This post is written by NCCER, a Platinum Level sponsor of the 2019 Advance CTE Spring Meeting.

Somewhere along the way, we have lost sight of what the American Dream is.  We’ve begun equating success with a career path only achieved through a four-year academic degree or higher.

Our workforce has suffered from this mentality of only valuing the so-called “white-collar” professionals in our economy. We are facing workforce shortages of skilled workers that will only increase as seasoned Baby Boomers retire.

What can we do to change this? One key to transforming our workforce development system is these three numbers: One. Two. Seven.

Only one job out of ten requires a master’s degree or higher. Two out of ten need a bachelor’s degree. And the remaining seven? These only need an associate degree, certification, craft training or credential.

Our current perception of what a successful career is only focused on 30 percent of jobs. Skilled professions, those that call for certifications, credentials, on-the-job training, often face three misconceptions: They are not lucrative. They are low or middle-skilled. They are dead-end jobs.

Let’s bust these three common misconceptions, particularly in the construction field.

1. Not lucrative.

A popular misconception is that “most well-paying jobs require (at least) a college degree, and getting one of those requires a significant portion of young people to essentially forego owning their own home (part of the much venerated ‘American Dream’) for years and years.” In fact, well-paying jobs are readily available and don’t require sacrificing the typical physical representations of success. Cameron Campbell, millwright, and Josh Chavers, welder, share how they’ve been able to afford brand-new trucks, homes and vacations because of the opportunities they’ve found.

Often overlooked, the construction industry provides sustainable and lucrative careers, like Cameron and Josh’s. CareerBuilder and Indeed both listed construction positions as some of the best jobs to get ahead in 2018. The industry is estimated to need 1.4 million skilled craft professionals by 2022, and with 41 percent of the current construction workforce set to retire by 2031, opportunities are only growing.

In fact, multiple careers in construction make a national average salary (without overtime, per diem or incentives) over $65,000 and do not require a four-year degree: boilermaker, mobile crane operator, millwright, industrial electrician, and welder, just to name a few.

2. Low or middle-skilled.

Forty-six percent of U.S. employers are having a difficult time hiring because they can’t find the skills they actually need in the workforce.

Despite offering great salaries, many of the most in-demand jobs are not only ignored but rarely shared as viable options or are only presented as ‘if you can’t succeed in the academic world’ jobs. These careers are made fun of in TV shows — remember the SNL skit poking fun at project managers? Or construction workers only shown as digging ditches? They paint a picture of jobs that people only pick when they can’t find anything else. But let’s take a minute to consider the skills a career — and not just a job — in construction really entails.    

Pipefitters calculate as many, if not more, mathematical equations in a typical workday than an engineer. Welders have to make sure their welds can hold up beams that support tons of weight — and I literally mean tons as a measurement and not figuratively. Electricians have to understand complicated systems and electrical components, as well as stay up-to-date on national, state and local codes.  

Blue-collar and white-collar careers remain pitted against one another, and a path toward a blue-collar career is undoubtedly portrayed as the less desirable choice. If you have ever tried to construct, install or repair any number of complicated projects in or on your own home, you know that highly trained professionals are anything but replaceable. Instead, they are essential to the longevity and functionality of the places that mean the most to us. These misguided terms used to describe craft professionals fail to represent the rigorous training, credentials, professionalism and strong work ethic belonging to the individual underneath the hard hat. By referring to them as anything other than highly skilled professionals, we are ultimately devaluing the work they do and decreasing the appeal of entering these careers.  

3. Dead-end jobs.

Performance-driven jobs put workers in charge of their career progression. A career as a craft professional has a lot of potential — to advance from entry level to fully trained to seasoned craft professional can take eight to 12 years, and leadership positions are entirely achievable, from management to CEO.

In fact, management jobs in the construction industry are going to be impacted even more severely by the Baby Boomers retiring, leaving the door wide open for craft professionals to expand their careers — 67 percent of the seasoned construction management is due to retire by 2031. Because construction is mostly performance-driven, you are the determining factor in how far you climb the ladder of success.

Boyd Worsham is a great example: Boyd started as an apprentice directly out of high school, worked his way up to become a journeyman carpenter, foreman, assistant superintendent, superintendent and finally the vice president of construction support for The Haskell Company and is now the president of an international education foundation, NCCER.

Ultimately, what do we want for our children and students? Do we want them to only focus on achieving an academic degree or would we rather see them find success on a path they may not have considered? Regardless if a four-year degree is required, we should want the next generation to find satisfaction, happiness and success in their field.

