The skill standards movement has emerged from a conviction that technology and market changes have caused significant modifications in the types of skills and behaviors needed by workers on-the-job. This conviction has motivated a broad education reform movement that involves changes in curriculum and pedagogy and seeks to tie education more closely to the emerging needs of the workplace. Industry-based skill standards are believed to be a crucial component of that movement. Advocates not only argue that skill standards will strengthen the educational system, but that they will also become a critical part of reform efforts in the workplace. Working together, educators and employers will get a chance to reexamine not only their relationships with each other, but also activities within their own institutions. As a result of the growing conviction that skill standards can make a significant contribution to improving both education and work, the Goals 2000: Educate America Act passed in 1994 established a National Skill Standards Board to promote the development of a national system of voluntary industry-based skill standards. Even earlier, starting in 1992, the U.S. Departments of Labor and Education established twenty-two pilot projects to help lay the groundwork for a national system.
The fundamental goal of this report is to contribute to the development of a skill standards system. It does that in several ways. First, it provides some basic information about the skill standards movement and the pilot projects that will be helpful for groups trying to introduce or improve standards systems. Second, it seeks to raise some basic questions about the purpose of such a system. We argue that there are short-term goals which focus on improving the flow of information among schools, students, and employers. There are also long-term goals that place skill standards within the context of broad efforts to reform schools and workplaces. While both sets of goals are important, the nature and governance of skill standards systems designed to meet the long-term goals may differ sharply from systems focused on the short-term goals. Our report is designed both to clarify the tradeoffs involved with achieving those goals and to evaluate the extent to which the current efforts to build skill standards systems address either the long- or the short-term goals.
In broad terms, our conclusions suggest that the skill standards movement has the potential to serve the long-run goals associated with innovation and reform in schools and workplaces. Nevertheless, many aspects of the current efforts remain rooted in past notions of skills. The conceptualization of skill which serves as a basis for many of the skill standards projects are more closely associated with traditional rather than more innovative approaches to organizing work. To be sure, there remain many traditionally organized workplaces, and systems of standards based on current or past notions about skills may be useful to those workplaces. To a large extent, however, the skill standards movement has arisen as part of an effort to bring the country's education system more in line with emerging, rather than traditional, needs of the workplace. This suggests that at least the objective of designing a system consistent with skills and behaviors needed in innovative workplaces must be considered explicitly.
The more traditional characteristics of the emerging skill standards systems are partly the result of past practice. Project managers have, for the most part, adapted traditional methods for analyzing jobs and developing standards. It is not surprising that those methods, developed in earlier decades when the demands of the workplace were different, are in conflict with emerging needs. Many managers are aware of this limitation and of the practical barriers to skill standards development and implementation. Indeed, the same factors that create a greater need for skill standards systems also make them more difficult to establish.
There are reasonable arguments for improving the system of skill standards and certification. For example, the General Accounting Office (GAO) (1993a) argues that such a system would help employers identify qualified workers, save money on applicant screening, aid in recruiting, and improve the public perception of firms. A better certification system would indicate to students what they must learn and provide a focused motivation for acquiring the particular skills that they will use in the workplace. Graduates would also have better access to a national labor market (if the certification is recognized nationally), thus promoting their geographic and occupational mobility. And prospective students, employers, and the public would be better able to assess the effectiveness of educational institutions or training programs.
While these arguments make sense, their force does not depend on current economic conditions. Indeed, they would have been equally logical at any time over recent decades. They do not explain why standards have emerged so prominently in the current policy discussion.
Although skill standards and certification are now a fundamental part of the current education reform strategy, ten years ago they were entirely absent from the reform discussion at the national level. A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) and the cascade of reports that followed its publication did not emphasize skill certification. This dramatic increase in the prominence of the issue gives the impression that skill standards are something that U.S. policymakers have recently discovered in Europe and Japan.[1] As two prominent commentators argue, "The United States has virtually no experience with a large-scale system for certifying the skills of new entrants or experienced workers" (Berryman & Rosenbaum, 1992, p. 51).
