Q: Jobs for the Future recently moved to target its work more tightly around two specific goals for accelerating advancement opportunities, one goal for young people and the other for adults. Why is accelerated advancement so important?
ans: As well the research of other people about what it's going to take for people to get ahead in this economy. And what we see is that what was thought would be good enough in the past--a high school education or jobs that pay entry-level wages--is no longer enough, given the complexity and the rapidity of change of the economy. We as a country have a policy of giving the least in terms of help and intervention to individuals who need help most. If you look at job-training and workforce development efforts, most are very short term, and the training is job-specific, yet the skills people (and employers) need are quite complex--skills in thinking, in team work, in "navigating" the job market, in the ability to solve problems, and so forth. For us, that adds up to a mandate to focus on the high-impact goals we have chosen: one, that all young people receive a strong high school education, with opportunities to complete some form of post-secondary educational credential by the age of 26; and, two, that all adults have the skills that enable them to earn enough to support their families (jobs that pay $25,000 to $40,000 per year), with opportunities to acquire the new skills they need to advance in a career.
In a sense, the nation--along with many organizations like Jobs for the Future--has too often set the bar too low for what we should, through public and private-sector collaboration, should try to accomplish. With our goals for accelerated advancement, Jobs for the Future wants to convey the urgency, the need for higher-performing systems.
I do think the road is steep; this is hard work. Even if the economy weren't entering a potential downturn, the nature of economic change presents a huge challenge. Some of the challenge is that there are no longer naturally occurring pathways for advancement either within firms or across and between firms. There has been a "hollowing out" of those jobs that had traditionally given working-class people their entry points to career ladders. This change is serious, it's taking place everywhere in the world, and it is irreversible, and so we need new ways of constructing those ladders.
Part of the solution lies in some of the work Jobs for the Future and others are starting to do around looking at "families" of skills that cut across industries. Traditionally, when people thought of career advancement, they thought of it in very industry-specific ways: you would be in the manufacturing sector or the service sector, for example. What needs to happen now is a much greater concentration on skills that can be generalized across occupations, and then making visible, or building, the bridges that can help people take those skills and move from a lower-level job in one industry into a better job in that firm, another firm, or even another industry.
Q: How do people get those skills?
ans: That's a loaded question. You could argue that growing up poor in the inner city means you are going to have navigational skills up the wazoo. This is when you see a real limit to traditional approaches to skill development, when many of the key barriers are structural: the kinds of jobs the economy is creating. The question is, what can public policy do, if anything, to change the quality of jobs that are being created? And how can you get intermediaries, government policy, private-sector organizing, and collaboration to create these ladders across jobs, so that even if people start at entry-level jobs and occupations and industries, they don't stay there.
Q: How can places like Jobs for the Future and the public sector in general help people move ahead from that entry-level job into a career?
ans: One way is to begin to identify and build those bridges across occupations and industries. For example, in the work Jobs for the Future is doing with career ladders, we're looking at ways to build bridges across different industry sectors. And in the work we're doing on the youth side, we're looking at ways to build bridges across the different stakeholders--for example, bridging the separate worlds of high schools, alternative programs for youth, and postsecondary schools. A big part of the need we see is to make connections across those systems.
Q: What seems to be the key are easier ways to make transitions, whether form school to work or from one job to another, better job.
ans: Yes, and the transitions can only be effective if you have a reliable set of structures and relationships for enabling young people or adults to see how the parts connect and to see how they can move from one part to another. Fortunately, many organizations already focus on making each individual part of these systems work better: reforming the education system, improving the quality of postsecondary education, building better systems for workforce development and employment training. I think Jobs for the Future's "value added" is in working with partners in all those areas to connect them so that, from the point of view of an individual, they work better to support ongoing transitions between work and learning.
I think that, as a country, we also have to be laser-like good at understanding how people can get the navigational and problem-solving skills the new economy requires. In the past, we counted on proxies to indicate a person's skills, looking at things like numbers of years of schooling, at degrees, and at credentials. But look at how the private sector is changing its own recruitment, assessment, and training: employers are no longer satisfied with shoot-in-the-dark, maybe-this-will-work approaches. They are trying to take research about how people learn and convert that into highly effective, low-waste learning and training interventions, even while the public sector is stuck in debates about what kinds of schools should get funded and what's a good exit test. The public sector doesn't have the same sort of relentless quest for determining when an intervention makes a difference, how much of a difference, and how you get that done on a large scale.
We're saying that not only does this have to change, but change has to happen faster. We have to turn bridges into superhighways. And there are lots of things to build on. For example, technology is reframing work and how work gets done in ways that lessen some of the constraints and barriers for low-income women or for people who would be discriminated against because of how they look or speak.
Q: What other reasons do you see for optimism?
ans: The biggest reason for optimism is simply the urgency. We have a lot of data saying this country has a large problem with income disparity. It's more serious than in almost any other advanced industrial economy. And we know from history that a healthy economy and democracy cannot sustain that kind of a disparity. Second, we are entering a period when the youth population is growing and also when many people from all over the world are coming to this country believing that they can get ahead. A country that promises hope and does not deliver it is at risk. And that adds an enormous amount of urgency.
The easy answers don't serve us well, yet I think we do know a lot, from research and from experience, about what things work better than others. Generally what works are learning programs designed to require a high-level application of what people know, a high level of integration of the discrete subjects that they're learning, and opportunities for exercising independent thinking and leadership.
Necessity being the mother of invention, many places around the country, because of demographic and economic pressure, are moving toward models of accelerated advancement and building effective transitions between high school and college. While there are many agreements between individual high schools and individual colleges, the New York City College Now program has taken this to a whole new level by creating a citywide system for advancement. The partnership between the public schools and City University of New York, the city college system, helps prepare high school students for postsecondary education and allows many students to take courses for college credit while they are still in high school. The program evaluates all students in their junior year. Those who are ready can earn college credits at no cost. Those who need remedial help can get it while they still have a chance to prepare for college. The College Now program, which started with one CUNY campus 18 years ago, shows the potential for systemic approaches to advancement on a very large scale. Today, every high school and CUNY's eleven senior colleges and six community colleges are involved in the programs, and 25,000 high school students take courses for college credit each year.
Q: As the economy slows after a decade of prosperity, what can JFF contribute?
ans:: Jobs for the Future started in the mid-1980s, when there was a need for our kind of work because people were losing their jobs. The country didn't know how to put together solutions commensurate with the needs that economic change was creating. And there was just as strong a need for our work in the 1990s expansion because the economy placed a higher premium on people's skills.
In periods of downturn like we seem to be entering, organizations like JFF have an important contribution to make. We can be a kind of "skunk works" for practitioners and policymakers--looking beyond day-to-day operational challenges to help identify and expand what, in fact, works, because, especially in times of limited resources, you can't just jawbone about trying anything. Societies need catalytic organizations like JFF to develop evidence-based knowledge on what's needed and what works and to get it adopted on a large scale in different kinds of places. How does something work? How do we know it works? What did it take, both in terms of practice at the program level, and in terms of public policy to support that? Answering questions like that is what we have to contribute. What does it take to support approaches that work and the people who make them happen?
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