White Paper Draft
Ed's WorkForceDevelopmentMap
Assignment:
Write 2 - 3 paragraphs about what you think of the Workforce Development Map. Where do you see opportunities? What are your experiences? Where do you see your work on the map? What ideas would you like to see implemented? What solutions do you think should be prioritized? Where do you think the gaps are? Why do you think things are the way they are?
If you don't have time to learn the wiki for this assignment, just drop your notes in an email to Betsey Merkel at bmerkel@weatherhead.cwru.edu in an email.
Also see Meeting Notes at:
http://osed.smartworkspaces.com/index.php/Main/OurMeetingNotes
Entries:
09-08-04 Ernest Johnson, CMHA: "With Cleveland Ohio leading Big Cities in America with people living in poverty more innovative initiatives needs to be designed and implemented that prepare people for participation in the labor market. More career option programs offering contextual learning opportunities would be helpful in getting more people employed. Career Option School to Work programs for in school and out of school youth. These type of programs have a theoretical component (school/training based learning) which is reinforced by the experiential (work based learning) In addition to the above a more comprehensive job creation system is need which includes skills training for residents and tax incentives for potential employers."
09-25-04 Martha Shaw, Instructional Designer:Good habits are hard to break, and so are bad habits. A lot of our attitudinal habitual behavior is passed on from parent to child and enhanced by teacher to child, mentor to child, and peer group to child. Our demonstrable small, early successes that are accompanied by enthusiastic praise, accolades, and encouragement lead to a sustainable mental model of ourselves. By understanding that we have succeeded at small things in our early years, we build a bank of self-confidence and a 'can-do' attitude to tackle larger projects later on.
One of the separators of economic "class" in society seems to be accompanied by a documented parallel that households of perceived economic "hardship"
also tend to follow a trend toward being less verbally communicative, and meaningfully communicative, in interactions between parent/elders and the child.
It has been documented that negative or discouraging comments are much more common in perceived "hardship" households, and we know that people who have faced an onslaught of discouragement in their lives -- especially if this discouragement has been consistent in their youth -- are often less confident in their own abilities, sometimes even ignorant of their actual real abilities, and often see themselves as somehow "less able" to be successful than contrasting groups.
We can extrapolate the concept of a child emerging from a less verbal or negatively verbal environment. Imagine that children emerging into the social and economic marketplace who come from economically un-leveraged households may also be entering the marketplace with a distinct lack of command of the leveraged verbal, conceptual, and strategic tools that many of their more "enriched" peers take for granted.
Children emerging from an environment where there has been a lack of cooperation between extended family to leverage their communal resources may emerge into society ignorant of how to leverage (and build, and build-on) extensible networks and resources.
Children emerging from an environment where there has been habitual terse communication or lack of effective complex strategic discussion often are ignorant of how to marshal their resources, both personal and social, into helpful strategic discussion that leads to an evaluation of effective applied problem-solving technique.
Children, who emerge from an environment where their beleaguered parents lived officially undocumented "shadow lives" due to a fear of drawing too much attention to themselves and their sources of income from official society gatekeepers such as government assessors, may emerge into society emulating -- and never pausing to evaluate -- many unconsciously copied "shadow life" patterns such as declining to register to vote, declining to participate fully in "official" citizen documentation, and in general exhibiting extended habitual transient behaviors. In a society that becomes more lengthily documented every day, such transient behaviors tend to sideline full and valuable civic contribution from these citizens, and they also deprive the citizen of much of the rich leverage available to them as adults. As well, to employers who are accustomed to being well-documented, these transient behaviors may appear peculiar, untrustworthy, or misunderstood.
I've never been poor, only broke. Being poor is a frame of mind.
Being broke is only a temporary situation. ~ Mike Todd, businessperson and movie producer
Lots of people don't have much money. The United States is filled with people who have checking account balances at the end of the month of $34.95, from CEOs? and entrepreneurs to farmers and bus drivers. Living beyond our means has become a national pastime. So the key to performance may not be simply dollars as a distinction, but perhaps the self-confidence, or acquired sense of self-command or self-direction, of the person who possesses that checkbook.
There are people whose checking account balance is $34.95 who can tell you which is the olive fork, and which is the cheese fork. There are people whose checking account balance is $34.95 who speak impeccable Latin, ancient Greek, or ancient Egyptian. Many liberal arts graduates around the world may teeter on that paycheck to paycheck chalkline their entire lives, yet few of them wander off to live under bridges, implode into disaster, or dissolve on a regular basis into insolvency. Why is this?
The future belongs to...people
who know where the knowledge is,
how to get it,
how to think about it,
and how to turn it into better work, better products, better lives.
Rexford Brown
As neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night ever stopped the postal service, not terrorism, or war, or fractious partisan bickering will ever stop the rising merge of globalism in our business and society. The connections are there, and the resources are at your fingertips on a googled web page. So the only questions left when facing the challenge of matching up the skills of each unique individual with a great learning or career opportunity is:
How do I identify where my happiness-path lies? And, once I identify it, how to I hook up with it and maximize my opportunity?