But this impression is misleading. Although one could argue about the meaning of "large-scale," there is in fact a long history of the development of standards systems in the U.S. For example, the competency-based education strategy (CBE), which received widespread support during the 1970s, appears to share many features of the current movement. CBE requires formal exit requirements to be stated in clear and explicit terms. Outcome goals are designed to be easily attached to concrete behaviors and expected performance requirements that were known and agreed upon. CBE advocates call for collaborative decision making by all those interested in students' educational progress. The system is intended to make individuals aware of when, how long, and how often opportunities for both instruction and evaluation will be provided (Spady, 1977). Supporters also indulged in some of the enthusiastic hyperbole that appears to be common today. One CBE proponent declared in 1977 that "Very few educational concepts in recent years have had as great an impact on educators and on society as Competency-Based Education" (Knaak, 1977, p. 1). Furthermore, CBE continues to be used by many educators.
There continues to be a profusion of systems in the U.S. for setting skill standards and for certifying their achievement, as a recent report on skill standards by Joan Wills and her colleagues (1993a, 1993b, 1993c) makes abundantly clear. They report on dozens of programs in a wide variety of occupations. Many organizations, partnerships, and associations in the public and private sectors have been developing certification processes for many years. And professional and craft occupations have extensive and well-developed systems.
The arguments in favor of skill standards and the extensive experience that American educators already have with certification systems raise two questions. First, why has the issue gained such national prominence only recently? After all, as we have pointed out, many of the arguments for a stronger system of skill standards do not depend on the current educational or economic environments. Second, why are the current systems considered inadequate?
One of the most obvious distinctions between some of these countries and the U.S. involved the systems of skill standards and certification. A system of standards would appear to address directly the most serious perceived problems in the U.S. system. Standards would identify for students what they needed to learn, they would signal the skills and capabilities of students to employers, and if employers took them seriously, they would provide a focused motivation for students. All of this would facilitate the transition from school to work.
Thus, the recent preoccupation with skill standards emerges particularly from a concern about the economic performance of nonprofessional and nonmanagerial workers. The traditional system is no longer adequate for the new demands placed on these workers in their new "professionalized" roles. This "mismatch" reduces the overall productivity of the economy and reduces the standard of living of individual workers. The system of skill standards is a crucial part of a broader reform strategy designed to promote innovative approaches to production and human resource management ("high-performance work organization") and to bring the education and school-to-work transition systems more in line with demands of the economy.[4]
[2] See, for example, Kochan and Osterman, 1994; Appelbaum and Batt, 1994; and Bailey, 1993.
[3] Forty years ago, sociologists argued that industrialization implied a general professionalization (Nelson & Barley, 1994). In an argument that seemed to foreshadow the discussion in the 1990s, Foote (1953) predicted that work would no longer be segmented into discrete tasks, but would become more collaborative, based on shared skills and knowledge (p. 371). Later, though, in a well-known article "The Professionalization of Everyone?" Wilensky (1964) attacked this view, arguing that the division of labor would remain such that professional occupations would continue to be distinct. This perspective seemed to dominate thinking for the next three decades.
Perhaps the current discussion is simply a repeat of optimistic speculations of a half a century ago. But Nelson and Barley (1994) suggest that as a result of the "shift towards horizontalism or the establishment of increasingly collaborative work relations" (p. 23), it may be that Foote (1953) and his colleagues were right after all. To some extent, this hinges on the strength of the shift from traditional to high-performance work (or horizontalism as Nelson and Barley put it). Research suggests that a significant minority of firms have introduced some important workplace innovations (Kochan & Osterman, 1994). Moreover, the current economic conditions do seem to provide a stronger basis for organizational innovation than conditions in previous decades (Bailey, 1993).
[4] On the other hand, there is a more pessimistic view of the underlying social function of skill standards. The well-publicized downsizing of many corporations suggests that more or less long-term employment with one employer is likely to be less common in the future. If workers are expected to change employers more frequently, then it is more important that they have an identifiable and portable credential. The job mobility that this provides is more important in a more fluid and less structured labor market with less job security.