And construction workers are happy. The 2015 Best Industry Ranking Report published by TINYpulse surveyed more than 500 organizations and over 30,000 employees across 12 distinct industries and found that construction workers are the happiest employees.

Why wouldn’t they be? With lucrative careers and growth opportunities, craft professionals are not only successful but have pride in their chosen path. The world as we know it, from our hospitals and roads to our schools and houses, would not exist without the expertise of craft professionals. Let’s not discount career paths just because it may not fit our misguided idea of success, but rather rediscover the American Dream and encourage all options to be explored.

This post is written by ACT, a Gold Level sponsor of the 2019 Advance CTE Spring Meeting.

Success after high school looks different for everyone. Increasingly, however, that success rests on additional postsecondary education or training beyond a high school diploma. As we have heard many times before, students must be ready for both college and career after graduation. Yet, in order to get there, students need to be equipped with reliable information about their readiness for both– regardless of the post-high school path they choose to pursue. We also know that educators need that same information to address skills gaps, accurately measure student learning, and calibrate program improvements.

For 60 years, we at ACT have been studying what is most essential for education and workplace success. Recently we’ve looked more closely at our data for students who took both the ACT college admissions exam and ACT WorkKeys assessments—a set of foundational skill, work-based assessments that lead to the National Career Readiness Certificate. In comparing the research-based benchmarks for each assessment, we found that the foundational skills required for “college readiness” and “career readiness” are in fact equally rigorous and essential to student education and workplace success.

However, we also know that skills are used differently in educational settings compared to the world of work. For instance: on the ACT, we might assess a student’s ability to read and understand a passage from Shakespeare. Yet with our WorkKeys assessments, we are measuring something different—how a student makes use of that reading skill and applies it in order to solve a workplace problem. In other words, measures of career readiness must include not only essential academic skills but also how those skills are applied in the context of a work environment in order to truly measure the “career readiness” of students.

For anyone who has spent time inside a CTE classroom, this is not a revelation. What students learn in school should prepare them to succeed in further education, in career, and in life. The extensive research foundation for our assessment solutions, based on actual workplace and postsecondary outcome data, further underscore this important point.    

As states endeavor to reexamine their CTE systems and implement new state and federal laws, it will be increasingly important to integrate college and career readiness benchmarks—like those found in the ACT and WorkKeys— to ensure that students are able to make successful transitions to life after high school. By leveraging the ACT work readiness system, students of all ages are able to certify their foundational skills and understand with confidence the relevance of those skills to a host of career pathways.   

Through research like this and through making such benchmark data freely available to practitioners on our website, ACT is doing its best to support CTE leaders and practitioners in meeting the goal of providing high-quality CTE programs and ensuring that all students are on the pathway to college AND career success after high school.

For more information and the full ACT Readiness Framework, please visit:

http://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Ready-for-What-May-2018.pdf

ACT Career Pathway Benchmarks (published in 2015 and will be updated in fall 2019 for all 16 Career Clusters): https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/CareerReadinessinUS-2015.pdf

ACT Work Readiness Benchmarks by O*Net Occupational Codes: http://profiles.keytrain.com/profile_search/?_ga=2.117505802.2073588000.1554240283-1916235549.1532011683

This post is written by eScholar, a Gold Level sponsor of the 2019 Advance CTE Spring Meeting.

Students want careers they are excited about. Once they know the careers that excite them, they want the most effective pathways to succeed in those careers. CTE pathways start earlier and lead to many rewarding careers. The challenge is to show a wide variety of students that CTE programs can launch them directly toward numerous careers and provide a running start toward an infinite number of others.  We know that with successful CTE programs students have lower dropout rates, higher test scores, higher graduation rates, higher postsecondary enrollment rates, and higher earnings than students who do not enroll in CTE offerings. The key is to show students the short- and long-term benefits and provide constant feedback and guidance about where their pathway can take them.

The goal of CTE in your state is to enable the delivery of achievement in not only academics but also in career-readiness through connected systems within the state. That means strengthening pathways based on actual education and workforce experience data. Some of the most economically successful states are making strides in these areas today. The data is clear.   

What are some of the leading states doing to deliver these benefits?

