Jamai Blivin & Merrilea J. Mayo, PhD
The
New
of WORK Education Employment
With the divide between education and workforce growing, what is it going to take for people, corporations and educational institutions to hit the ever moving target we call ‘career ready’?
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Today, we have 6.5M young adults between 16–24 not in school and not working...what is happening to them? How do we stop losing more every year?
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53% COLLEGE
ow u kn o y Did
of college grads are unemployed or underemployed. 8
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LL A 39% udents of
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t ge s on colle diati e m e ire r requ
58%
4
50%
Only of college students graduate with a postsecondary degree.7
of employers report that graduates are not adequately prepared for work. 6
THE
71% of college students work while in school.5
BIG QUESTION
How do we maximize college and career options when the time-honored pathway from school to career no longer works for most?
CONTINUED
The Big Question: In this new world of work, how do we maximize college and career options when the time-honored pathway from school to career no longer works for most?
We Need a Disruptive Solution to Introduce Skills-Based Credentials as Alternatives to Degrees
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onsider the scenario. Despite the fact that 90% of all jobs require a high school diploma,3 7,000 students in the U.S. drop out of high school every day.2 As a result, our nation faces a historical high in the number of young adults under the age of 26 without jobs. In fact, 6.5 million of our young adults are neither in school nor working.9 This includes 53% with college degrees, often saddled with an accompanying crush-
ing debt, who are either unemployed or underemployed.8 While the lucky ones have achieved the roles they seek, many more have been overlooked. Despite having the skills and knowledge required for the new world of work and the global high tech economy, many young adults in the U.S. have no opportunities to prove their skills and translate them into careers. The statistics represent real people, individuals who through their actions, such as dropping out of high school or college, illustrate that the system no longer works for the majority of young adults and students. What’s more, we are not only failing our young adults, we are putting our nation at risk.
s the job market continually evolves & becomes more technical, it’s easy to blame the education system for failing to prepare students for work. But, the original public education system, including its credentialing system, wasn’t designed for a highly technical world and consequently wasn’t built to be nimble & adaptive (ironically, two of the critical skills lacking in many of today’s job seekers). New technical information doubles every two years,10 which means that halfway through a four-year degree, students are already behind. Graduating students are led to believe their degrees qualify them for jobs, when in fact, many employers seek candidates with degrees that no one seems to have. This is the direct result not of poor college planning, but rather of the disparate timelines of school and economy. As long as the time-to-degree is four years—and the rate of change of technology and economic cycles is six months to two years—the majority of our students will probably graduate with the “wrong” degrees. The “right” degrees weren’t known or may not have existed when these students started college. If education is truly obsolete in its current structure, then why is industry still hiring using degrees, the traditional measure created by the education system as its primary credential for hiring?
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What’s in a Name (or a Degree Title)? nnovate+Educate has been working in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education for many years, and we believe in the four-year degree! But, what we have learned through our work is this: while the knowledge underlying a degree may be as valid as ever, the college degree as a title, in matching individuals to jobs, is irretrievably broken. It is not surprising that we have over 50% of employers reporting
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8 T H E I N N O VAT I O N I N TA K E
difficulty filling open jobs,11 and unless the millennia-old trend of increased technological change and work specialization simply grind to a halt, the youth unemployment situation will continue to get worse. Dr. Tony Wagner of Harvard University and best-selling author of The Global Achievement Gap: Why even our best schools don’t teach the new survival skills our children need - and what we can do about it, sums it up beautifully: “In today’s highly competitive global “knowledge economy,” all students need new skills for college, careers and citizenship. The failure to give all students these new skills leaves today’s youth—and our country—at an alarming competitive disadvantage. Schools haven’t changed; the world has. And so our schools are not failing. Rather, they are obsolete: even the ones that score the best on standardized tests. This is a very different problem requiring an altogether different solution.”7
The Skills-based Solution o this end, Innovate+Educate has begun using cognitive skills assessments to measure students' underlying skills. These assessments accurately map to over 95% of all jobs, predict on-the-job performance five times better than a degree, and—best of all—allow those with the “wrong” degree to qualify for available jobs. The tests are based on three to five truly fundamental skills: literacy, numeracy, critical observation, critical listening, and the ability to understand and apply charts, graphs and diagrams. Youth can gain these skills during the course of their college study, prior work experience, online self-education and any other valid learning route. We argue that we need to market these student skills explicitly to employers, because we now have thousands of studies showing these skills are a much better way, than degree title alone, to match individuals to jobs.12
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When there is No Degree he inability of degreed students to meaningfully convey their basic qualifications in an accelerating world of innovation and change is one challenge. Another challenge resides among those who have no degree. Nearly everyone who is college-bound will struggle with the Catch-22 of needing a job to get an education, but needing an education to get a job. These students, as well, need a different way of labeling themselves to employers, an ability to display current skills, albeit without a completed degree. Here, too, having assessments of fundamental skills can capture the current state of the student and relay that information to the employer. In New Mexico, we’ve found that only 1% of unemployed 16-24 year-olds have a college degree. However, when tested, 33% display fundamental skills at the level of a college degree, acquired during high school, work or other venues. These students could be going to college. They could be hired in ‘college-degree-requiring’ jobs that don’t highly depend on specialized content knowledge. But, they have no way to attend college easily without a job, and no way to get a job without a degree. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and community colleges fill some gaps for students struggling to afford a degree with cheaper, more flexible learning pathways. And many corporations, such as Wal-Mart and Starbucks have launched corporate education & training programs.13 But these learning avenues do not always translate to academic credit or transfer to other job opportunities. We need a non-degree-title-based, skills credentialing system to advertise to the world what students are capable of. This does not mean the elimination of degrees, but rather that we evaluate them equally well in terms of more fundamental components. This way, they become portable, transferable and updatable with each increment of learning achieved, however and wherever it is accomplished.
