Based on the needs expressed by employers, the skills that students need to make their way through postsecondary education and the labor market itself, and the knowledge that educators have always wanted for their students, we can identify seven areas or domains of competency that are critical for postsecondary students--indeed, for all postsecondary students who attend two-year colleges to improve their chances in the labor force, regardless of whether they have declared themselves occupational or transfer students.
Foundation Academic Competencies
To assure that students have adequate competency in reading, composition, and math to benefit from instruction, colleges typically assess first-time students for placement in the appropriate level of academic courses. State policies and local practices vary about whether placement assessment is required prior to enrollment in any course, or only prior to enrollment in an English or math course. For students with significant skill deficits in reading, writing, mathematics, and sometimes science, community colleges offer a variety of remedial courses (often termed developmental education). These courses are often noncredit, although they entail tuition costs equal to credit courses; they are typically structured to build progressively the skills necessary for successful academic and occupational study.
The most advanced levels of courses in community colleges and technical institutes are those which transfer to four-year institutions. They typically address a range of complex cognitive capabilities, including problem-solving, reasoning, organizing resources, and acquiring and using information. Because these are the skills the SCANS report identifies as most in demand by employers, the prevailing wisdom is that these courses best prepare students for future careers. However, the workplace generally requires applications of these foundation skills in a far different context than is found in the conventional classroom. Carnevale, Gainer, and Meltzer (1990) note a number of contrasts between academic requirements for communication and numeracy and those used in work situations:
In addition, there exists a serious mismatch between how employers use the term "math competency" and the curricular practices of colleges. Employers note that problem-solving and interpretation are required even when working with the most basic levels of calculation, but that advanced math courses are often unconcerned about industry use of mathematics. Conversely, colleges seek to improve student skills by requiring additional advanced math, while ignoring skills needed for manufacturing and for quality control in all industries such as statistics.[2]
A second group of courses meets Associate degree requirements but do not transfer as general education requirements. Some of these are less complex versions of baccalaureate level courses--second-tier courses that introduce and practice skills that are prerequisite to transfer level courses and have titles like Elementary or Intermediate Algebra and Fundamentals of English Grammar and Composition. Another set of nontransfer courses are often called "applied" because they emphasize work-related applications of conventional academic topics, explicitly connecting skills that are learned in the classroom with their uses in everyday practice. In our survey of practices, over half of applied mathematics and communications courses were targeted to technical or business majors; others were either generic to all occupations or career-specific. In these courses, students practice writing business and technical reports; compute profit distribution, depreciation, purchase discounts and mark-ups; or manipulate technical formulas for measurement, circuitry, or machine technology.
Exemplary programs, then, avoid the separation between theory and practice at all levels of communication and calculation instruction, smoothing the direct transfer of skills from the classroom to professional performance. They are characterized by curriculum and teaching strategies that are organized by job tasks, not discrete basic skills; include problems and simulated situations that call for the use of basic skills as they will be used on the job; provide opportunities for complex thinking and problem solving; use actual job materials as instructional texts; provide the opportunity to work and learn in teams; and build knowledge of job content.
Education for Citizenship: The Economic, Political, and Social Aspects of Work
Exposure to the economic, political, and social aspects of life is perhaps the clearest distinction between job training and education. The new "smart workers" of the 20th century are ready to assume political and social, as well as economic roles in the community. The specter of "technopeasants" (Hersch, 1983), technically qualified but lacking an understanding of human issues, urged the Commission on the Future of Community Colleges (1988) to state,
Students in technical studies should be helped to discover the meaning of work. They should put their special skills in historical, social, and ethical perspective. Those in traditional arts and sciences programs should, in turn, understand that work is the means by which we validate formal education. (pp. 20-21)Of all the domains, the greatest disagreements between employers and community college faculty probably involve the relative importance of courses in social and cultural institutions. While roughly half of general education requirements fall in the humanities (e.g., history, geography, sociology, political science, and philosophy), they are regarded by employers as much less important than courses in the more utilitarian areas of English, mathematics, computer literacy, and career management (Armistead, Lemon, & Perkins, 1989). Students also tend to place low value on education for citizenship, based on Cohen's (1988) findings that about half of community college students enroll in vocational programs that do not require general education.
