Drawing on innovative workforce development efforts around the country, Jobs for the Future (JJF) publications, tool kits, and other resources respond to the challenges to advancement for low-wage workers. Occasional papers in the series Advancement for Low-Wage Workers seeks to elevate discussion of this issue within and outside the workforce…

Comparative analysis of Canadian and U.K. national survey data examined educational attainment by gender, age group, and occupational category; extent of apprenticeship certification; and enrollment patterns for continuing adult education. Canada's higher educational attainment, flexible school-work transition, and higher continuing-education…

While the average age of journeymen in Alberta, Canada is close to retirement, students wanting to learn skilled trades have difficulties finding companies that will hire them, meaning that there may not be enough apprentices and journeymen to replace retiring workers. To address this situation, Keyano College (KC) joined with 10 local businesses…

A strategic plan to strengthen and expand the nation's existing apprenticeship system contains three components: apprenticeship promotion and marketing, national registration and tracking system, and quality. Efforts to promote apprenticeship must involve a two-pronged strategy that seeks both to develop new programs and expose potential program…

This booklet describes programs designed to offer a comprehensive system to improve Florida's work force. Through these programs, students and workers in Florida are prepared to enter the labor force, attend technical training programs, enroll in other postsecondary programs, or upgrade their skills on the job. The following are discussed: the…

The decentralized structure and functions of labor unions and their educational programming are examined, and the support of federal and state legislation and colleges and universities are traced. The four union educational categories are labor education, apprentice education, vocational training, and self-improvement education. Labor education is…

These five research reviews should be useful to educators concerned with developing and improving vocational education programs. Reviews include: (1) Four longitudinal studies of labor market experience conducted by The Ohio State University Center for Human Resource Research, concerning young men 14-24, young women 14-24, men 45-59, and women…

This document is an English-language abstract (approximately 1,500 words) of an Australian Tripartite Mission appointed by the Minister of State for Labor and National Service to examine the methods of training skilled workers in a number of European nations from which Australia is obtaining migrant labor. The Mission summarized its findings of…

The first decade of democracy in South Africa ushered in dramatic social policy reforms. One innovation in initial teacher education emerged through the skills development policy, which introduced learnerships to address South Africa's human resource development needs. South Africa's learnerships have been adapted from countries such as the United…

Inplant training has begun to be used as a strategy to improve access and the relevance of training by the Human Employment and Resource Training (HEART) Trust/National Training Agency (NTA) in Jamaica. Inplant training is presented as a viable, efficient, and relevant method of providing induction and upgrading training for industry. In this…

Since 1976, Mississippi's Itawamba Community College (ICC) and Tecumseh Products Company (TPC) have maintained a cooperative relationship providing the firm with support and services stemming from ICC's Skill/Tech One-Stop Career Center. The support offered to TPC has included the following: (1) since 1976, 105 pre-employment classes have been…

In the face of changing economic conditions and shifts in skill requirements caused by technology, American corporations must integrate learning as an integral part of their functioning. Businesses must implement learning-intensive production, speed up the process of learning how to improve training, and learn how to assess the results of…

This document contains the analysis of public responses to an issue paper published in the Federal Register (December 2, 1987) regarding the U.S. Department of Labor's Apprenticeship 2000 initiative, the purpose of which is to determine the future role of apprenticeship in meeting needs for a skilled work force. The document contains the following…

The Department of Labor's annual report on employment and training requirements, resources, and utilization and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's annual report on facilities utilization and employment and training program coordination are major contents of this report. Chapter I gauges the impact of the year's key economic trends…

A distinctive feature of the British approach until the 1960s was that vocational education and training (VET) should be provided by employers. This is conventionally contrasted with the much more formal state coordinated approach of Germany. The question posed is whether the British style was the "spontaneous order" that results because…