skill sets.

This is a very tall order. What must schools do to help students develop these skills—both functional and foundational? Are today’s schools really capable of doing so? How can other institutions, including companies, foundations, non-profits and governments help? These and a number of related issues will be discussed in my November 27th blog.

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Core Skills for Knowledge Workers in a Global Economy

Sunday, October 30th, 2011

The U.S. education system was created primarily to teach analytical, and to a lesser extent, communication skills. The vast majority of this education, especially at the university level, is segmented into specific domains. Although these domain-specific content and skills are certainly critical, many additional broad, foundational skills are required of a generation of knowledge workers that are capable of delivering high-value in a global economy.

Exactly what are these skills and why are they so important? I discussed some of these skills at a high level in my November 2009 article, Right-Brain Skills for 21st Century Jobs and discussed some of these and others in a number of articles over the last couple years.

Although nobody of whom I am aware has published a comprehensive list of such skills (as if there ever could be such a thing), I would include capabilities such as:

  • IT fluency, where familiarity and comfort with tomorrow’s tools is so deep that technology becomes the de facto, go-to tool to address virtually any business need;
  • Quantitative analytics, especially higher-level math, statistical analysis and analytics;
  • “Integrative imagination,” the ability to integrate information and ideally methodologies from disparate realms to create original new insights;
  • High-level thinking skills including focused research, information filtering and prioritization, critical and adaptive thinking, creative problem-solving and analytical systems thinking; and
  • Soft skills, such as written and oral communications, teamwork, social intelligence, leadership and cross-cultural awareness and sensitivity.

But what are the precise skills that will be required? How do the combinations of skills vary among occupations, industries and positions? Nobody really knows. Nor do they really know how these requirements will evolve in the future. There is, however, one thing we do know. Far too few people entering the workforce, or even that are currently in it, have a sufficient base of such skills.

These broad skills, although necessary, are not sufficient to prepare an individual for an interesting and fulfilling career. They must be complemented with deep domain knowledge in a particular field AND sufficient knowledge of a broad range of other disciplines and fields to provide an inter-disciplinary perspective enable cross-domain collaboration. This domain knowledge, however, must be built atop the core skills that are applicable to virtually any field.

But, to address the current “core skills gap” we must first answer some fundamental questions:

  • Which of these core foundational skills are most critical and most universal?
  • What are the best stages in one’s education and career to learn these skills?
  • How can they most effectively be taught and learned?
  • What responsibility for identifying and learning these skills should be assumed by the individual —and what by primary, secondary and post-secondary schools, by businesses or by other types of organizations?

Much of my ongoing research and writing will focus on these and related questions.

Posted in Skills Requirements, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools | No Responses »
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IBM Corporate Service Corps: Integrating Business Objectives and CSR

Sunday, January 23rd, 2011

This is a summary of my January 2011 report “IBM Corporate Service Corps: Integrating Business Objectives and CSR”. For more information on this report or to purchase it for $995, click here.

IBM has one of the strongest talent development programs and one of the strongest corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs in the technology industry. What do you get when you combine them? IBM’s Corporate Service Corps (CSC)—a great example of how companies can do well by doing good (see my May 2010 report for a view of another IBM initiative, this one or integrating its university CSR and internal talent development initiatives.)

IBM’s Corporate Service Corps is a leadership development program, inspired by the U.S. Peace Corps. It is intended to put IBM’s most valuable resource—its people—in places that can most benefit from their expertise, and provide these employees with experiences from which they can gain broad leadership and cross-cultural experience. It provides select, high-potential employees with intense experience in working with global teams on short-duration, high-intensity projects in emerging countries. It is also a big expansion of IBM’s CSR efforts that turns social volunteerism into a life learning experience.

CSC Objectives

The program, which was launched in 2008, deploys small, 8-12-person multi-disciplinary teams to provide pro bono consulting—helping emerging country government, nonprofit and non-governmental organizations develop specific plans for addressing some of their most pressing societal needs. These can range from upgrading a government agency’s IT environment and processes, to developing a supply-chain management process for getting agricultural products to market, to improving the quality of a community’s public water supply. While each project is different, each is intended to result in practical blueprints for solving problems that are limiting a country or a community’s growth and their peoples’ ability to contribute to that growth.

