Jobs and Our Future Workforce, Part One

I grew up in a company town.  Copper was king and our little town, and other little towns throughout Arizona, depended on one company.  That business also owned the supermarket and the hospital and company houses. You could get a job with just a high school diploma.

Of course, when the copper mine played out and the price of copper dropped, the company closed the mines and the smelters.  Which, of course, was a near-death knell for those towns.  The employees had nowhere to go for jobs, especially low-tech jobs.

I bring this up because in my parents' generation, you did try to get a job in a good company and maybe stay there until they handed you your gold watch at retirement.  Those days are long gone.  Most of our students today will have multiple jobs and maybe multiple careers.  Being flexible and nimble and keeping up with technology may be the key to future long-term employment.

For now, there's what is being called "a skills gap."  From Bloomberg:

“Some big companies have closed and left devastation, but it’s inaccurate to say there aren’t opportunities in manufacturing,” he says.

Unskilled assembly-line work has been replaced by so-called advanced manufacturing jobs that require some computer, information technology, or other technical knowledge. In Detroit, Louisville, Grand Rapids, Mich., and other manufacturing hubs, many employers can’t find workers with those skills.

Over the next decade, 3.4 million manufacturing jobs are expected to become available as baby boomers retire and economic growth spurs work opportunities, according to a 2015 study by the Manufacturing Institute, a Washington-based think tank, and Deloitte LLC. But a skills gap could result in 2 million of those jobs staying unfilled. Workers are most lacking in computing and technical skills, as well as basic math and problem-solving, the study found. More than 80 percent of 450 U.S. executives surveyed said the gap will affect their ability to meet customer demand, and 78 percent said it will make it more difficult for them to use new technologies and increase productivity.

I mention manufacturing because, as any adult knows, every kid is not going to college.  Some of that has to do with opportunity/money but, some of it is about kids who don't want to go.  It was always difficult to hear philanthropists tout getting 100% of kids to college because it was so unrealistic.

But I'll also throw in this article from The Fiscal Times:

“I think we are going to see shortages across the wide spectrum,” Hine said, including jobs that don’t require college degrees, such as home health aides, personal care assistants and restaurant staff.

“These are the jobs that people are getting worried about, are noticing are going unfilled. But they’re not well-paying,” he said. “And they don’t provide a good, stable income and career opportunities.”

When hiring was difficult, employers gave multiple explanations for it. In 2013, for example, Minnesota manufacturers said two-thirds of all their openings were hard to fill, but that only 14 percent of positions remained open purely because applicants didn’t have the right education and training.

Instead, most employers had a hard time filling jobs because of a mix of factors. A lack of applicants with the right skills was one reason. But there were many others, including location, low wages and undesirable shifts.

“The job is not that specialized,” one manufacturer said of a position it had trouble filling. The problem was finding someone willing to live in a small town and work long hours for low pay.

Ya think?

The surveys also found that the qualification many employers wanted most was prior work experience in a similar role.  They wanted to hire someone who could be fully productive on day one. But at the same time they weren’t willing or able to pay enough to attract that perfect candidate.

Pressure from a shrinking labor force should spur companies to recruit more widely, lower their requirements and make their jobs more appealing. In Mankato, which has a 2.8 percent unemployment rate, employers are doing more to recruit underemployed immigrants from Somalia and Sudan.

One interesting story - about retraining comes from CNN Tech, The Coal Miner who became a Data Miner:  

Now the third-generation coal miner gets her adrenaline rush sitting indoors on a soft swivel chair, fixing code on a computer screen. The 33-year-old is a data scientist currently doing a paid residency at Galvanize in Austin. 

"While I was working as a coal miner, I taught myself to code on the side as a guilty pleasure," said Evans. 

Every Friday afternoon, she would sit in her office and teach herself Visual Basic, the only language she had access to. She wrote code to automate some of the more tedious parts of her job and let it run overnight. She practiced programming in her downtime for five years. 

At Galvanize, she took part in a 13-week program and learned about natural language processing, recommending systems, Python and data science. Now she's doing a full-time paid data science residency at Galvanize, helping teach new students, while she looks for her next job. 

Ideally, Evans is looking for a position as a data scientist and Python developer, or data scientist and business analyst. Those skills are in high demand in industries like healthcare, finance and startups that rely on algorithms. The starting salary for a data scientist is around $110,000, according to Galvanize. Evans says she'll make about the same amount as she did at the coal mines, but the lifestyle change will be a huge improvement.

So, for a middle-class life, it looks like students will have to have more than a high school diploma, even if only a specialized technical certification.  How do we get there for those who don't want to go to college?  One way is CTE (Career and Technical Education).   OSPI has a whole section on it.

Why should students who barely have an opportunity to explore the arts, health and fitness, or social studies, be directed to courses in aerospace manufacturing, horticulture, financial math, sports medicine, or integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)? 

The answer to the above questions, we believe, is that CTE offers a unique opportunity to engage students in an enormous variety of subjects, incorporating academic, creative and technical skills, with the specific goal, nowhere else represented in education, of preparing students for all of life that comes after high school. 

There's even Running Start for the Trades.

But then there is this one glaring issue - definitely in SPS but probably most districts.

Career and academic guidance resources vary from school to school and district to district, so we encourage all 7th, 8th and 9th graders to seek advice from:

• Your school advisor or your school career or guidance counselor
• Your school career center or your district CTE office

Right there in black and white - guidance counselors.  The district doesn't have near enough of these and yet they wonder why CTE courses are underenrolled (and then they cut funding to some parts).  Kids need adult guidance on this issue and it has to come from schools.  Where are those counselors?

The Atlantic looks into CTE in this article, The Need to Validate Vocational Interests:

Obviously, the counterargument here is the largely touted maxim that people with college degrees make more money than those without them, which is statistically true. But this idea is misleading: Crushing student-loan debt increases yearly and ethnicity, class, and gender factor into salary levels, regardless of education. And low-income kids can become “targets for diploma mills that load them up with debt, but not a lot of prospects.”

In Kentucky and other states around the U.S., dual-credit programs and community-college initiatives receive quite a bit of attention, and although I am not suggesting that these programs are unnecessary, I do believe it is important to be intentional in the creation and execution of such initiatives to avoid perpetuating biases and tracking students onto paths that do not empower them to capitalize on their strengths. While many states and policymakers are increasingly promoting post-graduation alternatives to college, many of these efforts are half-baked or seemingly based on the premise that such alternatives are for students who aren't good enough to go to college.

Important to note:

As much as parents, educators, and school systems proclaim the importance of a college degree, according to Gallup, only 14 percent of Americans believe that college adequately prepares students for success in the workplace, and only 11 percent of business leaders agree that college graduates are adequately prepared for the workforce. But like the university president I listened to at the recent conference, 96 percent of chief academics officers at colleges and universities are confident that they are preparing students for job success.

Indeed a recent survey of high school students by Youth Truth found this:

1.  Most students want to go to college.
2.  Only one in two students feel academically prepared for college.
3.  Students find support services helpful - but most aren't using them.
4.  Feelings of readiness vary widely across schools.