The US is Ranked 12th in Talent, Topped By Those Pesky Socialist Countries. What’s Gone Wrong?
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
In an IndustryWeek article entitled, “Top 10 Countries For Talent,” it was reported that the IMB World Talent Ranking for 2018 placed the U.S. at 12th, behind many of those countries that are considered “socialist.” How can that be? Could it be that countries 1-11 found a better balance between a thriving model of capitalism and an economy that filters down to all?
It appears that these countries have deliberate strategies for sustained growth. They cultivate relationships with trading partners to “lift more boats” than just those at the top, and seem to do pretty well with their form of democracy. Their societies reflect this stability in the standards of living, mortality rates, health of their people, lower crime rates and lower numbers of suicides and mass incarceration.
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It wasn’t all that long ago that the United States set a high bar for educational attainment, upward mobility, access to healthcare and income security during working years and in retirement. But by most of these measures, the U.S. has continued to slide embarrassingly backward – sometimes as low with some measures to what the world considers a “developing country.”
In 2018, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development announced the results of its 2015 rankings of 72 participating countries for the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) test. The U.S. ranked as follows: Reading – 35th; Math – 24th; Science – 25th.
So it was really no surprise when it was revealed that the U.S. ranked 12th in talent in 2018. After all, in the last 3 decades the U.S. has transformed itself from the all-inclusive economy that served it so well – instilling ambition and innovation in generation after generation – to more of a “top- down” economy…with most of the accumulating wealth remaining at the top. To pay for that imbalance, capital has to flow from the bottom up, which whittles away at all of the measures that have meaning for the worker class. Obvious contradictions that emerge from a lack of long-term fiscal and social policy planning have maintained the imbalance for those who benefit from institutionalized ineffectiveness and counter-productive policies – the absence of which allow those in power to appear to be doing something while accomplishing little. Read More
Thinking Past the Assessment – Unfinished Goals and Unrealized Expectations
by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.
Literally speaking, an “assessment” is the process of measuring the value, quality and/or quantity of something. There are many types of assessments, and methods for assessing. In theory, it is the process of evaluating one thing against a set of criteria to determine the match/mismatch.
There are assessments for risk, for taxes, vulnerability. There are psychological, health, and political assessments. There is a group of educational assessments that measure a variety of outcomes such as educational attainment – assessments of course content mastery, assessment of grade level attainment, assessments of Scholastic Aptitude Tests (“SAT”) that compare a student to their peers nationally and a variety of college readiness exams.
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Determining that you, indeed, hired the right person for the job will not automatically ensure the person is successful in learning and mastering the job. The most important step in the employment process is seeing to it that the individual’s core knowledge, skills and abilities are applied in learning and mastering the tasks which they were hired to perform. That is where the money is made.
Educational assessments have been adapted for use in workforce development and employment, used to assess a prospective employee’s suitability for a job opening. They often measure more of what, if anything, a student learned and retained before graduating than how they match the employer’s actual job opening. Psychological assessments have been adapted to measure a prospective employee’s sociability to the workplace, morphing into a new category called “psychometric assessments.”
We have seen a growth in the employment assessment industry over the past 2 decades – particularly after 9-11. There are assessments for cognitive tests, physical abilities, “trustworthiness,” credit history, personality, criminal background and more. When used improperly, the methods have been challenged in court for their appropriateness and intent.
An assessment is a “test,” and has been held as such by court rulings over the years. The instrument determines a positive or negative outcome for the employee or prospective employee. The court has ruled, in many cases referring to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Uniform Guidelines for Employee Selection Procedures, that anything used to evaluate a prospective employee’s access to employment, or an existing employee’s retention, promotion and movement within a job, must meet certain standards to be legally valid. Read More
Is the “Gainful Employment” Requirement For Education Realistic?
by Dr. Dave Just, formally Dean of Corporate and Continuing Education at Community Colleges in MA, OH, PA, SC. Currently President of K&D Consulting
In May of 2019, the U.S. Education Department sent out reminders to universities of the July 1, 2019 deadline to update their websites to include specific information to comply with U.S. Obama-era “gainful employment” regulations. On July 1, 2019 it was revealed that the U.S. Department of Education publishled its final regulation to eliminate the so-called gainful employment rule. However, it may not go away entirely. Proponents of the rule say Congress might later choose to alter the regulation in the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA), which would require the department to again address the issue.