Although CSC is absolutely intended to deliver broad societal benefits to emerging countries, it is first and foremost a corporate leadership development program. Its goal, however, is not so much to teach specific business skills as it is to instill the qualities individuals require to become leaders in a globally integrated business. Participants are given deep, intensive exposure to emerging markets and diverse cultures and experience in forming and working in multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary teams. They are expected to return with improved cultural literacy, better appreciation for the strengths and limitations of different cultures and work styles, and especially greater adaptability and global teaming skills.

Although the program entails a lot of additional work (30-day in-country assignments plus extensive preparation and post-return requirements) in addition to the employee’s day job, participation is seen as both a privilege and a reward. It is a validation of one’s accomplishments in the company and as a steppingstone to advancement within the company. This makes the program extremely popular and selective—attracting about 10,000 applicants for the first 400 positions.

CSC Results

Although there is certainly plenty of anecdotal evidence to validate the program. IBM, being IBM, requires more formal evidence that its goals are being met. Harvard Business School assistant professor Christopher Marquis designed and conducted a formal survey of participants and recipients and evaluated the results as part of a case study on the program. His findings: CSC is “effective and executing on its goals and mission” (of providing a unique—and highly scalable and cost-effective—leadership development experience, societal benefits to emerging countries and improving employee’s perception of and commitment to IBM). IBM claims the program also delivers some additional side benefits, as in improving IBM’s brand in new and emerging markets and even in creating some new sales opportunities for the company.

In some ways, there is little that is really new in CSC. It combines two relatively common corporate practices—the use of overseas postings as an executive development tool, and encouraging and funding employees to perform volunteer work. The big difference is that IBM has integrated them into a fundamentally new form that delivers these experiences to far more executive candidates than would be previously possible, and does it in a cost-effective way that delivers additional benefits to the company.

CSC Futures

IBM will absolutely continue, and modestly extend the program. Its ultimate value, however, is likely to transcend IBM. Some of IBM’s customers, including Novartis, Federal Express and Dow Corning are already learning from and have begun to implement similar programs. Meanwhile, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with IBM to create the Alliance for International Corporate Volunteerism (ICV). The alliance will expand upon the CSC model to facilitate participation by many other companies and create corporate responsibility networks that integrate activities of corporations, governments, international organizations, foundations and other participants. USAID will also serve as a delivery coordinator for some of these projects, thereby increasing the chances that CSC’s consulting recommendations will deliver their intended value.

Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, IBM, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry Trends, Skills Requirements, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Preparing B-Schools for the Challenges of the 21st Century

Sunday, October 24th, 2010

If student interest and enrollment is the criteria for the success of business schools, B-schools are on a role. Business, which has been the most popular college major for the last 15 years, continues to grow in popularity. It accounted for more than 21% of all bachelor’s degrees conferred in 2007–2008—twice the percentage of social sciences and history, the second most popular major. The MBA, meanwhile, has become the second most popular masters degree, accounting for 25% of all those conferred in 2007-2008. MBAs trail only masters in education, with no other discipline even close. And that was all before the recession—a condition that typically lead to a surge in college and especially graduate (particularly B-school and law school) applications.

B-Schools’ Growing Identity Crisis

But for all the student interest in B-schools, these institutions are facing something of an identity crisis. First, even business degrees are not protecting graduates from the ravages of the recession. Many graduates cannot find jobs at all and many of those who can are forced to take low-level positions far outside their desired fields and without the career or salary tracks they anticipated. They are struggling to repay big loans and, according to a study by Yale economist Lisa Kahn, most are unlikely to ever catch up with colleagues who had the good fortune to graduate in better times. Worse, the longer a new grad goes without a career-track job, the more difficult it will be to compete with more recent graduates for new positions.

