Reports / Articles
Advanced Manufacturing, Mechatronics, and Quality Consortium (AMMQC): Final Evaluation Report (2019)
This evaluation report provides useful information based on study findings for developing career pathways programs in community colleges. Employer engagement is centered on working with business and industry to ensure that training content is aligned with business needs and appropriately prepares learners for success in the target business or industry.
This report provides concrete tips for organizations that provide services (including education and training) seeking to engage business and industry partners. Specific strategies to engage business leaders to help prepare students and clients with barriers to success in the workplace are detailed.
What Works for Adult Learners: Lessons from Career Pathway Evaluations
This brief examines evaluation studies focused on understanding the influence of career pathways on adult learners’ attainment of living-wage careers. In addition, the publication discusses how educator-business partnerships evolve throughout a career pathways initiative.
The Employer Perspectives Study provides community colleges, future grantees of federal workforce initiatives including other training providers and the public workforce system, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) and other policymakers, and other stakeholders with insights about how to approach, build, and sustain strong partnerships with businesses.
The Power of Career- and Employer-Focused Training and Education
This Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) brief overviews successful research-supported career pathways programming. It features the importance of engaging employers in successfully training and ensuring employment at post-program completion including how to engage employers. The brief also includes links to additional resources featuring career pathways programming.
Minding the Gap: Investing in a Skilled Manufacturing Workforce
This resource summarizes the discussion and distills outcomes and key points from a national summit addressing the gap between educational preparedness of jobseekers and job-market needs. Participants included education, business, and state labor leaders.
Toolkits
This toolkit underscores the importance of engaging employers when building educational training programs resulting in industry-recognized credentials. It includes topics such as potential challenges to partnering with business leaders, how to engage industry at both the state and local levels, and the continuum of business engagement activities from identifying in-demand skills and competencies to entry and exit points for employment.
Strategies for Workforce Development A Toolkit for The Solar Industry
Although this toolkit is for solar industry businesses, it provides a host of useful information for any business seeking a talent pipeline. The toolkit offers a clear explanation of how business and education/workforce partners can build meaningful career pathways, how public workforce and training funds can be accessed, and how to construct a talent pipeline by implementing work-based training.
Work-Based Learning Policy: For Out-Of-School Youth and Disadvantaged Adults
This “how-to” toolkit focuses on why work-based learning (WBL) that combines classroom and employer-based learning is appropriate for youth and adults. It offers a clear description of WBL programming and models of successful examples.
Training
Effective Approaches for Aligning Curriculum with Business Demand
This National Science Foundation (NSF) webinar outlines several systematic approaches that the NSF ATE Centers have used across the country and in several disciplines to align college workforce programs to industry.
A Resource Guide to Engaging Employers (2015)
This is a how-to-guide for adult educators and training providers trying to establish partnerships with employers. The main audience is community college educators however, the information is relevant for practitioners working in the workforce development arena. The guide defines employers, their roles, and the potential partnerships with employers can bring to learners, and offers examples of successful models.