In addition to the low employment benefits, faculty suggest that another reason students fail to enroll in courses related to social and cultural institutions is that those courses emphasize knowledge over performance and rely heavily on reading and writing. As one liberal arts instructor noted,
Many . . . "hands-on" students have not really enjoyed reading or writing, so they tend to feel out of place in a liberal arts course . . . [conversely] introduction of almost any problem is absolutely what brings out the best in these students. In listening, answering questions, and writing, these students can seem very mediocre, but present them with a problem to resolve and they become amazingly alert, adequate, and full of great ideas.Citizenship issues such as the role work plays in society, the causes and effects of technological developments, the evolution of American work ethic concepts, the role of individual workers within an organization, the history of occupations and labor movements, or public policies toward technology and employment blend academic tradition with the occupational interests of students.
Job Specific/Technical Skills
The most common understanding of career preparation describes its most narrow dimension--technical and production skills required to operate equipment and to perform the tasks and procedures of a particular occupation. Most occupational programs in community colleges concentrate on this domain; a portion of each course or program includes laboratory or shop exercises--"hands-on" activities similar to those in specific jobs. However, the American economy is quite large and diversified, industrial and commercial machinery has short cycles of obsolescence, and firms vary in how they organize work, so that the essential skills required in any specific occupation cannot be imparted with any certainty.[3] For these reasons, many industry advisory councils now recommend that colleges train students in generic technical and system utilization skills (described below), and that firms provide the job-specific training appropriate to their technology and production methods.
Finally, an emphasis on technical and production content takes a narrow view of work preparation. In this conception, jobs are viewed as a fixed bundle of tasks and skills, rather than an interaction between the work environment, other employees, and the characteristics of the individual worker (Berryman & Bailey, 1992). Employers define a broader view of work, complaining that schools have strayed too far in the direction of narrow vocationalism, rather than emphasizing the type of generic skills which are described in the next sections (Committee for Economic Development, 1985).
Increasingly, a good deal of job-specific training provided by two-year colleges takes place within Workforce, Economic Development, or Continuing Education Centers, which provide education to particular firms under contract--often referred to as contract education or customized training. One important difference between contract education aimed at currently employed workers and the regular career preparation programs of community colleges and technical institutes is that employers help define the content of contract education. They can, therefore, specify if certain general or "academic" skills are required, and, if certain highly job-specific skills are necessary, they can be taught at the work site. A critical flaw in the community college organizational structure is that feedback about employer expectations and changes in production methods or technology and work-based learning approaches does not naturally flow from contract or customized training to instructors in other divisions of the campus.
Some colleges have adopted Educator-in-the-Workplace programs in which academic and occupational faculty, counselors, and administrators spend unpaid or paid time observing or working at a local firm as a way to familiarize instructors with the everyday applications of academic knowledge so that they can bridge the gap between school-based learning and workplace expectations with their students. [II-45]
Career Exploration
Career exploration is a deliberate process for becoming aware of personal interests and abilities, and ideally introduces students to a variety of career clusters and their education and training requirements, working conditions, common tasks, advantages and disadvantages, and lateral and vertical career ladders. In addition, because the economic returns to postsecondary education depend on how much and which field of study a student completes, individuals need to be well-informed about local and national labor markets--the economic consequences of their decisions (Grubb, 1995b, Ch. 3).
Unfortunately, many students enter community colleges without occupational goals or clear understanding of their own talents; they are "experimenters," using the college to experiment with the options available to them, trying to find a field of study which they might like and where they might excel (Grubb, 1996b, Ch. 2). Until they find an area of interest, they are likely to "mill around," taking coursework with no distinct focus. We suspect that comprehensive community colleges have underestimated the magnitude of this problem, even though instructors refer to it constantly: "experimenters" are unlikely to be highly motivated since they have not yet decided what to do in life and, therefore, create problems for instructors.
Given this issue, we would expect high-quality programs to include self-knowledge of personal attributes; education/training requirements; and the economic consequences of career selection.
Skills Related to Utilizing Systems
The ability to understand how social, organizational, and technological systems function and how to operate effectively within them is often the basis for acquiring rewarding positions and promotion in the high performance workplace. In this environment, understanding how parts of the organization are connected is essential because management and line staff share responsibility to identify trends and anomalies in the company's performance. Employees work in teams to allocate resources (time, capital, material, facilities, and personnel), to monitor quality, and to keep pace with changing technologies and work processes.