With a recent Businessweek survey finding that only 38% of college seniors majoring in business having job offers, B-schools are going to incredible lengths to help their graduates find jobs. For example, they are scouring alumni networks, distributing tips via Facebook and Twitter, counseling students on resume writing and search and interview techniques and even teaching business dinner etiquette. The schools’ challenges, however, go deeper then the needs to address the immediate challenges of the recession. They are, for example, simultaneously struggling to retain their relevance, as by ensuring that:

  • Their educations remain relevant in an era where the nature and requirements of virtually all jobs—and therefore of education required to prepare graduates for them—are being fundamentally transformed by forces including technology, globalization and demographics (see a number of my previous blogs for fuller discussions of these new skills and education requirements);
  • Their pedagogies adapt to the rapidly growing need for managers and executives to think globally, transcend cultures, contribute to the success of teams and embody inter-scholastic, as well as inter-disciplinary perspectives;
  • The schools retain their attractiveness in an era where growing percentages of applicants —both foreign- and U.S.-born—are applying to increasingly credible European and Asian schools to prepare for overseas postings and increasingly global careers; and
  • The fundamental nature of a B-school education is being called into question by the ethical lapses that contributed to the financial crisis and growing calls to establish management a “self-policing profession”, like medicine and law.

So, in a period in which B-schools might otherwise be celebrating their popularity, they are instead being forced to rethink the entire nature of business education and their role in preparing graduates for a very new age. Not surprisingly, different schools are coming to very different conclusions:

  • Some B-schools, especially local and regional schools, are effectively narrowing their focus and converting traditionally broadly-focused programs into highly specialized curricula intended to prepare students for specific jobs;
  • Others, especially many of the world’s leading B-schools are redefining their curricula to provide much broader, much more holistic educations that are intended to prepare aspiring executives for a totally new era of management.

My next two posts provide overviews of each of these two trends and their prospects for addressing the challenges that are facing business educations in general and B-schools in particular.

Posted in Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, Universities and Grad Schools | No Responses »
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Accenture Contributes Its Professional Development Skills to Non-Employees

Sunday, October 3rd, 2010

Accenture has always considered professional development to be one of its core competencies. It recruits tens of thousands of new employees each year, puts them through intense training programs and follows up with ongoing, career-spanning, personalized professional development and mentoring regimes. In 2009 alone, it dedicated nearly $800 million to these efforts.

The company is now extending its commitment to and skills in training and professional development beyond the walls of its own company to thousands of people—250,000 by 2015 to be exact—who do not, and probably never will work for Accenture. Its newly announced Skills to Succeed initiative is intended to help disadvantaged people from all around the world to develop the skills they will require to get good jobs or to start and build their own businesses (and thereby create jobs for themselves and others).

Accenture, both itself and through its foundations, is funding this initiative through a commitment of more than $100 million in cash, in-kind donations and employee time, over a three-year period. It considers this effort to be so important that it has developed a global operating model to align all aspects of the company and foundations’ corporate citizenship efforts around Skills to Succeed. In fact, it has established a goal that 80% of all the company’s corporate citizenship activities will be aligned around this initiative by the end of 2010.

However, while Accenture itself manages and delivers training to its own employees, Skills to Succeed training will be delivered almost exclusively through independent non-profit partners that have proven skills in and share Accenture’s commitment to skills training, and that can “drive change and achieve scale” across multiple countries and continents.

Building the Skills to Succeed Initiative

Accenture launched the first stages of this program in mid-2009, with a $48.3 million contribution—primarily of in-kind skills (such as consulting, hardware, software and office space), secondarily cash and, to a small extent, pro bono contributions of employees’ time (as in teaching, mentoring and so forth). It aligned its efforts around three primary objectives:

  • Employment Building, which is the initiative’s primary focus and is intended to train and prepare disadvantaged people for secure jobs that pay well above local average salaries. It begins by providing training in skills required for these jobs to employment-ready individuals (generally, from high-school juniors and community college students to unemployed workers who are looking to be retrained for new jobs and industries). While much of this training focuses on IT skills (an area in which many NGOs have current programs and skills), Accenture plans to address many types of skills that are “at the intersection of business and technology”. These may include IT operations, programming, engineering drafting and accounting/finance. The program also helps prepare these trainees for actual jobs (such as by placing them in part-time jobs or internships while they are still in school) and actually capture new jobs (as by helping them develop resumes, plan job-search campaigns and secure and prepare for interviews).
  • Business Building, which is intended to help entrepreneurs create new employment opportunities such as by helping them strengthen their leadership skills, develop business plans and strengthen capabilities including financial operations, hiring and customer service; and
  • Market Building, in which Accenture helps governments, NGOs and companies build access to markets where current market infrastructures are not sufficient. Examples include a partnership with the U.S. Agency for International Development to improve rural farmers’ access to information on agricultural and marketing practices.

