Curriculum Design and Assessment to Address the Industry Skills Gap

The bureau of labor statistics notes that the current number of open positions in the United States is approximately 3.7 million, yet the official unemployment rate (U-3) remains at 7.3% representing 11.3 million people, while an alternative and more inclusive measure of unemployment (U-6) is 13.7% and represents 21.2 million people 1 . The existence of unfilled and available positions, as compared to the total number of unemployed persons, is significantly influenced by the availability of qualified candidates in areas for which there is an apparent skills gap, i.e. jobs for which there are few or no qualified candidates. This skills gap compounds the already pressing employment and economic problems in the United States, and in the world. A sound approach to address and eliminate the skills gap is to align curriculum with the needs of employers and give students a seamless and transparent pathway toward achieving a credential such as an Associates degree, Baccalaureate degree, or certificate. Additionally, care must be taken to supply students with an opportunity to achieve these academic milestones with little or no debt, and by means of flexible delivery modes that accommodate work and life responsibilities. This is somewhat different than the current model of higher education and career-technical education. Additionally, a process of continuous review and improvement is needed to ensure curriculum alignment with industry and employer needs, along with reliable means of assessment to objectively measure and verify that students have gained the requisite competencies. This paper describes the efforts of a Community College Partnership Network (CCPN) involving Associates degree and Baccalaureate degree granting institutions, secondary schools, and County and State governmental agencies, to address the real-time needs of employers for the purposes of preparing a well-educated and high value-added professional workforce. Interactive mechanisms of collaboration such as advisory committees, student employment opportunities, undergraduate research programs, an applications-based curricular approach, and continuous improvement and assessment mechanisms are outlined and are central to the effort. Background and the Skills Gap The existence of a skills gap has been the subject of many studies. For proper consideration of the concept of a skills gap, a rudimentary definition and some background will be helpful. The purported skills gap can be reasonably defined as the lack of requisite skills or abilities a potential employee demonstrates, and for which the potential employer is unable or unwilling to invest time, money, or other resources to develop the potential employee. When a skills gap exists and a negative hiring decision has been made, the potential employer has come to a judgment that the potential employee will not add the necessary amount of value, in the required amount of time, for the desired degree of investment. For an employer, the problem is often reduced to one of return on investment and of meeting the most immediate and pressing needs in the present time, and not waiting for a new employee to come comfortably up to speed. For the potential employee, the skills gap is often a source of frustration and confusion, as job descriptions themselves are usually not comprehensively written and the potential employee often does not have sufficiently detailed information regarding the true needs of the employer. A further difficulty is that the required skills often change with business conditions, economic climate, and the implementation of new technology. The retirement of current and incumbent workers has also been noted as a significant factor in contributing to a talent drain, and even those continuously employed risk an erosion of required skills when professional development opportunities are scant or non-existent. In a report by the World Economic Forum, entitled “The Future of Manufacturing Opportunities to Drive Economic Growth”, it is estimated that there are 10 million jobs in manufacturing companies that remain unfilled due to the skills gap and that the ability to access the right talent will increasingly become a matter of competitive advantage 2 . The good news is that with institutions of higher education taking a sharper focus on reducing or eliminating the skills gap, and in creating more meaningful educational and training opportunities in general, potential employees can be well prepared with the skills and abilities that are needed and in high demand by potential employers. Studies on the existence of the skills gap have often relied on surveys in which employers have communicated difficulty in finding qualified applicants for open positions. The Manufacturing Institute, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and the Career Advisory Board of DeVry University have all reinforced the difficulty of locating sufficiently qualified candidates for open positions. Additionally, the consulting firm Accenture points to little or no professional development by employers as contributing to the existence of the skills gap 3 . The urgency of addressing the skills gap often originates from the manufacturing industry but is seen in service and non-manufacturing sectors as well. The need for properly prepared people includes positions such as scientists, researchers, engineers, technicians, production workers, sales, marketing, machinists, and welders. The existence and severity of the skills gap has also been debated. The problem of unfilled positions and unqualified employees has often been minimized by considering that wages are not rising exponentially as they might with a pure supply and demand dynamic, and some jobs do eventually get filled 4,5 . Often, filling jobs has been looked at as a global initiative, where the supply pool is much larger, and not just a local or regional issue. Other considerations include whether or not candidates are willing to move where jobs are located, and that society as a whole has placed a premium on achieving a four-year college degree as a more desirable alternative to learning a skilled trade. However, even more important than talking about degree attainment is to consider the skills and competencies that graduates have attained as a measure of success and through verifiable assessment. This consideration should serve as a model for post-secondary education and for secondary education as well. The Needs of Industry In order to truly understand and identify the most critical needs of industry that potential employees must possess, institutions of higher education, as well as secondary schools, must partner with key constituents to verify the skills that are needed and lacking. The Community College Partnership Network (CCPN) described in the current work builds off of past efforts funded through a NSF-ATE (National Science Foundation-Advanced Technological Education) grant entitled “Institution-Level Reform of an Engineering Technology Program” Grant No.0703836. The final report for this effort, entitled: “Increasing Degree Relevance Through Educational and Industry Partnerships: A Guide for Students and Educators to Understand the Skills Required by Industry” identified several key technical and non-technical skills required by regional industry partners. The project subsequently identified to what extent, and how, each skill is contained as a student-gained competency within the curriculum. In order to identify and understand the skills required by employers, they must be engaged and involved. Often this entails an educational institution creating a forum where an employer representative can experience the institution’s commitment and communicate their knowledge of required skills. The NSF project mentioned previously identified critical technical and non-technical skills as well, and further created linkages between courses, programs, and careers. The project, originally begun in 2008, consisted of a one-day planning conference with manufacturing representatives to learn their views regarding the most important skills for new graduates to possess. The critical skills identified are outlined, in alphabetical order, in Table I 6 . Table I: Technical and Non-Technical Skills Identified as Important by Employers Technical Skills Non-Technical Skills Applied mathematics Ability to set priorities and innovation Computer hardware and software systems Appreciation of the manufacturing process and procedure Computer network security Creativity and innovation Digital and control circuitries Customer support English-to-metric conversions Ethics and professionalism Programmable logic controllers Problem solving skills Project management Teamwork and conflict resolution skills Safety and hazardous material handling Written and oral communication Statistical analysis Understanding of specifications and technical documents With the results of the one-day planning conference, a week-long summer workshop with multidisciplined (technical and non-technical) and multi-segmented (secondary, two-year college and four-year college) faculty and administrators was held to examine the current curriculum in terms of alignment with the identified technical and non-technical skill sets. Over twenty educators participated in the analysis and discussion of topics which included: prioritization of the critical skills identified by industry, identification of new skills that could be added to the curriculum, development of recruitment strategies for underrepresented populations, proposal of work-based activities for students, and proposals for faculty development opportunities. The final event of the project was to conduct a Summary Symposium, where participating industry members and educators reviewed the overall project goals and discussed implementation and dissemination plans regarding the results of the week-long Summer Workshop. A similar effort conducted under the auspices of the NSF