Should colleges work with industries to fill demand for workers?

Narrow our job skills gap by building educational pipelines

By John R. McKernan Jr. and William D. Hansen, Tribune News Service

An unfortunate irony to emerge from our lackluster economic recovery is that even as millions of Americans remain unemployed or underemployed, too many employers are unable to find qualified candidates for open positions.

Shortcomings in our education and workforce development systems continue to widen the skills gap. Left unchanged, the supply of skilled workers will dwindle — leaving some 5 million jobs vacant by 2018 — and won’t keep pace with the demands of a modern economy or the needs of employers struggling to compete.

The skills gap has been pigeonholed for many years as an education issue and left to policymakers, educators and administrators to fix. But as the top consumer of our education system, the private sector has a huge stake in this challenge and can’t afford to wait for others to find a solution.

And many businesses haven’t. The essence of enterprise is solving problems and fulfilling needs, so it should surprise no one that business leaders are innovating their way out of the problem.

A number of companies and partners have pioneered a whole new approach to sourcing workers by applying the lessons of supply chains — the common-sense practice of planning ahead and establishing processes and relationships with preferred and trusted suppliers to ensure that you have what you need, when you need it. We call this talent pipeline management.

Talent-pipeline management isn’t much different from the state-of-the-art supply chain principles that companies use to source goods, capital or information. It involves demand-driven relationships between end-use customers, in this case employers and their suppliers, education and workforce providers, to create and share value.

Rolls-Royce employed this strategy when it built its massive Crosspointe engine manufacturing complex in Virginia.

Before making the $170 million investment in the first-ever Rolls-Royce facility to be built from the ground up on U.S. soil, the company wanted to be sure that skilled workers would be available and in steady supply.

So it partnered with the local community college system to establish a program tailored to its advanced manufacturing operations. Since forging this innovative partnership, Rolls-Royce has provided input on the course work and curricula, as well as new tools and resources to train students on the same machines that are used at the Crosspointe facility.

These kinds of arrangements add value for everyone involved. The employer wins by having steady access to candidates who are not only qualified, but whose skills have been customized to the demands of the position. The education partner benefits by being able to point to concrete job opportunities for its graduates, thus raising its competitive edge and helping recruit students. And those students ultimately receive an education that comes with real job prospects.

There are pockets of progress and examples of success around the country, primarily led by major employers with the tools, infrastructure and resources to prioritize talent pipeline management.

What lacks, however, is a systemic approach enabling more companies to adopt sophisticated strategies for job training and recruitment.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and USA Funds, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving students’ prospects for success in a modern economy, will be setting up regional partnerships over the coming year to get more employers across the country educated, engaged, and equipped to better manage their human capital needs.

Through talent pipeline management, we can achieve truly demand-driven education and workforce systems to help create opportunities for individuals, ensure a steady flow of qualified workers to enable allow businesses to thrive and grow, and keep our nation on the leading edge of global competition.

John R. McKernan Jr. is president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. William D. Hansen is president and chief executive of USA Funds.

Companies can get skilled workers faster using German approach

By Whitt Flora, Tribune News Service

At first blush, it sounds like a good idea: have business partner with universities and colleges to create a vocational curriculum that provides graduates well-paying jobs in today’s growing industries.

There’s just one major hitch: The primary role of education, particularly higher education, is to develop citizens with a variety of skills needed to live a full and vibrant life in a flourishing 21-century democracy — not to custom-tailor graduates to fit vacant slots in businesses desperate to hire trained workers.

That’s why the recent initiative launched by business groups to create an unobstructed pipeline of skilled workers from major public and private universities is likely to produce only lukewarm results.

While it’s true that college graduates earn more money over their lifetimes than those without a degree, the problem is that far too many who start college drop out and end up with large amounts of student loan debt with not much chance of paying it off. Many are forced into bankruptcy.

In the 2011-12 school year, the Pell Grants, the Department of Education’s largest aid program to help students from a low- and moderate-income background finance a college degree, cost taxpayers a whopping $34.5 billion with dismal results. While federal statistics are sketchy, they suggest that a majority of Pell recipients dropped out before completing their sophomore year.

No wonder. It’s clear that many high school graduates don’t have the aptitude to go on to college and would rather go directly into the workforce and start careers. The paradox is that nearly a million attractive jobs are going begging, while millions of Americans remain unemployed or seriously underemployed.

The remedy is not to have schools create new and easier courses to accommodate students who aren’t legitimate college prospects, but to create more vocational training opportunities along the lines that have been standard in Germany for decades. Forced to rebuild its industrial might from the rubble of World War II, the Germans long have placed a high value on vocational education.

In Germany, the educational system begins to differentiate between those students best suited for higher education and those who may fare better in vocational training at an early age, often in the eighth grade or at the start of their freshman year in high school.

More than two-thirds of the German workforce has received vocational training from technical schools, trade guilds and company training programs. In 2012 alone, German companies hired and trained some 600,000 workers.

The system obviously is working. In October, despite a slumping economy, Germany’s youth unemployment was 7.7 percent compared to 12.7 percent for the United States.

In Germany, vocational ed students learn both in the classroom and on the job — usually attending vocational schools two days and spending three days a week as apprentices in a chosen vocation. Slightly more than 50 percent of German students choose this career path.

American companies who want to start such programs in their own factories won’t have to travel abroad. A number of U.S. factories owned by German firms already have installed training systems that could help fill America’s crucial need for skilled workers.

Volkswagen’s sprawling auto factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is a good example. The company runs its Volkswagen Academy in a large building that also houses its Passat assembly line. Aspiring workers who complete the three-year program earn a starting salary of $22 an hour and are certified to work at German auto plants anywhere in the world.

It’s time to end the stigma long-attached to vocational education by adapting the German approach throughout the U.S. Most Americans don’t need a university diploma, but all need a well-paying career.

Whitt Flora, an independent journalist, is a former chief congressional correspondent for Aviation &Science Technology Magazine and a former White House correspondent for the Columbus Dispatch.