SRI Education and partners conducted a 6-year study of community college-employer collaboration to improve the design and delivery of workforce education programming.
In the United States, headlines regularly describe the “skills gap” between what employers want and what workers can do. Historically, closing this gap has relied on an informal system of community college workforce educators meeting occasionally with industry advisory panels. However, the disruptive forces of global job competition and the rise of the knowledge economy have catalyzed a decade of experimentation into new forms of collaboration between employers and college educators. The result is a set of more active approaches to employer-college partnership that aim to restructure and accelerate the U.S. workforce education system.
To date, evaluation of these innovative partnerships has focused on productivity metrics. While measures of how many instructional materials are developed and how many students have been enrolled, certified, and employed are important, to truly accelerate and deepen workforce education reform across the U.S., more knowledge is needed.
To address this knowledge gap, SRI Education has developed the Workforce Education Implementation Evaluation (WEIE) framework with funding from the National Science Foundation. The WEIE framework provides a set of tools that can be used by researchers, evaluators, and practitioners to measure the key qualities of employer-college partnership implementation. It includes tools for:
- Understanding regional labor market needs
- Planning and monitoring the quality of employer-college collaborations
- Improving the quality of the instructional programming to prepare students to have transferable workforce skills
The WEIE goal is to engage more funders, researchers, practitioners, and evaluators in building a deeper and more democratic understanding of practice in the workforce development field. The WEIE framework’s core elements—the research brief, toolkit, and links to published research—are available on this website.
The work focused on the following objectives:
- Describe partnership strategies
- Characterize approaches for aligning workforce programs with local labor market demands
- Characterize approaches to designing and delivering workforce instruction
- Create an implementation evaluation framework to inform future research into workforce education partnerships and programming
- Disseminate usable tools and materials for partnership building and workforce-integrated instruction
Principal Investigator: Louise Yarnall
Sponsored by the National Science Foundation
NSF Award Details
Related publications
Populations: Adult learners
Services: Research and evaluation