Posts Tagged: Middle-skills

Working Classes? Preparing for Employability

On June 28, the New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) convened members of the Commission on Higher Education and Employability (CHEE) in Providence to discuss concrete ways New England employers, education leaders and policymakers can work together to ensure a successful, equitable workforce future. The Commission comprises high-powered educators, employers, economists, policymakers and...

E-to-E: Spanning Opportunity and Skills Gaps with Education-to-Employment Pathways

New England’s economy has improved, but economic opportunity and skills gaps contribute to slower growth in employment, income and social mobility than experienced in previous recoveries from recessions. With an aging population and relatively slow natural growth rates in the labor force, these gaps put the future of the New England economy at greater risk than that of other regions. There ...

Cyber-Gap

  Within the information technology sector, cybersecurity is considered its own supersector. As information becomes increasingly digitized and a growing array of transactions can be completed in the cloud, people, governments and enterprises become increasingly more vulnerable. This vulnerability is capitalized upon by hackers and other cybercriminals, as evidenced in the high-profile ...

View the Middle-Skills Gap Through a Competitiveness Lens

It’s not every day that one finds Harvard Business School (HBS) advocating for community and technical colleges. Adding its own voice to an increasingly loud refrain on the country’s "middle-skills" gap, HBS’s recent report co-authored with Accenture and Burning Glass, addresses this problem from a unique perspective—that of U.S. competitiveness. Bridge the Gap: Rebuilding America’s M...

To Close Middle-Skills Gap, Improve Community College Outcomes

Over the past four years, there has been intense talk about the middle-skills gap in New England. In Massachusetts—from the governor, often flanked by business leaders, to the commissioner of higher education, to President Obama speaking at a high school in Worcester this past spring—it appears that everyone is concerned with the middle-skills gap. And Massachusetts is not alone. For southe...

Do Employers Value the Bachelor’s Degree Too Much?

The debate over the value of a college education appears to be settled. Not only do employers value employees with a bachelor’s degree, they may actually value them too much. The fact is there’s a dramatic credentials gap in the American workforce between the education levels employers are requesting in job postings and the education levels of workers already in those jobs. In some middle-s...

To Close the Skills Gap, Re-Value the Associate Degree

A number of economists, policymakers, elected officials and employers cite a “skills gap” as the reason the nation is not putting more people back to work. The problem, they reason, is that too many people have the wrong skills for today’s jobs, and colleges and universities are not doing enough to prepare people with the right skills.The idea of a skills gap is tempting to buy i...