Policies > Future of Work > Section 1
Skill Development & Workforce Training
The right skills for our economy keep evolving, college completion rates remain low, and quality apprenticeships and other job-specific training opportunities remain too few.
Section 1:
Skill Development
Section 2:
Modernizing Social Safety
Section 3:
Supporting Entrepreneurship
In order to support sustained living for American families, we must better prepare our citizens with the skills employers need now and also provide access to lifelong learning opportunities, including avenues that are less costly and time intensive than traditional higher education but still allow workers to adapt, retool, and retrain.
The Facts
The World Economic Forum found that by 2020, more than one-third of the core skill sets of most occupations will be skills that are not crucial to today’s workforce.
In 2002, 56% of jobs required low amounts of digital skills and just 5% required high digital skills. A lot has changed: by 2016, the share of jobs requiring high digital skills had jumped to 23% and the jobs requiring low digital skills fell to 30%.
In a recent Accenture survey, 74% of executives say they plan to use artificial intelligence to automate tasks in their workplace in the next three years, yet only 3% intend to increase significantly investments in training in the same time period.
Only 6% of American high school students were enrolled in a vocational course of study, according to a 2013 U.S. Department of Education report; that is compared to 42% on the vocational track in the United Kingdom, 59% in Germany, and 6% in the Netherlands.
Automation has a disproportionally high impact on minorities, as reported by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Almost a quarter of African-American workers are concentrated in just 20 occupations that are at high risk of automation, such as cashiers, retail salespersons, cooks, and security guards.
POLICY GOALS
School districts and institutions of higher education must provide better access to a range of pipelines for entering the workforce, including opportunities to earn college credit, industry credentials, and workplace experience while in high school.
Unemployed and underemployed workers – including new/young and experienced/older workers – must have better access to higher-skilled jobs.
Policymakers must engage employers in developing effective education and training opportunities and rethinking traditional hiring approaches to include retrained workers.
State workforce development systems should support lifelong learning, specifically ongoing skill development and training.
Quality workforce training opportunities must be available to traditionally disadvantaged communities.
In all of their workforce development efforts, policymakers should be mindful of removing non- skill barriers to workforce participation faced by certain populations (i.e. veterans transitioning back into civilian life, people with disabilities, and formerly incarcerated people).
Policy Recommendations
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Apprenticeships
Supporting apprenticeship programs is an important way that government can help provide workers with intensive, individualized training and the opportunity to earn nationally-recognized industry credentials in growing, middle-skill fields.
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Equal Access for Women
Women do not have the same access as men to participate in education and training programs, particularly workplace experience and apprenticeship programs that would advance their skills and careers in high-demand fields like advanced manufacturing and skilled trades.
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College & Career Pathways
States and localities – working with school districts, institutions of higher education, and employers – should create pathways for students in grades 9-14 that combine rigorous academics, workplace learning, and progress toward post-secondary degrees and/or industry credentials.
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Employer-Led Training
Businesses tend to provide more training to workers who already have high educational attainment and higher earnings. Thus, states should address the decline in employer-provided worker training by providing business tax credits (or other similar incentives) to offset a portion of the cost of new training activities for middle and low-wage workers.
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Higher Education Access
State and local leaders should advance policies to increase the number of students applying to, attending, and completing post-secondary degrees and credentials, and to to ensure no one is denied access to college because of an inability to pay.
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Employee-Led Retraining & Lifelong Learning
Policymakers should expand access to ongoing training by facilitating access to short- term training programs, and offering accounts that help fund participation in training programs.
