Building the Skilled Technical Workforce: “I’s Very Much a Work in Progress”

It’s hard because a lot of these places struggle anyway to retain well-educated or well-skilled workers — the people who have those skills very often move away to more promising labor markets. So, it’s partly an issue of figuring out what the community colleges should be doing, and what employers should be doing. Apprenticeship will probably figure strongly in all of this.

The report said that one problem is a lack of coordination — among policymakers, employers, community colleges — in education and training efforts for skilled technical workers. Has there been any progress on that?
Holzer: I don’t think there’s been great progress at a national level. The good news is that there’s a lot of innovative activity going on, often at the state and local level.

Some places are figuring out how to bring together their economic development and their workforce development. Some state or regional government leaders and nonprofits are trying to work hand in hand with the key regional employers in a lot of these higher-demand sectors. And community colleges are trying to figure out how to better interact with the business community and the economic development folks.

It’s very much a work in progress. North Carolina has a thriving biotech sector. South Carolina has a lot of advanced manufacturing, including some from overseas. Tennessee has auto plants. So, around the country you can see these efforts either to bring in foreign companies or to grow them domestically. And in all those cases, there’s a lot of attention to workforce and how to meet the employment needs and the skill needs of those employers.

But it’s very uneven, and we don’t even have the research to say, “This is the right way to do it under these circumstances, and this is the right way to do it under those circumstances.” And for the very successful small programs, the big question is, how do we scale those efforts while maintaining the quality? Everybody’s trying to figure that out.

Is there anything we can learn from other countries?
Holzer: The European Union countries, on average, are better at workforce development below the B.A. level. They don’t put nearly the resources into higher ed that we do, but they put a lot more resources into what they call active labor market policy. Active labor market programs are designed for everything from training, to doing a better job of matching the right workers to the right jobs, to maybe subsidizing jobs for the least skilled people.

Germany, Austria, and some of the Nordic countries have much more developed apprenticeship systems that start for a lot of young people in high school. But one of the downsides of the way they do it is that they’re much more comfortable with tracking students who are quite young. So, in high school, students have to choose between the technical track or the university track.

The United States doesn’t want to go back to tracking, because we have a very bad history of tracking by race and class. So, we need to try to figure out, how do we provide a robust set of choices to young people without tracking? What’s an American version of technical training?

A lot of states right now are building what they call career and technical pathways from high school into community colleges. They’re programs for grades nine or 10 through 14.

Your own research is currently focused on community colleges. What role can they play in educating people for skilled technical jobs?
Holzer: I have a big project with people at the American Institutes for Research looking at the ability of colleges to do workforce development successfully. We’re looking at credentials — associate degrees and certificates — that have clear labor market value and for which people don’t have to go on to get a four-year degree.

We are trying to understand why some community colleges are much better than others at graduating students with these credentials. One thing we’ve learned is that the technical colleges are better at this, because this is most of what they do. This is their bread and butter. Whereas regular comprehensive community colleges are trying to do several things at once — trying to prepare people to transfer to four-year schools, and trying to give them a strong general education background.

The good thing about general education, on the other hand, is that it gives people a solid foundation in basic academic skills. People don’t stay with the same employers forever, so you want to give them education that’s portable, and you want to make sure they’re trainable in other sectors, in case the jobs dry up in their initial sector of concentration. So, it’s a complicated dance to make sure you give people those foundations, but at the same time to try to be responsive to the needs of regional employers, which can change, especially in the world of AI.

Can you say more about that? How do you think artificial intelligence will affect skilled technical jobs?
Holzer: It’s really hard to know. A lot of the evidence now says that artificial intelligence is going to substitute the tasks of college-educated workers — B.A. and above — more than non-college, because it could do the lower-level tasks like basic writing, basic math, programming, coding that college graduates do well.

If I had to speculate, I think AI will likely replace some, but not all, of the tasks that are now done by the skilled technical people. In health care, for example, you’re still going to need the phlebotomist to draw the blood, the technician to take the X-rays.

People in those jobs might have to be nimble and pivot a little bit to pick up new skills and new tasks as that happens. And they shouldn’t have to do that on their own. To me, that’s the primary task of workforce development in the age of AI: How do we help people navigate these changes? Should we have lifelong learning accounts, where people always have a little money to draw on to upgrade their skills? Should we subsidize employers to do more on-the-job training, and maybe even tax them modestly for displacing workers? This would incentivize more employers to retain and retrain workers when they implement new forms of AI.

One positive thing is that AI should make training more accessible to a lot of workers, because they’ll be able to do more and more virtually. And with virtual reality, you could simulate a workplace and some of the equipment you need. So, AI should help, but again, we can’t expect workers to do this on their own. We have to try to create a workforce development system.

Read the 2017 report Building America’s Skilled Technical Workforce.

Sara Frueh is Senior Writer at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The article was originally posted to the website of the National Academies.