The central core value of enrichment in lifetime learning is merely having more facility to know yourself a little bit better, and being more able to sift out desired opportunities from the flotsam of life on Earth as it flows by in seconds of time. The more you are enabled to seek and sift for opportunity, the more opportunities you will discover. But if you never start enacting the habits of a purposeful search, you may never direct your own search. Instead, you'll be buffeted by the fates into some slot by act of chance.
It seems logical to assume that people who leave school before graduation leave for a real and logical reason. And it seems pretty obvious that, at some prior point, they have identified school as a real waste of their valuable time. Why is that?
Despite a general assumptive connect between school and learning, anyone who has attended school can vouch for the fact that school is a bureaucratic system of control, behavior modification, and obedience as much as it is lauded to be a launchpad of learning.
You're not freely invited to learn in school. Like an actor who spends most of her time looking for a job as opposed to actually acting, a student in school spends a great deal of their time first obeying the rules before they get an opportunity to learn anything. And even when that learning window opens, the learning topic is usually pre-arranged. In school, you don't get to learn what you want to learn on demand -- instead you get to learn what someone else has decided that you will learn at that hour of that day. In other words, you get to learn what's important to someone else. Not what's important to you.
For the people who leave school, what was on the learning menu for prior days obviously did not appeal. This lack of appeal can be hypothesized as either the dropout didn't want to learn anything, or the dropout didn't want to learn any more of a set topic, or the dropout saw the school menu as inherently lacking a meaningful private purpose, so the dropout voted with their feet and left the building.
We might argue that on the job, a new worker may find the same strictures for orderly behavior that are found in school rules. But there's a difference -- on the job, you're getting paid to be bossed around. You're not volunteering your time away for free.
Especially for people who might find school frustratingly difficult, or for people who are very unclear as to what denotes their intellectually-stimulating future happiness, rules and regulations perceived to be the demonic inventions of the torturer, or the illogical picayune pettiness of the professional lame bureaucrat, prove infuriating and often unjust.
Your ability to put up with a substantial level of baloney being slung at you in your environment is directly proportional to your personal drive and desire to wade through the sludge of any perceived temporary insanity towards your directed goal. For people without directed goals, and no stated aim, a reason to wade through sludge is fairly hard to find.
Alas, great customer service is not usually an academic core value, because the students are not seen as the customers -- the parents, government, and community-at-large are the customers. We might more fairly compare the general empowerment level of students in school to the power level of the average present-day Iraqi in Occupied Iraq.
Therefore, it only becomes more pertinent to instill and cultivate in students a sense of self-direction, and self-knowing, which they may or may not ever receive at home.
Secondly, the more we can guarantee and insure that there are well-lit paths to higher and varied levels of learning beyond high school that are perceived by students as very accessible, achievable, relevant and purposeful, the more attractive these paths might appear.
Right now, in life after high school, higher education is expensive education. And if you lack the money to pay for it, you land in a bizarre form hell of sheaves of paper and administrative paperwork that is daunting, bewildering, depressing, and overwhelming even to motivated students! There is also very little regulation in place to rein in unscrupulous recruiters who sign up students for rackety learning programs of little actual value, or who prey on gullible students to sign up for usury-level interest rate loans that turn into years-long economic drag-downs once the student has dropped out in despair, or the program has folded.
Right now, as I see it, the United States gives a sincere lip service enunciating the glory of learning, while in actuality providing indifferent viable services to students in need of some real, reliable up-by-your-bootstraps assistance. There is still an outdated allegiance to a "personal ownership" of making your own way through the many minefields that dot the landscape of acquiring education, and if you fall into a pitfall, then it's caveat emptor, let the buyer beware.
Meanwhile the world at large is developing businesses that will demand not just a basic level of skills, but a complex layering of experienced, exercised, flexible and conditioned minds for the extremely complex technologies that will pervade the global future. Well-paying jobs to be created will demand hybrid education in multiple fields of technical and humanistic expertise, internships, global social and navigational skills, and skilled strategic decision-making based on arrays of data. Technocrats will also need diplomacy -- creative diplomats will need some technical mastery to adequately supervise 24-7 product teams of workers around the globe. The pace of regular business will continue to increase in complexity and statistical forecasting, while geospatial challenges that plagued old-fashioned Henry Ford grow simple as the officemate next door or the next cubicle down. Computerization and robotics will add to the fray, as will off-planet exploration and development.
If we don't build those minds in the United States, then other countries will assuredly build them elsewhere, and then we'll be cleaning out data banks at night for the "real workers" who come in remotely from across the world in the morning. But right now, it takes multilevel higher education creative development, on-demand flexibility, multimedia, and investment to be a master, while it takes little continued investment to be the future's cleaning lady.
