Workforce

This brief profiles Miami-Dade County Public Schools’ efforts to establish career pathway systems for its students. These efforts focus on providing students with coursework that builds their competencies in core academic and career areas, and provides opportunities to earn postsecondary and workforce credentials. Key features of the district’s career pathway systems include early career exploration, strong partnerships with postsecondary and workforce institutions, and emphasis on college and career in school curriculum and culture.

As the economy grows dependent on a skilled workforce, the fact that fewer than 40 percent of Americans have a college degree raises an important question: What is being done to improve the educational attainment of our workforce? This report discusses the importance of postsecondary educational attainment, both for individuals and for companies; presents the results of focus groups and interview research; and concludes with a set of recommendations for employers, employees, higher education leaders, and policymakers. 

Work-based learning is an educational strategy that offers students an opportunity to reinforce and deepen their classroom learning, explore future career fields, and demonstrate their skills in an authentic setting. This article from Advance CTE highlights how states can set a vision for work-based learning and provides some key questions when setting this statewide vision. The article highlights an example from Tennessee and their strategy for strengthening work-based learning. 

Education leaders and employers across the country are working together to develop a well-prepared and competitive workforce. Work-based learning is an effective strategy for connecting students’ classroom learning to their future careers. This article from Advance CTE discusses the state’s role is removing potential legal barriers around work-based learning and provides key questions to ask when confronting those legal barriers. The article also highlights examples from New Jersey.

Popular conceptions of college and career readiness are growing beyond strictly academic competencies such as literacy and numeracy. New thinking on the many dimensions of preparedness has produced volumes of research and scores of new products, making the process for educators and employers to focus on the readiness paradigms that suit their needs very difficult. This paper attempts to clarify the readiness landscape.

As postsecondary credentials have become increasingly important for accessing higher quality employment, a growing number of education and workforce programs are implementing career pathways approaches to help both youth and adults prepare for further education and better jobs. In recent years, MDRC has conducted research on a range of career pathways programs and their components.

In the United States, postsecondary education and training have become more necessary than ever. Completing this education and training is the new threshold one must meet for access to a middle-class life. Unlike other countries, the American career and technical education (CTE) system provides inroads to further education and college degrees; promotes career mobility as an avenue for lifelong learning; and provides retraining for workers who have seen their jobs shipped overseas or outmoded by technological advancements. This report has two parts.