Corporate Voices Newsletter - September 2009

President Obama’s American Graduation Initiative: Community Colleges and Employers Working Together to Build Skills
The Best Companies for Hourly Workers List
Corporate Voices Releases Report on Employer-Sponsored Workforce Readiness Training
A New Face at Corporate Voices

 

President Obama’s American Graduation Initiative: Community Colleges and Employers Working Together to Build Skills

In an increasingly competitive global economy, America’s success will depend on the skills of our workforce. And the skill level required to compete is rising. In the coming years, jobs requiring at least an associate degree are projected to grow twice as fast as those requiring no college experience.

To meet this economic imperative, President Obama has asked every American to commit to at least one year of higher education or career training. He has set a new national goal – by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.

Many of those graduates will come from community colleges, which are a vital and undervalued asset. But unfortunately, nearly half of students who enter community college to earn an associate degree or to go on to a bachelor’s degree fail to reach their goal six years later. As the President has said, that’s a tragedy for these students and a disaster for our economy.

It’s not enough to crank out more degrees; we also need to make sure that those degrees translate into real skills that will lead to good jobs. A recent survey by Corporate Voices and other partners found that nearly a quarter of employers found skill deficiencies among the two-year college graduates they had hired. We can do better.

That is why the President announced the American Graduation Initiative, which will reinvest $12 billion in savings from student loan reforms into strengthening and improving our nation’s community colleges.

There are three core elements of the President’s initiative:

• Community college challenge fund: Too often, community colleges lack the resources to improve instruction and partner with businesses that are ready to hire. This fund will support innovative programs that combine basic skills with occupational training, allow dual enrollment with high schools and universities, and offer students comprehensive, personalized services to help them plan their careers and stay in school.

• Modernizing facilities: Most community colleges were built several decades
  ago, and are struggling to keep up with rising enrollments. We will invest in the modern facilities and equipment needed to train students in technical and other growing fields.

• Creating a new online skills laboratory: New, high-quality online courses will be carefully developed and broadly distributed, to extend skill-building opportunities to rural areas and working adults with unpredictable schedules.

The President has asked Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis to work together on this initiative, so that both the education and workforce investment systems are integrally involved. This initiative is about breaking down government silos, not building them up. Congress has already acted to move this proposal forward. The House Education and Labor Committee passed a bill that included the President’s initiative in July, and we expect the Senate to consider it this fall.

We are facing tough economic times, but with community colleges and employers working together, we can rebuild the capacity of America’s workforce and successfully compete for the jobs of the future.

--Heather Higginbottom serves as Deputy Director of President Obama’s Domestic Policy Council.

 

The Best Companies for Hourly Workers List

Corporate Voices for Working Families is partnering with Working Mother Media to recognize the best companies for hourly workers and to highlight best practices throughout the American business community.

The application for Best Companies for Hourly Workers is now available online and we invite all of our partner companies and others to apply. To apply, click here.

Companies included on the Best Companies for Hourly Workers list will be featured in the May 2010 issue of Working Mother magazine and honored at a celebration in New York City.

Public or private for-profit companies are invited to apply, including companies, corporations, and autonomous subsidiaries that offer their own benefits program and report to their own CEO.

Applicants must also meet the following requirements:

1. Must have a minimum of 500 employees in the U.S.
2. Total U.S. employee base must total at least 50% hourly workers

The deadline to submit an application is October 16, 200.

We are excited that Working Mother Media will kick off the Working Mother WorkLife Congress Conference with a preconference on Oct. 27 focusing on key work/life benefits issues facing companies with hourly employees. For more information on the 2009 WorkLife Congress, please click here. 

Corporate Voices Releases Report on Employer-Sponsored Workforce Readiness Training

Corporate Voices for Working Families partnered with The Conference Board, the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD), and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) on a new report that shows U.S. employers continue to struggle with an ill-prepared workforce, finding new hires lack crucial basic and applied skills.

For the most part, employer-sponsored readiness training is not successfully correcting these deficiencies, according to the report, The Ill-Prepared U.S. Workforce: Exploring the Challenges of Employer-Provided Workforce Readiness Training.

“The results of this study demonstrate how critical it is for companies to be more strategic and focused on efforts such as providing internships and working in partnership with community colleges on workforce readiness initiatives to prepare new entrants before they enter the workplace,” says Donna Klein, Executive Chair, “It is a losing strategy for employers to try to fill the workforce readiness gap on the job. They need to be involved much sooner to prepare new employees to succeed,” Klein said.

The report draws from a survey of 217 employers about their training of newly hired graduates of high school and two- and four-year colleges. The survey, conducted during 2008, included employers in manufacturing; financial services; non-financial services; and education, government, and other non-profits. 

Almost half of respondents said they have to provide readiness training for new hires – and the majority rate their programs as only “moderately” or “somewhat successful.”

The report, which includes five case studies of successful workforce readiness programs sponsored by Bank of America and Year Up, CVS Caremark and TJX Companies, Harper Industries, Northrop Grumman, and YUM! Brands, finds that:

• Many companies say new hires lack crucial critical-thinking and creativity skills – but don’t offer related training.
• Employers’ inability to detail their spending on remedial programs makes it impossible to assess the true costs of an ill-prepared workforce to their own – or the economy’s – bottom line.
• Employers with successful workforce readiness training incorporate:
  • A culture committed to training and thorough job-readiness screening.
  • Strategic partnerships with local colleges, and a focus on integrating training with job-specific skills and career development.
  • Constantly re-evaluation to align training with company needs.
• Employers should:
  • Track the cost and quality of training programs.
  • Help focus philanthropic dollars and public-policy discussions on the need to link K-12, technical-school and college education to the workforce readiness skills that employers need.

In July, the Obama administration announced a community college initiative that would boost graduation rates, improve facilities and develop new technology. America’s community colleges are an excellent provider of skills workers need for our current and future job market. To read more about the initiative and the administrations plans, please read Heather Higginbottom’s guest article above.

The Ill-Prepared U.S. Workforce: Exploring the Challenges of Employer-Provided Workforce Readiness Training is available on the Corporate Voices for Working Families website.

 

A New Face at Corporate Voices

Sara Toland serves as the Senior Manager for Workforce Readiness, Business
and Community Engagement. Sara’s career has been focused on her desire to ensure that all children and youth succeed in life. Her new role at Corporate Voices will continue that focus as she manages the National Partnership Role of the organization in the Ready by 21 work. She is looking forward to working with the Corporate Voices member companies, the Forum for Youth Investment and other National Ready by 21 Partners in engaging communities and businesses to ensure that youth are ready for workforce.

Sara most recently worked at the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at Georgetown University as the Program Manager for Certificate Programs, which targeted senior level policy leaders across the country and engaged them in cross systems work. She also previously served as the Special Assistant to the Executive Director at the Governor’s Office for Children in Baltimore, Maryland. Through this position, she played a critical role in coordinating the members of the Governor’s Children’s Cabinet and their staff on cross system collaboration and services on the state and local levels.

Sara was recently married and resides with her husband in Sterling, Virginia.