To close America’s chronic middle skills gap, U.S. employers have to partner much more actively than in the past with local community colleges. Due to waves of disruptive automation, the nature of middle skills jobs is evolving much faster than educators’ abilities to change curriculum.
Surveys of educators (pdf) and employers (pdf) reveal the disconnect behind this partnership’s underperformance and underscore the need for businesses to take the lead in making it more relevant and effective in three areas: training and education aligned with industry needs, commitments to hire community college students, and sharing of data on the supply and demand for talent.
The nature of work has changed dramatically across industries in the last few decades due to rapid and repeated waves of automation. Nowhere is this more evident than in middle-skills positions—those that require less than a four-year college degree but more than a high school diploma. America’s community colleges have been, and should remain, the education portal through which these workers pass. But increasingly, the ecosystem is in imbalance due to the growing gulf between those who teach and those who hire. Both educators and employers are failing to meet the challenge of the moment: how to create a steady pipeline of workers required to keep the U.S. economy competitive and prospering.
Employers complain they cannot find the talent they need—in terms of quantity, quality, and diversity. Critical middle-skills positions go unfilled. Revenues are lost, and customers are dissatisfied. Costs mount with overtime and turnover, and morale declines due to overwork.
At the same time, some students come out of the community college system only to find that they are unemployable in their field of study or at a living wage. Employers do not find them “workforce ready” and capable of carrying out the more sophisticated technology-promoted tasks associated with middle-skills positions. Too often armed with outdated credentials and burdened with student debt, these graduates discover that they lack the technical and foundational skills needed to secure positions to which they had aspired.
For their part, educators struggle to get employers engaged—in curriculum development; in gaining access to information on how technical and foundational skills for middle-skills positions are changing; in attracting skilled advisers and faculty members to serve at community colleges; and in acquiring the latest equipment and software licenses. Educators also face high hurdles when seeking internships and apprenticeships from local businesses. Real-life work-based learning experiences for community college students are rarely available and often unpaid.
The net result is a middle-skills environment in disequilibrium, underserving the needs of aspiring workers, employers, and ultimately, communities.
In order to diagnose the malaise afflicting the ecosystem, Harvard Business School’s Project on Managing the Future of Work launched a multiyear, multi-method research initiative. It included extensive background research, as well as interviews with community colleges across the country—urban, rural, and suburban—and with a large number of businesses of various sizes and from different industries and regions. The Project then partnered with the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) to conduct the first-ever extensive survey into the state and trajectory of the partnership between community college leaders (educators) and senior executives across industries (employers). The survey was constructed around a framework for collaboration that included three fundamental goals for partnership along with three strategies each for achieving those goals. (See Sidebar I on page 4.) The survey also presented business and community college leaders with a comprehensive list of actions to execute the nine strategies.