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The New World of Work: Competency & Skills-Based Hiring ome of the best minds in education reform seem to agree. Bill Gates, in a May 2013 Fast Company interview, said, “Another dream would be to revolutionize (student) self-assessment, so that in any area—math, psychology, economics, whatever—you could assess your skills and know what you may need to learn. The ideal there is creating a skills-based credential that is well trusted and well understood enough that employers view it as a true alternative to a degree. You could unbundle the idea of ‘Where did you get this knowledge?’ from ‘What knowledge do you have?’ That would unleash unbelievable open innovation.”14 While such a system may never be practical in the world of education, it is highly practical in the world of work. ACT has profiled more than 16,000 jobs and found that over 95% can be fairly accurately described via some combination of three to five fundamental skills and,
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as stated earlier, a combination of at least three skill scores predicts onthe-job performance five times better than a degree title.12 Obviously, such tests do not demonstrate content mastery and therefore cannot completely replace a degree. But, they clearly and convincingly show the employer something about the underlying capabilities, and allow individuals to demonstrate competency while awaiting a degree or when they have the “wrong” degree. As a bonus, employers who use the skills-based matching system for hiring typically experience significant financial advantages: 25-75% reduction in turnover, 50-70% reduction in time to hire, 70% reduction in cost to hire, 50% reduction in training time.12
“Another dream would be to revolutionize (student) self-assessment, so that in any area—math, psychology, economics, whatever—you could assess your skills and know what you may need to learn. The ideal there is creating a skills-based credential that is well trusted and well understood enough that employers view it as a true alternative to a degree. You could unbundle the idea of ‘Where did you get this knowledge?’ from ‘What knowledge do you have?’ That would unleash unbelievable open innovation.” —Bill Gates in Fast Company, May 2013 Employers need a way to normalize and standardize all those different degrees, from all those different colleges and universities, as badly as students from all those different colleges, having all those different degrees, need jobs. We propose that the solution is not unlike what colleges themselves adopted when trying to rationalize admissions decisions for the millions of high school students from approximately 15,000 high schools: a standardized test. While workforce tests similar to the SAT and ACT are available, employers don’t commonly use the tests. In this case, standardized tests reflect the “common core” of work skills, which are different from (though partially overlapping with) the “common core” of school skills. Thanks to our partnership with the W. K. Kellogg Foundation’s New Options Project, Innovate+Educate is building a skills-based credentialing ecosystem approach in which employers hire by “skill score,” and students and non-students alike can apply for jobs by submitting their skill scores along with resumes. Innovate+Educate trains HR staff how to advertise job openings by skill score, and how to match applicants’ submitted skill scores to the jobs they have on hand. For those without the necessary workplace skills for the jobs they seek, Innovate+Educate is building an online curriculum of skill-up resources for individuals. In an exciting development, several colleges T H E I N N O VAT I O N I N TA K E
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and high schools are currently integrating this curriculum into existing coursework. Interestingly, the same curriculum also markedly improves student performance on academic standardized tests, an unforeseen benefit. It should be noted that those who score highly on the workplace skills tests often turn out to be amazing employees, eager to begin their educational pathway anew once they can afford to do so. The most heartwarming stories we’ve received are from at-risk youth who previously could not qualify for a job for lack of a degree.
