Achieving Necessary Skills

By Author: asdas
Total Articles: 105
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With our nation's economic competitiveness slackening and our productivity levels not keeping pace with our international competitors, employers and policy makers have called for changes and improvements in how our schools prepare students. In multiple surveys, employers point to inadequacies in academic skills and work readiness among workers, including the lack of integrity and of willingness to assume responsibility and work cooperatively. They also point to the increasing need for workers to be lifelong learners — a need generated by the increasing speed with which skills become obsolete and by the frequent changes in jobs that are typically made by workers during their lifetimes (one in five workers leave their jobs once every five years and younger workers even more often). According to the Committee for Economic Development, "Employers in both large and small businesses decry the lack of preparation for work among the nation's high school graduates. Too many students lack reading, writing, and appropriate behavior on the job. Nor have they learned how to learn, how to solve problems, make decisions, or set priorities. ...
... "This view of young workers contributes to their poor prospects in the labor market as employers seek to hire older, more experienced workers, even for entry-level positions.
Yet students have correctly ascertained that there is little, if any, relationship between how well they do in school and how likely they are to get a high-skill, high-pay job, or even a job that pays good students more than their counterparts who do less well in school. Employers rarely bother to check the academic credentials of young job applicants, nor does the US have an externally graded competency assessment system, which is key to the secondary school curriculum, as do most other industrialized nations. The US Department of Labor Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) recently made a start on developing such a system by identifying the five competencies that effective workers can productively use and the three-part foundation of skills and personal qualities that competence requires.