One of the first and largest efforts was in Brazil, where Accenture partnered with two local agencies (Rede Cidada and the Committee for the Democratization of Information) to establish Conexão (the local membership organization of Youth Business International), which provides free technology training to unemployed people and free consulting to small, promising entrepreneurs. The program was a huge success, training 13,500 young people (3,500 of whom have already been hired) and supporting 124 entrepreneurs.

This success led to more than 80 additional programs so far, with more than 15 NGO partners in both developed and developing countries. Examples include:

  • United States, where Accenture is working with Genesys Works to train inner-city high school students in skills including IT, engineering drafting and accounting and is placing them in part-time jobs during their senior years. Accenture executives also teach business preparedness skills to students in community colleges;
  • United Kingdom, with Youth Business International, to help disadvantaged young people find and get appropriate educations or occupational training and mentor them on skills required to become successful entrepreneurs;
  • India, with the Dr. Reddy’s Foundation, to train disadvantaged young people in business process outsourcing and technology skills;
  • Philippines and Cambodia, partnering with Passerelles Numériques to help underprivileged students build the skills they need to obtain IT jobs; and
  • Several countries in Africa, where it is working with Enablis to build the skills of young entrepreneurs.

Accenture’s Objectives and Methods

The concept for Skills to Succeed was born about 18 months ago during a full-scale assessment of the company’s corporate philanthropy efforts. It was looking for a single unifying effort that addressed a critical, global societal need; that reflected the company’s values, culture and character; and in which Accenture had skills that would enable it to contribute unique skills and expertise, in addition to money.

Its initial efforts in partnering and launching the program, combined with the successes it achieved and the lessons it learned, validated its commitment to the initiative and prompted it to set an ambitious goal—that of training and preparing 250,000 disadvantaged people (anyone from high school juniors to older people who need retraining for or who hope to create their own sustainable, well-paying jobs). Although Accenture is open to all types of NGO partnerships and skills training programs, it assesses each opportunity in terms of its ability to:

  1. Cost-efficiently achieve significant, sustainable, demonstrable and measurable results;
  2. Harness the energies of Accenture and the enthusiasm of its people; and
  3. Be scaled to train large numbers of people and leveraged across multiple states and countries.

But while Accenture is open to examining many different types of programs and partnerships, one thing is not negotiable—its objective. Accenture and its executive committee are fully committed to Skills to Succeed. The company is wrapping virtually all of its corporate philanthropy programs and contributions into this program and is committing all levels of Accenture employees to actively contribute to these efforts. It is also beginning to engage customers and partners in this program, as by working with them to place interns and program graduates.

But for all of Accenture’s commitments and efforts, the company understands that that achieving its 250,000-person objective within five years is a big challenge. It is committed to investing $100 million or more of its resources and the capabilities of its people to the program and is rapidly scaling its efforts. It has, for example, already added 80 new initiatives and is actively evaluating others. The means of accomplishing its goals are flexible. The objective, of preparing a quarter of a million people for rewarding jobs, is not.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Accenture, Community/Other Colleges, Corporate Social Responsibility, Education System and Institutions, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry's Role, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers | 2 Responses »
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The Community College Crisis

Sunday, August 22nd, 2010

As I discussed in my last blog (“The Community College Contribution”), the community college system plays a number of critical roles in the U.S. higher-education system, not to speak of the roles these colleges play in their communities and the broader U.S. society. The Great Recession has greatly expanded these roles and has prompted phenomenal growth in the number of applications to, and enrollment in these colleges.

The problem is that the rapidly expanding role of the system, combined with the need to accommodate growing numbers of students, has exposed a number of serious systemic cracks. Piling on on the impact and the financial cuts attributable to the recession has now brought the entire system to the brink of crisis.