The New American Dream
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f we are to stop losing record numbers of students from school and start rebuilding our economic competitiveness, skills-based credentialing must be implemented on a national scale. We’re spending $600 BILLION a year on education in the U.S.14 with dismal results when it comes to work readiness. Imagine what could be possible if we took just a fraction of that money to provide alternative credentialing pathways – or even alternative credentialing as a waypoint within existing pathways – for individuals to demonstrate their ability to do the job. Imagine what could be possible if employers across the country used skills-based hiring and said: whatever you have learned, regardless of how it is labeled, has value, and we can put you to work. When all the people who can’t afford a post-secondary degree and who can’t get a job without it, are able to demonstrate enough
12 million
Cognitive skills assessments accurately map to over 95% of all jobs, predict on-the-job performance 5x better than a degree, and—best of all—allow those with the “wrong” degree to qualify for available jobs. skills to start working, earn a living, support their families and eventually, go back and obtain that degree, then, ‘The American Dream’ will be attainable, once again. n Jamai Blivin is the CEO of Innovate+Educate, an organization she founded in 2008. Since that time, Innovate+Educate has become a leading voice across States for industry alignment to advance college and career readiness. Jamai has consulted and worked extensively with State programs, IT Companies, Higher Ed Institutions, and K-12 Systems to industry’s role in the solutions. Jamai holds a BSBA and MBA in Finance from the University of Arkansas. Merrilea Mayo, a materials scientist & engineer by training, played a founding role in two policy-oriented non-profits (ASTRA and UIDP), served as President of the Materials Research Society (2003), held Director-level positions at the National Academies and Kauffman Foundation (2001-2009) and now runs a consulting firm specializing in innovation, workforce, technology and the future of learning.
U.S. workers without jobs
50% of companies report difficulties filling open jobs
The G A P is
BIG To be continued . . .
The New World of Work References 1. Busteed, Brandon. The School Cliff: Students' Enagement Drops Wth Each School Year. [Online] January 7, 2013. http://thegallupblog.gallup.com/ 2013/01/the-school-cliff-student-engagement.html. 2. Alliance for Excellent Education. About the Crisis. [Online] http://www.all4ed.org/about_the_crisis. *Note: Dropout rates are difficult to estimate accurately, we found another source that estimated 8,300 drop out per day across a 365-day year, not a 180-day school year. We chose the more conservative estimate; either way, the numbers are staggering.
3. Lumina Foundation. A Stronger Naton Through Higher Education. [Online] March 2012. http://www.luminafoundation.org/publications/ A_Stronger_Nation-2012.pdf. *Note: The statistic says 90% of all jobs will require some level of post-secondary education. We used this to make our point, that given this, obtaining post-secondary education requires first obtaining either a high school diploma or GED.
4. National Center for Education Statistics. Remedial and Degree Completion (2011). [Online] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_rmc.asp.
53% of recent college grads are unemployed or underemployed
6.5 million young adults (16–24) are not in school and not working
5. U.S. Census Bureau. New Analyses of Census Bureau Data Examine Nation's 65 and Over Labor Force, Working Students and Changes in SelfEmployment. [Online] January 24, 2013. http://www.census.gov/news room/releases/archives/american_community_survey_acs/cb13-15.html. 6. Mourshed, Mona, Farrell, Diana and Barton, Dominic. Education to Employment: Designing a System that Works. [Online] 2012. The McKinsey Center for Government. http://mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education/Education-toEmployment_FINAL.pdf 7. Wagner, Tony. The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need – and What We Can Do About It. New York Basic Books, 2008. 8. Associated Press. A Study based on analysis of data from Northeastern University with supplemental material from Paul Harrington of Drexel University and the Economic Policy Institute. 2012. 9. Belfield, Clive R. and Levin, Henry M., and Rosen, Rachel. The Economic Value of Opportunity Youth. [Online] January 2012. http://www.civicenter prises.net/MediaLibrary/Docs/econ_value_opportunity_youth.pdf. 10. Gantz, John and Reinsel, Davis. Extracting Value from Chaos. IDC View. [Online] http://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/idc-extractingvalue-from-chaos-ar.pdf. 11. Manpower Group. Talent Shortage Survey. [Online] 2011. http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/MAN/1262980731x0x469531/7f71c 882-c104-449b-9642-af56b66c1e6d/2011_Talent_. 12. Wikipedia. Skills-Based Hiring. [Online] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skills-Based_Hiring 13. Connell, Christopher. Starbucks, Wal-Mart offer classes – for college credit. [Online] April 2013. http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/15/pf/college/corporate-classes/index.html
Th e G A P is
OVERWHELMING
14. Kamenetz, Anya. We Can Make Massive Strides. Fast Company Magazine, May 2013.
To be continued . . .