Community Colleges: Your New Best Friend

The way Americans prepare (or not) to be workers is changing dramatically under our eyes, brought on by technology, the growing complexity of skill needs and the impatience and fickleness of the workforce. American CEOs are very worried, according to a Hult Business School study, with 98% of leaders saying their organization is struggling to find talent (notably 89% also say they avoid hiring recent graduates).

The tried and true methods don’t work anymore. The disconnect between what American born workers want to learn and what employers want to hire against has been thrust into sharp focus in the latest round of HB-1 Visa debates as team DOGE (led by Elon Musk) comes into office vowing to protect the best of immigrant talent. For example, 30% of AI master’s and doctorate holders in the US are foreign born. We can rant about saving the best jobs for “true Americans,” but the reality is that too few are entering the fields where we need them.

For the past century, the four year college degree has been the entry ticket up the corporate ladder. But the communication system between corporate needs and kids deciding what to major in can’t keep up with the pace of demand. It operates like that old parlor game, Telephone, where you whisper the comment to your seatmate and see how it gets mangled by the time it gets around the table. Career ideation today is driven more by Tik Tok than a national or even regional strategic plan.

But there is a hopeful early trend: community colleges are stepping up to meet the moment. These community-focused and sometimes stigmatized learning institutions were having an identity crisis over the last decade as enrollment dropped by a third nationally. But now parts of the sector are staging a comeback. And it’s those colleges that are taking on the mandate of becoming “just in time” brokers for the changing nature of the way Americans want to skill up that are boosting their enrollments.

In northern Virginia, for example, where I grew up, two-thirds of the country’s data flows through the region. Amazon and our local community college got together to design an earn and learn model. These partners are creating specific credentials in data operations, Cloud computing, and cybersecurity to provide AWS a talent pipeline and Virginia residents good jobs. Apprentice Kordell Williams told a gathering I attended recently, “I was loading trucks three years ago. Now I’m the lead technician at my data center and training others.”

In Colorado, the community colleges have addressed shortages of social workers and therapists by joining forces with the healthcare industry and regulators to create a new entry level job category in behavioral health. In Phoenix, the community colleges surveyed employers to determine their most pressing talent pipeline needs and designed with them micro-pathways to develop, for example, precision optics and data analytics entry level employees, as well as IT help desk workers. Granted these are entry level roles, and don’t solve the highly skilled worker challenge, but colleges are bringing more professional workers to the doorstep of industry, where corporate training is also charting innovation.

While much of America is questioning the value of a four year degree and turning to just in time learning, 100 community colleges are designing micro-pathways with employers. The dreaded “enrollment cliff” that has higher education concerned about the falling number of 18 year olds, all but the most elite colleges and four year universities are stepping up their outreach to the business community. The emerging construct for college: a stepladder approach, where learners can come in and out of formal and informal education opportunities throughout their working lives.

But for this construct to work, employers need to take a larger role in three key ways, all of which will help move the country to an earn and learn model to prepare the modern workforce.

1) Employers should help create a skills genome through their industry associations or chambers of commerce. A genome is a complete set of DNA, or genetic material, for an organism. And the hiring ecosystem is certainly a shape shifting organism. Only a few industries have pulled together these skills taxonomies and competency frameworks that could guide training organizations, eager applicants and employers. The employers who have moved to what is being called skills-based hiring, are in the fields where desperation abounds, like cybersecurity, plagued by 500,000 US unfilled jobs. Other fields include advanced manufacturing, green technology.

A master skills map will also provide the data sets needed to create a national GPS service to provide career wayfinding for job applicants. With better visibility to skills, salary levels, career progressions, workers will have a GPS system to guide their careers, and employers will be able to find them, based on the industry certifications they have earned. Google has talked about providing an app like this over the years, but the underlying data is still too spotty. Even AI needs data sets.

2) Speaking of industry certifications, employers find them to be a powerful hiring tool, but by my back of envelope calculations, industry certifications only exist for about 30% of professional job roles. (Often in jobs where a license is required, like health care or food safety. And also IT and cyber, where technical skills are easier to enumerate.) That has to change if we are serious about skills-based hiring and preventing strategic talent gaps that could impact GDP or even US leverage in the global economy.

3) Employers should embrace apprenticeships or other work-based learning with high schools and community colleges as a way to discover and test out talent as early and often as possible. Many employers bristle at the government red tape required for registered apprenticeships, but colleges, like Reach University that helps to certify teachers, are stepping into the game to help. And it will get easier, as more intermediaries set up turn key processes aimed at helping employers qualify. Many employers are embracing more informal work based experiences for learners, through the micro-pathways I mentioned above. It’s a great way to try before you buy.

My Gen Z students are very frustrated with how to get hired in the age of AI. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that even Harvard MBA students are struggling to gain employment. If surveys suggest that Gen Z believes there are many ways besides college to get “educated,” and they do, let’s lean in. Any of us who have had hiring responsibility would agree with my friend, a hiring manager at Goldman Sachs, “The four year degree is a blunt instrument, but it’s all we have.”

Written by Kathleen deLaski.
Have you read?
Countries with the most gold reserves.
World’s Best Public Relations Agencies (Top PR Firms).
Countries with the highest human freedom.
World’s Safest & Most Dangerous Countries For Travelers.