Systemic Challenges

The community college system is already becoming a victim of its own success. Between 1998 and 2008, the number of students enrolled in the community college system exploded by 225%, far outpacing growth at four-year universities, whose enrollments grew 1.65 times. But while the number of students surged, the number of community colleges expanded by only about 16% (to a total of 1,045), far more slowly than the number of four-year schools and private, for-profit two-year schools (often called junior colleges). The results, most community colleges are terribly overcrowded.

Operating budgets are also growing more slowly. Public community colleges, for example, count on tuitions for only about 20% of total funding and sources including gifts and contracts with local businesses roughly another 10%. Governments account for the vast majority, with states contributing about 40%, localities about 20% and federal another 10%. The problem is that state and local government funding has been growing at less than the rate of inflation and has fallen way behind the growth in the number of students graduating from high schools and the percentage of high school graduates who are going to college.

Community colleges, meanwhile, capture far less than their fair share of federal government funding. While these schools enroll about 35% of all post-secondary students, they capture only about 20% of total federal tertiary education funding including 9% of federal campus-based aid, 14% of academic competitiveness grants and 30% in Pell Grants.

Some of this shortfall, however, is at least attributable to the colleges themselves. Consider Pell grants. Publicly-funded community colleges typically address the same market and recruit from the same applicant pool as private, for-profit two-year schools. But while these for-profit colleges (including those owned by Apollo Group, Career Education Corporation and ITT Technical Institute) enroll only 7.7% of total post-secondary students, they have become much more effective at qualifying for federal education aid— capturing almost 25% of all federal aid, with some counting on this aid for 90% of their total revenues.

These for-profit colleges have been particularly effective in winning Pell Grants, capturing more than $10 billion—more than all community colleges combined. Why? Numerous federal investigators and journalists have been asking the same questions. Suppositions include the ability of these high-priced, typically profitable schools to afford and incent recruiters to sign large numbers of students and train financial aid officers to help students qualify for federal grants and loans. But whatever the reasons, the Department of Education has just issued new rules that will dramatically cut aid to those schools whose graduates do not earn enough to repay their loans.

Limited funding, however, is only part of the explanation for community colleges’ traditionally poor financial position. While community colleges certainly get less funding than other types of higher-education institutions, they also bear disproportionately higher costs. For example, they are forced to spend an estimated $2 billion per year to teach remedial skills (especially in math, English and writing) that were not learned in high school. This remediation burden falls particularly heavily on community colleges. According to the U.S. Department of Education, about one-third of all the nation’s first-year college students require at least one remedial course—a figure that rises to 42% for two-year schools. Some states want them to go even further, taking over all GED education plus the remedial education traditionally offered by public four-year schools.

The results: Community colleges are being forced to pack more students into each class, reduce time in expensive facilities such as labs and cut back on “frills”, such as education and career counselors (see below). This, combined with their state-mandated open admission policies, results in more dropouts than graduates.

True, all American colleges and universities (except for the most competitive), have a dropout problem. An OECD study, for example, shows that while the U.S. sends the highest percentage of high school graduates to college of all member countries, it has the second lowest (next to Italy) completion rate. Publicly-funded community colleges perform worse than any other type of school. A 2009 St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank study, for example, found that only 35% of community college students complete one semester of study and that fewer than 50% end up completing any type of degree. Those who do go on to four-year schools are 36% less likely to complete their degree than are those students who started at a four-year college.

The worst part—this was all before the Great Recession.

Burden of the Recession

While the situation was bad before, it is much worse now. All state college systems face huge budget cuts, but California has become ground zero. Although all forms of public education are being decimated in California, public universities face the brunt of the cuts. The University of California and the California State University systems now face budget shortfalls totaling $940 million. They are being forced to slash salaries, freeze hiring and limit purchases to essential items. Worse still, tuition rates are soaring (up 32%), 200,000 students will lose Cal Grant tuition assistance (before the entire program is eliminated in 2011), and state universities are being forced to stop accepting applications for the 2010 spring term and cut total system-wide enrollment by 40,000 students over the next year. California community colleges alone had to turn away 140,000 prospective students this year.

The situation is even worse for the state’s 100+ public community colleges. Record percentage of high-school graduates, facing bleak employment prospects, have decided to attend college. Meanwhile, laid off employees, fearing that “their jobs are not coming back”, are looking to community colleges to help prepare for new careers. And then there are the hundreds of thousands of students who are being turned away from the state university systems. As if this weren’t bad enough, the state is cutting $630 million in funding for community colleges—about 9% of system’s total budget.