These are "new basic skills" for community colleges, and they require innovative teaching approaches and novel content. Rather than being dominated by a lecture approach, which places control of learning in the hands of instructors and relegates students to passive reception of knowledge, programs that make greater use of project and occupationally oriented problems allow students to be actively engaged in problem solving. Teamwork, in which diverse individuals negotiate and teach one another new skills, replaces individual assignments and assessment. Certificate and degree programs which feature work-like simulations or culminating activities help students understand the complex interrelationships among divisions of a firm and between internal and external customers, helping to overcome the piecemeal nature of instruction which occurs in independent courses.
Generic Technical Skills
An array of technical skills required in work can be described as generic--not idiosyncratic to a particular firm or occupation but, rather, transportable among firms. These skills are technical, scientific, or formula tools by which organizational or production systems can be operated and analyzed. Students and employees use these tools to recognize and define problems, organize resources, invent solutions, and track and evaluate results. Although this domain has been omitted from standard lists of employer needs and educational outcomes, generic technical skills offer benefits to students and employers alike, both as skills valuable in their own right and as prerequisites to advancement. Generic technical skills include knowledge of software applications; operation of electronic information equipment and processes; business and recordkeeping procedures; creation and interpretation of data representations such as diagrams, flow charts, graphs, and blueprints; quality assurance techniques; and occupational safety and sanitation standards.
Powerful learning conditions occur when these technical tools are used to design or diagnose organizational systems, as described in the next section. This domain may be introduced and practiced in both academic and occupational programs, and fits well with performance-based assessment using work-related simulations. However, general technical skills sometimes present challenges to academic faculty who may lack experience in their use; advanced study coupled with industry practicum for instructors may be required, or trainers from local firms may be employed as adjunct faculty.
Workplace Organization
Classrooms are typically structured and organized differently than are workplaces, creating a gap between a student's training in school and the expectations of the job. School work is typically organized in units, with the completion of one prerequisite to the next. Tasks are bounded, with explicit criteria and consequences for quality. Assignments are made in advance, with ample time for careful thought and planning. Students set the timing, location, conditions, and tools to use for completing projects--in libraries and homes, at odd hours of the evening or weekend, using a variety of computer hardware and software.
Workplaces are quite different: Equipment is prescribed and is typically located at the work site; tasks are ambiguous and have variable time frames; noise, odor, and activity levels in the environment are uncontrollable; and employees engage in multiple tasks simultaneously--so work is "messy" (Jacobs & Teahen, 1996). On the job, employees become expert through practice: interacting with and learning from co-workers, discovering a variety of solutions for a variety of tasks, and finding shortcuts to make work faster and easier.
Students can master these skills only through experience at an actual work site. At the same time, they can expand their awareness of social issues and interpersonal problems, such as sexual harassment, racial discrimination, unemployment, and economic cycles, and they come to appreciate the different roles and interests of owners, managers, and workers (Weintraub, 1992). But this type of learning requires a connecting mechanism--a formal activity in which students are guided in finding the commonalties between work- and classroom-based learning. Even when students hold part- or full-time jobs, there is rarely any connection made to the college curriculum and so these jobs cannot be exploited for the learning possibilities they offer. While many occupational classes attempt to mimic workplaces, or incorporate labs and workshops that are similar to work tasks, they are unavoidably different from the pace, demands, and complexity of real workplaces. The result is that educational institutions are often mediocre places for learning what "real work" is like.
Exemplary programs conceptualize work-based learning as a laboratory in which concepts and theories introduced in class are applied or observed on the job, while the workplace forms a locus for data collection to be analyzed in class (Heinemann, DeFalco, & Smelkinson, 1991). Connecting activities which guide students to explore or confirm career interests, practice interpersonal skills, and apply skills learned in the classroom to real situations allow students to learn how work is organized and how people behave in work settings.
[2] We thank Larry Smith, Technical Training Director of Teepak Corporation, Danville, Illinois, for pointing this out to us. Perkins (1993, p. 32) refers to curriculum which does not connect to practical application as "quadratic education," as illustrated by the emphasis on quadratic equations and other skills rarely used in everyday practice.
[3] The inability of community colleges-or any other educational institution-to provide current production skills is largely a function of the acceleration of change. Computer-based technology has expanded rapidly, and technical education faculty who received their training in the pre-microcomputer era may have lagged behind. Costs for modernization are enormous, and even when colleges have purchased new machinery or equipment, few have undertaken the staff development necessary to teach advanced technologies. Further, even when training and equipment reflect prevailing processes and standards, obsolescence strikes swiftly. As an example, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers estimates that an electrical engineering degree becomes obsolete within 18 months of its award. See Reid (1995) and DePeitro et al. (1989).