Jobs, Education and Adult Training – What Do We Do? The Beginning Of The Path Forward

One of the biggest challenges facing our current economy and our future Industrial Renaissance is the lack of skilled people to fill industrial and technical jobs.

I’ve written about the need to find a way to raise the skill levels of adults who almost have the required skill set as well as provide an alternate path for high school youth towards a craft or trade skill.  But how do we make these changes happen?  If it were simple for individuals or companies or schools to solve, it wouldn’t be the problem it is.

Many different groups have a stake in the success of these changes: individuals, families, communities, community groups, businesses, education entities, government bodies and agencies.  Conceptually, each of these stakeholders may agree, from their perspective, that some sort of consensus solution must be found, but each may have obstacles that prevent them from meeting in the middle.

So, what do we do?

In a given community (this could be a metropolitan area such as Boston or a rural county like Hickman County, Tennessee), the stakeholders need to be identified.  A potentially good way to get off to a bad start, if you are from that community, is to assume you already know who those stakeholders are and jump straight to engaging them on their participation.  Setting assumptions aside, time and energy would need to be spent to communicate and engage with the community: those who readily respond and those who need to be sought out.

This engagement could begin with discussion of the broad topic of jobs, education, and adult skills training.

As a slight aside, one of my blog categories is “13 Sides To Every Story” (and explained in this blog post), and this concept is crucial to the success of identifying and engaging the community and its stakeholders.  The more fully-formed the picture of a community’s stake in jobs, education and training, the more likely each stakeholder will adopt the perspective that overcoming their obstacles to participation is valuable and essential to their community and to themselves.

Trying to solve this issue while seeing only two or three sides of the story, while seemingly much simpler, will most likely, in the end, take far longer because of having to re-do actions taken based upon incomplete data.

Once you have thirteen sides to the story, you can start finding out which stakeholders are willing to address their obstacles to participation.  Some of these obstacles could be conflicts of interest/priorities within an organization, as well as potential conflicts among stakeholder interests/priorities.  Please note these obstacles are barriers to entry to the discussion, not the obstacles to making changes in jobs, education and training a reality – those obstacles will be challenged once the stakeholders are committed to the process.

In a given community, some stakeholders may not be able to get past their obstacles to participate.  If those that are able are sufficient to reach “critical mass”, then the community can move forward, with the hope that those not participating will be able to join at a later time.

The path forward for a community to address jobs, education and adult training requires leadership among the stakeholders.  It also requires strong skills in facilitation and conflict-resolution to help stakeholders get past their own obstacles, so they are ready and able to work together to help their community and themselves.

We can help you get on that path.  Contact us.