Ed Morrison · BFD Learning Moment: How workforce sector partnerships form

October 9th, 2010


How Workforce Partnerships Form

The next generation of businesses run on brainpower. Regions that are figuring this out are focusing on how to design and develop workforce sector partnerships. Next week, I’ll be heading to a conference in North Carolina, one of the hotbeds of new approaches to workforce development.

Workforce sector partnerships are another form of open network. Where business clusters focus on strengthening networks of firms, workforce sector partnerships focus on strengthening networks of skills.

These partnership emerge out of occupational clusters within a regional economy. Firms share skill needs, and they form partnerships with education and workforce development providers to strengthen the pipeline of people with these skills.

A good example — one that I have been working on in both Hawaii and Maine — involves developing sector partnerships in high demand health care careers.

Building this partnerships is particularly difficult for several reasons:

1. Employers have a difficult time clearly specifying the skills they need.– Employers capable of communicating detailed specifications for everything they purchase, but they are generally incapable of specifying clearly the skills they need. Although we have seen advances in recent years with work readiness certificates (example: Georgia) and Work Keys, employers still have difficulty explaining entry level job requirements and career ladders within companies in meaningful terms of skill development.

The result: There is a big communication gap between employers and educators.

2. Education providers do not design their curricula around skills.– Educational institutions develop their own internal logic to their course offerings. This logic may or may not connect well with the market. For example, software companies in Northeast Ohio used to complain to me that Case Western Reserve’s business school did not teach the latest generation of software skills to its students. When I explored further, I concluded that the faculty was unwilling to keep up with the latest software languages — Ruby on Rails, for example.

The result: There is often a big gap between educational programs and the demands of the market.

3. Building better talent pipelines requires crossing educational boundaries — usually through articulation agreements that are not easy to negotiate or execute. In Indiana, Purdue and Ivy Tech have difficulty negotiating articulation agreements in engineering, for example. Ivy Tech, the community college, relies heavily on algebra in its educational offerings. Purdue expects students to have mastered calculus.

The result: There are often stubborn gaps between educational institutions.

This chart explains a typical pathway for a workforce sector partnership. With pilot programs, the partnership begins to fill these gaps through innovative programs that are delivered more quickly and flexibly.

Last 5 posts by Ed Morrison

Random Posts

Category: BFD
Comments Off