High-quality employer-educator collaboration, skills building, and stackable credentials can lead to a strengthened workforce infrastructure and an aligned labor market, writes Geographic Solutions' President and Founder, Paul Toomey, in his most recent Fast Company Impact Council article.
Strong employer-educator partnerships produce several benefits: They identify real employer demand and translate that demand into curriculum and credentials. They also embed work-based learning and shared data to improve hiring and retention.
Partnerships that yield high quality relationships between employers and educators also help the close an important skills need. Commonly referred to as the middle skills gap, this mismatch presents itself when jobs require more than a high-school diploma, but less than a four-year degree. It's quantified by the number of workers with the training, credentials, or experience needed to fill them.
Stackable credentials play an important role in employer-educator collaboration, allowing students and workers to build skills in smaller, clearly defined increments.
Some of the most successful programs have been able to bring these factors together to create positive outcomes. This includes curriculum designed by Pathways in Technology Early College High Schools (P-TECH), Toyota's Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education program (FAME), and Northeastern University's co-op program model.
Read the entire article at Fast Company.