Although all California community colleges are in similar straits, City College of San Francisco has become something of a poster child for the crisis. The school which lost $13.6 million in state financing this academic year, has slashed spending and is trying to raise money in any way it can. It has held garage sales and flea markets, installed donation boxes in bookstores and cafeterias. It is now soliciting contributions from individuals—promising to name a class for any individual or company that pledges $6,000.

This creativity, however, has not been enough to stave off reality. It was forced to cancel its summer session and cut more than 900 classes over the year. Those students who can afford higher tuitions and lower subsidies must now struggle to get the courses required to meet major requirements, graduate or transfer to a university. One thousand six hundred and fifty-five of those students who tried to register in fall 2009 did not get into any classes at all, up from 635 in fall 2005. And when they try to ask a counselor for help, they learn that more than 10,000 counseling hours have been cut.

As explained by Michael Kirst, professor emeritus of education at Stanford and past president of the California State Board of Education, “The longer students cannot take the classes they want or need, the less likely it is that they will complete the program they want. They run out of money. They run out of time. They just give up at some point.”

How bad is this situation? Search Google for the term “community college crisis” and the first five articles focus on California. But, that’s California. What about the rest of the country. First, in terms of community colleges, one can almost say that California IS the country. More than one-quarter of all U.S. community college students are in California.

Facetiousness aside, the California case may be the highest profile and the most extreme. It is, however, far from unique. Virtually all states are facing huge financial shortfalls and most are making particularly large cuts in public education—especially higher education. And many experts expect the state fiscal crisis to worsen in 2011. Moreover, the current fiscal crisis only served to make a dreadful situation even worse. As discussed , the nation’s community college problems run much deeper than budgets.

Although the U.S. consistently dominates the ranks of the world’s best universities, its overall higher education accomplishments are far less impressive. For example, according to the OECD, although the U.S. already spends more than twice the share of GDP on higher education than does the European Union, it is typically in the middle of the pack (or lower) in areas such as International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) qualifications, science and math education and graduation rates.

So, what’s the answer? The solutions are even more complex than the problem. Although nobody knows all the answers, I will discuss some of the proposed solutions—and the ways of paying for them—in my next blog.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Community/Other Colleges, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Education System and Institutions, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces | No Responses »
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The Community College Contribution

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

As I discussed in my June 25 blog (Occupational Opportunities for the Next Decade), the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2010 Occupational Outlook Handbook shows that 46 million jobs (30% of those in the U.S.) will soon require more than a high school education, but less than a four-year bachelor’s degree. The nation’s 1,200 community colleges are—and will continue to be—the primary source of this education as demand for individuals with two-year technical degrees grows faster than that for those with a full university degree.

These institutions, which enroll a total of 11.8 million, or 43% of the country’s undergraduate students, play five critical, but very different roles in our educational system, providing:

  • Transfer Education, for students that will transfer to a four-year institution to pursue a BS/BA degree;
  • Career Education, for those that will graduate with an Associate Degree and directly enter the workforce;
  • Developmental Education, remedial education for high school graduates who are not academically ready to enroll in college-level courses;
  • Continuing Education, which entails non-credit courses for personal development and interest; and
  • Industry Training, which is contracted for by companies to provide training for specific jobs.

Of the 930,000 students who completed formal courses of community college study in 2009, 65% graduated with Associate Degrees (which typically require the equivalent of roughly two years of full-time study). The other 35% end up with certificates, such as a GED (General Educational Development) high school equivalency or Industry training certificate.

Engines of Social Mobility

Community colleges, however, do much more than confer degrees or certificates. They are also one of nation’s the most effective enablers of social mobility. community colleges, for example, have open admission policies, offering degree-track admission to anyone with a high school diploma or equivalent, regardless of grades. And, according to data from the American Association of Community Colleges, tuition at public community colleges costs an average of 64% less ($2,544) than those for public four-year colleges and 1/10th to 1/20th the cost of many private four-year schools.