The only thing I feel more sure about is that, at heart, everybody would like to learn something, and understand more, to help them deal proactively with their world, coming both today and tomorrow.
"A well-formed mind is better than a well-stuffed mind." -- old proverb
Some interesting links:
Tom Carroll: Constructing a New Culture of Learning:
http://www.centerdigitaled.com/converge/?pg=magstory&id=3419
Deschooling Society / Creating Learning Communities:
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/livingontheland/2003-July/000045.html
09-30-04 Bill Callahan, Cleveland Digital Vision: Dave Megenhardt suggests that I post something about computer literacy and where it goes on Ed's map.
There's growing consensus that "computer literacy" (or "technology and information literacy") is a foundation element of all kinds of workforce training, akin to high-school level literacy and numeracy.
Computer literacy must be distinguished from training in specific IT job skills. A computer-literate person doesn't necessarily know how to replace a hard drive, but she knows what a hard drive does and how to manage storage capacity. She may not be an expert MS Excel user, but she knows the basics of spreadsheet use. A computer-literate person is broadly familiar with the hardware and software elements of personal computing, able to use the Internet effectively and safely, and ready and able to learn additional skills as needed.
The two certifications of core computer literacy now in widespread use are the Internet and Core Computing Certification (IC3) and the International Computer Driver's License (ICDL).These are increasing viewed within the training industry as gateway certifications for all kinds of more advanced training.
So a short, functional definition of computer literacy for our purpose could be:
1) ability to pass the IC3 or ICDL certification tests, and
2) ongoing use of basic PC applications including WWW and email.
This is, in fact, the definition that local Community Technology Centers are beginning to put into common use, along with our partners in the schools, at Tri-C, and the business and workforce leadership. Mayor Campbell's new "Digital Community Initiative", for example, is built around twin objectives of getting thousands of low-income adults IC3-certified and getting them affordable home computers and high-speed Internet access.
Where computer literacy goes on the map:
First, as an element of high school graduation. (CMSD is getting ready to start using the IC3 as a standard in its vocational schools.)
Second, as an element of every upward path for adults who haven't already achieved it. This is just one of those things that need to be addressed by workforce and education programs at whatever point we find people.
Third, as an entry point. The map doesn't address the issue of entry points, i.e. how the community gets our members into the system and moving toward careers. But a key aspect of computer literacy training is its role as a community recruiting tool for mobility programs aimed at dependent and working-poor adults. Community computer training programs in low-income neighborhoods typically attract hundreds of people through simple word of mouth, especially when they include affordable computer ownership options. Poor people, like the rest of us, value computer knowledge and ownership for its own sake. This makes Community Technology Center programs a very effective way to get lower-income, undereducated residents into community spaces where they can see and access other "learning and earning" opportunities -- GED, college entry, financial literacy, job search or entrepreneurial assistance, etc.
09-30-04 Bill Callahan, Cleveland Digital Vision: One separate point about the map in its current form... it needs an arrow pointing from the "entry-level/working poor" circle back to certifications and college. In fact, you could probably just re-route the existing "working poor to career" arrow through the higher education cluster, because that's the path most people are going to have to take.
10-20-04 Herb Crowther, TransTech (hcrowther@capling.com):
TransTech and its associates propose to establish the Cleveland Transportation Academy to create jobs for Greater Cleveland residents.
There are hundreds of truck driver job openings per year in Northeast Ohio. The average starting pay is $30,000 and experienced drivers can earn $50-60,000 per year (or even $100,000 if they own their rig). There is high annual driver turnover at most but not all trucking firms. Our proposed business model includes several features we believe can minimize turnover among our graduates and provide transportation industry career paths for them. The Urban League offered to help supply and evaluate candidates, and provide other “intake” services.
We have a time-sensitive opportunity to partner with one of the country’s largest trucking firms. If we can move fast enough and provide appropriate incentives this company is willing to locate a new school in Cleveland that they would otherwise locate at one of their operating facilities in Indianapolis, Indiana or Memphis, Tennessee. We believe we could subsequently expand the school offerings to serve other trucking firms, provide other commercial driver training certifications, as well as fleet management, logistics, and automotive and diesel repair.
The general location requirements of the business include proximity to the freeway (for the 5 to 40 acre driving track and yard) and possibly Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) if Tri-C provides incubator space for the simulator facility. It is likely we could support storefront or satellite office presence with partner organizations in several neighborhoods throughout the City of Cleveland. We also see an opportunity to use the school to recruit new residents to the City.
We have performed a significant amount of exploratory work on an at-risk basis (as an in kind contribution) to achieve a basic validation of the school opportunity. Using our team’s transportation industry connections and our team’s portfolio of skills we estimate that with a $30,000 grant we could complete the business plan, negotiate agreements with Schneider National and other collaboration partners such as Tri-C, and identify tentative sources of grants, equity and debt to capitalize the school.
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