Like a lot of policy discussions of today, the confusion over gainful employment – which ought to be a given – mistakenly focuses on the “supply-side” of the equation. No matter how much tinkering goes on with the rule, if employers and government policy fail to provide the quality jobs with quality compensation levels for which the focused college learning is directed, gainful employment may remain an unachievable goal.
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In the 1990’s, computers and microprocessors began to appear in more and more aspects of a broader range of occupations. The alarms went off that this was going to dramatically and significantly alter the nature of work and the skills required in the future. Education at all levels began to reexamine its learning models and content in an, often, futile attempt to “keep up with change,” never mind get ahead of it.
“Futile” since, concurrent with this transformation, government was compounding this disruption with trade agreements and incentives to a smaller and smaller concentration of corporations that encouraged the exportation of the jobs that education programs were targeting. Additionally, employers imported workers to fill these positions (through visa programs) who would perform the same work at a fraction of the established compensation levels – many of whom attended the same U.S. education institutions.
We unfortunately know now that what followed was a rapid churning of jobs that used to provide income security and fulfilling careers to all levels of the workforce and made it nearly impossible for anyone to enroll in a 2 or 4-year education program confident there will be jobs waiting for them upon graduation. Read More
Is an Apprenticeship Without Structured On-The-Job Training an Apprenticeship?
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
Career and vocation-focused training is a pivotal point in every current and future worker’s life. This world is overwhelmed by forces that make the effort more difficult for the education and training providers, more urgent and critical for the learner, more scrutinized by the employer and constantly measured against time; how long the training takes (which determines costs) and the relevance of the skills acquired to the targeted job which is always moving to the next level of technology. If the training is not “continuously improved” and maintained to be predominantly current and accurate, the graduate may find that jobs for which the new-found skills were targeted now marginally or, even worse, no longer exist.
In theory, apprenticeships offer a promising approach for traditional trades and crafts. As of 2008, more jobs can be registered as apprenticeships with new models accepted by the U.S. Department of Labor. If the program is based on a sound structure and methodology (one that can work for any type of job classification), an apprenticeship capstone – the job-related, employer-based training – would be maintained current and accurate for at least the employer apprenticeship host. Without this component, an apprenticeship experience may be as hollow as some of the for-profit educational chains which are often criticized for high costs and low placement rates.
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“No one would ride in a plane flown by a pilot with only classes and simulator time, have surgery by a surgeon that hasn’t yet operated on a live human, or receive a root canal from a dentist with no “live-patient” time. Certified mastery of the tasks that define each of these jobs is what makes the ‘license to practice’ credible. And there is a difference between ‘a pilot” and ‘the pilot.’ Having a pilot license certifies you to fly planes, not a specific plane; you still have to have training and be certified to apply your craft to flying that plane. With the hybrid approach to apprenticeships, both are accomplished at the same time.”
The term “apprenticeship” has taken on many new meanings in the rush to increase the number of apprentices in the United States. Some 2-year community college programs that have been around a while have been re-branded in an effort to give new life to the same programs of worker development. Some have been thrown together to position an organization for the anticipated flood of grant dollars to find apprentices. Many of these are less “employer-centric” and more “industry-friendly” in spirit. Yet, it is important to remember that the ultimate beneficiaries of an apprenticeship should be the apprentice, the employer, the community, the industry and then the workforce development community, in that order. This should always be the focus and priority.
The process of gaining a “certificate of apprenticeship completion” level status can be an important milestone in an apprentice’s life. Achieving it can be accelerated by the focus and relevancy of related technical instruction and implementing employer-based structured on-the-job training, the latter for which mastery is also the measure of accomplishment for the apprentice and employer. Both components are critical to the quality of the program. Shortening the time without focusing these two components can weaken the program’s credibility and legitimacy. That is why many states require the employer to perform a job/task analysis on the job targeted for registration to ensure the structure, content and process is in place to document and explain what job-tasks have been mastered. That is what is most important to the current employer and any future employers. Read More
Read the full October, 2020 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.
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