Completion With A Purpose: Consumer-Driven Education and Training Policy
A “How To” Playbook for America’s Governors
Every governor understands the urgency around the issue of education and workforce, the strain employers are under to find and retain workers for the jobs of today and tomorrow, and the challenges adults face when determining whether and how to pursue additional skills. More than 7 million American jobs remain unfilled, costing our economy hundreds of millions of dollars every year. We must do better, and creating sound policies to connect learning to work will make a difference.
Key Findings
To drive change, governors and state-level leaders must focus on:
- Ensuring every learner has meaningful, relevant experiential learning as part of their education and training.
- Investing in innovative funding models that better align to the needs and pace of today’s students and workers.
- Better leveraging existing funding streams to provide adult learners the support they need to succeed.
The New Learning Ecosystem for which Strada is advocating is one that truly links educators and employers, makes learning relevant and accessible to today’s learners, and uses real-time data to give students more purposeful pathways to lifelong success. This playbook is designed to help governors and state-level leaders tailor strategies to create a truly consumer-centered system that priorities experiential learning, aligns to the funding needs of today’s student, and more holistically supports adult learners to develop the skills they need to compete in the 21st century.
The old model of education, where first you learn and then you earn, simply no longer reflects the needs of secondary or postsecondary students preparing for increasingly long and varied careers. Schools, higher education institutions, and employers must work together to ensure every learner in every state is both enrollable and employable, with access to work-based learning opportunities that provide the human and technical skills driving the economy.
“Students are telling us they feel underprepared to enter the workforce while employers bemoan the skills of recent graduates. That signals demand for new career advising and work-relevant learning models that support more successful transitions from education to employment.”
William D. Hansen, Strada Education Network
