Since its inception, agricultural education has been instrumental in equipping secondary graduates with the necessary skills to be successful in their future career endeavors. While this has remained a priority over time, many employers claim that secondary graduates do not possess the necessary skills to be successful in the workforce. This study…

Soft skill acquisition is a topic of career readiness for high school students. Soft skills are known as noncognitive skills, life skills, or people skills and are important to develop in high school students for career readiness. Organizational leaders understand technical and professional skills without developed soft skills do not achieve…

Extended learning opportunities (ELOs) have gained traction in Maine and nationally as a means for students to develop "college, career, and life" skills through out-of-classroom experiences. As ELOs are not structured or regulated by the state, they vary significantly in range, scope, and access. This report offers insight into…

Nationally, the labor market is calling out for workers to fill the increasing number of job vacancies, but those qualified, skilled, and able to fill them are limited in supply or retiring in large numbers. As America's key industries offer high salaries in return for candidates with the necessary skills and credentials to fill their vacancies,…

Workforce development and career and technical education (CTE) have long provided reliable pathways to middle skill jobs and a gateway to the middle class. Given recent changes in middle skills jobs, the education landscape, and federal policy priorities, the role of CTE in the U.S. educational landscape is evolving more rapidly, encompassing a…

Career Technical Education (CTE) at the high school level is a sequence of courses that prepares students with the academic and technical knowledge and skills needed to either continue their studies or enter the workforce after high school (Gray & Lewis, 2018). While there is research regarding how high school CTE programs support academics,…

In Midwestern high schools, English language learners (ELLs) who are enrolled in Career and Technical Education (CTE) classes transition from school to the workforce at unacceptably low levels. This loss of opportunity has been linked to CTE instructional practices. The purpose of this study was to explore the instructional practices used by CTE…

Many have called for greater alignment between education systems and the workforce, more equitable access to career-oriented experiences, and new policy approaches that will enable all individuals to successfully enter and thrive in the evolving labor market. Overall, education leaders at all levels must commit to new policy solutions that offer…

The main goal of the secondary vocational education system is to fulfill the staffing needs of the Russian economy. The only way that we can effectively deliver on this objective is by ensuring there is a well-coordinated and stable system in place that allows vocational schools to cooperate with businesses. This article reviews how this…

The Committee for Economic Development (CED) believes the nation must focus on effective pathways to help students from all backgrounds and educational attainments successfully transition to careers as members of a skilled US workforce. To further that goal, this report looks at three tools to better serve those students whose initial entry into…

In order to maintain the United States' global competitiveness and create new and innovative solutions to solve global challenges, more and diverse numbers of STEM graduates need to be attracted and retained in technical disciplines (Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century: An Agenda for American Science and Technology,…

The Linking Learning to Careers (LLC) program offered high school students with disabilities an individualized and targeted approach to strategically plan for their futures. The Vermont Division of Vocational Rehabilitation (DVR) designed LLC to build on its usual services for high school students to emphasize unpaid and paid work-based learning…

Postsecondary workforce development is one of the major innovations of the modern community college. In a workforce approach, curriculum is driven by the needs of local industry, course delivery systems are sufficiently flexible to meet the diverse needs of students and industry, and students experience a mixture of work-based and classroom…

Ready, Connected, Supported: A Framework for Youth Workforce Development and the YES Project, a working paper from the Center for Promise--the research arm of America's Promise Alliance--provides an overview of the "Ready, Connected, Supported" framework--the backbone of America's Promise Alliance's YES Project, a national campaign to…

The career readiness of high school students has been a longstanding issue that has received renewed attention in recent years. To document an approach to promoting career readiness in the United States, we conducted an exploratory case study of a distinguished information technology career academy. Using the premises of capital building as a…