They also cater to disproportionately higher percentages of ethnic minorities (40% of total enrollment) and first-generation college students in their families (42%). And since they are so geographically widespread, with campuses or extension centers within an hour’s drive of more than half of the nation’s population, they provide a critical source of education and vocational training to commuters, those who live in rural areas and those who must work part-time. In fact, according to AACC, 60% of all community college students are enrolled part-time (with 89% of these working either full or part time) and of those who do attend on a full-time basis, 80% work (with more than a quarter of these working full time).

Those students who attend community colleges—and especially those who graduate—are generally rewarded with higher-paying and more secure jobs than those who with only a high school diploma. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, for example, show that those students who attend, but did not receive an Associates’ degree from a community college, typically earn 13% more than those with just a high school diploma. Those who complete a degree earn 21% more. Both are also correspondingly less likely to be unemployed. Those who take, and ideally earn certificates and degrees in technically-oriented math and science courses, earn significant premiums (about 14 percent for men and 29 percent for women) over those in less technical fields.

Local Economic Development Engines

These schools also play important roles in helping their communities develop their economies. They do this by upgrading the skills of their community’s labor force, both in providing remedial and vocational training to “traditional” students who have just recently graduated from high school, and especially to older, non-traditional students. These include those who return to school to freshen or sharpen existing skills, homemakers or welfare recipients who are preparing to enter the labor force, immigrants looking to improve their language skills and displaced or dislocated workers who are seeking to retrain for a new occupation that offers better employment prospects.

Since many vocational graduates tend to seek jobs in their own communities, most of these schools tend to be highly attuned to the needs of local businesses, tailoring courses and curricula to the needs of local industries and often partnering with specific companies to:

  • Provide customized or contract job training, as where they develop programs that are tailored to the needs of specific companies; or
  • Develop cooperative education programs that combine classroom learning and practical (typically paid) on-the-job experience.

These colleges can also play much more proactive roles, as by partnering with state and local governments to provide business development services. They may partner with the state to create and operate entrepreneurial training centers or government-funded small business development centers (SBDCs) or participate in the creation of regional economic development plans. Colleges also actively partner with government agencies and Chambers of Commerce to attract corporations to build or expand facilities in their communities, by serving as a third-party training arm to teach local citizens the skills required by these new employers.

They may also play much more defensive roles, as by contracting with cities and states to retrain plant-closing victims for new jobs in totally different fields. The State of Michigan, for example, provides tuition assistance to community colleges that retrain displaced auto workers for careers in other industries—especially health-care.

On-Ramps to Higher Education

Community colleges also play another critical role in society: that of a feeder system to universities. A large percentage of students enter community colleges with the express intention of transferring to four-year universities and the recession is prompting growing numbers of four-year students to temporarily “drop down” to community colleges to cut costs.

Overall, about 29% of all community college students end up transferring to four-year universities and 17% of all bachelor degree holders had previously earned associate degrees. These transfer and “step-up” processes are facilitated by the existence of “articulation agreements” that specify which courses credits will and will not transfer to four-year schools. With careful planning, students can transfer most, if not all their credits.

The result is millions of low-income, minority and late bloomer high school graduates who would not have been able to afford to attend or get accepted by four-year universities, end up with four-year, and in some cases, graduate or professional degrees. And with university costs doubling over the last decade and rising at twice the rate of those for health care (see my July 11 blog “Is College Still the Best Road to the American Dream?”), the role of community colleges as a first-step to a four-year degree appears likely to increase.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Given the value community colleges provide, their popularity should come as no surprise. The growing demand for educated workers, combined with the rapidly growing cost of a four-year university education has led enrollment in these colleges to expand at about twice the rate as for four-year universities. Now, the recession is prompting more high-school graduates to enroll in college as a means of deferring entry into the job market, forcing more displaced workers to return to school to learn new skills, and enticing growing numbers university students to “drop down” from four-year to two-year programs as a way of reducing expenses and the long-term burden of college debt.

Total enrollment has exploded from 6.8 million to 8 million between 2006 and 2009 and applications for 2010 are likely to surpass those in 2009 to reach a new record. Unfortunately, this may be too much of a good thing. Unless something dramatic is done, the rapid growth of community colleges may well contain the seeds of the system’s destruction.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Community/Other Colleges, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Education System and Institutions, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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