• States, including Texas and Pennsylvania, are leveraging their longitudinal data systems to link anonymized data across the entire pathway, including K12, postsecondary, and workforce data.
• They are analyzing how to show students the path toward their goals. Pathway analytics can show students real paths towards their goals and how to meet their individual circumstances.
• In Texas, they are managing one of the country’s most comprehensive longitudinal data system, which includes CTE experiences, postsecondary and workforce goals. This enables analysis of pathways, comparing desired and actual outcomes.
• They are developing strong employer partnerships, to ensure students are attaining educations that make them ready for the workforce.
• States like New Mexico are providing real career exposure to students and showing them many opportunities in different fields through New Mexico Career Pathways.  

When a state is able to execute on all of these best practices, they deliver evidence-based CTE programs that ensure workforce-ready graduates.

At eScholar, we have long been focused on providing data-driven pathways that provide a clear scope and sequence for students to achieve their goals in any career cluster. It’s a unique approach. The eScholar Pathways Project analyzes the educational and career pathways of millions of individuals to evaluate the effectiveness of individual pathways to educational and career goals.  This project has also analyzed billions of educational and career experiences for millions of anonymized individuals to identify effective pathways to degrees and careers. The experiences analyzed include course taking, extracurriculars, interventions and employment and wage data.

By taking this approach, a state can provide strategic and tactical insight for both organizations and individuals. If a school district is interested in expanding its CTE program, it can use pathway analyses to determine how to design its curriculum. An individual can review a pathway report to select the best courses that are most highly associated with goal success. A guidance counselor can use a pathway report to provide more precise advice on when a student should take a certain course.

We are not the first ones to examine course-taking patterns and goal attainment. Clifford Adelman’s book Answers in the Tool Box: Academic Intensity, Attendance Patterns, and

Bachelor’s Degree Attainment found that academic intensity and the quality of one’s high school curriculum are the most significant factors in bachelor’s degree attainment. However, taking an expanded approach with the eScholar Pathways Project, we can analyze not just courses, but experiences. We can also analyze pathways for outcomes beyond bachelor’s degrees, including associate degrees, advanced degrees, and career outcomes.  

We are still conducting research and development on our pathways design, but so far, it has shown a striking amount of promise and the ability to take state and local CTE programs to the next level.

What are your thoughts on this? What initiatives is your state taking to elevate its CTE program?

Follow us on Twitter @eScholar or visit us to learn more at www.escholar.com.

This post is written by the Southern Regional Education Board, a Gold Level sponsor of the 2019 Advance CTE Spring Meeting.

Increasing Access and Equity

Despite pervasive national rhetoric around college and career readiness, studies indicate a small percentage of high school graduates complete a full college—and career—preparatory curriculum, and nearly half of all graduates complete neither a college nor a career-preparatory curriculum. The numbers are worse in schools serving high percentages of minorities and schools in geographically isolated or economically disadvantaged communities. 

We believe that career pathway programs that blend quality career and technical education and college-preparatory academics offer a way to increase readiness, postsecondary attainment, career advancement and economic stability for youth of all genders, races, socioeconomic backgrounds and ability levels.

The Southern Regional Education Board has a long history of helping K-12 schools and technology centers in racially, economically, and geographically diverse communities adopt school improvement frameworks that are based in the belief that students can master challenging academic and career pathway curricula if schools create environments that encourage them to make the effort to succeed.

SREB’s Making Schools Work frameworks are also grounded in research showing that high-quality CTE keeps students engaged and achieving at higher levels, prevents dropout, promotes successful transitions to postsecondary education and the workplace, and offers special benefits to students from low-income families, minorities and young men.

At the 2019 Advance CTE Spring Meeting, you can learn more about three SREB programs helping address the issue of access and equity in CTE. Please stop by the SREB table to meet with the directors of the following three programs:

• Technology Centers That Work (TCTW) unites centers, home high schools and postsecondary institutions around career pathways that give students a head-start on a high-demand credential or degree. TCTW can be adapted to suit full-time centers, extended-day or extended-year programs.
• Teaching to Lead is a teacher preparation program that helps professionals from business and industry become great teachers.  The program helps induct and retain teachers for new and emerging career pathways.
• Advanced Career curricula consist of four courses featuring fully developed lesson plans, projects and assignments.  As complete programs of study, AC’s college-preparatory, STEM-intensive pathways are taught in the context of a college-ready academic core.

In urban, suburban and rural settings, SREB school improvement frameworks and programs provide a structure that empowers schools to make the changes needed to expand or improve access to high-quality programs and ensure that all students – regardless of their gender, race, socioeconomic background, ability level or location – discover a purpose for learning and life.

We look forward to sharing more information with you in Washington, D.C. next month.

https://www.sreb.org/  – For more information contact Dale Winkler [email protected]