Closing the skills gap

The Labor Department recently announced that the U.S. economy had enjoyed a record 76 consecutive months with job gains. Yet at the same time, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports that 5.6 million jobs remain unfilled because of a pernicious “skills gap” – or mismatch between employers’ needs and workers’ abilities.

In a Business Roundtable survey, 45 percent of C-suite executives say hiring is particularly difficult in so-called STEM fields, those requiring expertise in science, technology, engineering and math.

College graduates themselves are no less concerned: A national survey commissioned by Northeastern University found that just 14 percent of recent college graduates believe their education prepared them to work with artificial intelligence and robotics – innovations poised to transform the American workplace.

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in labor economics to conclude that business as usual is not working. To close the skills gap and keep our economy from stagnating, businesses and academia must join forces. For starters, we see four paths to partnership:

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n Modernized curriculums: Faculty members must be willing to adapt their courses to provide the job skills and knowledge employers actually need. One successful model is the University of Maryland’s Advanced Cybersecurity Experience for Students program. The nation’s first four-year undergraduate honors program in cybersecurity, ACES features a “living-learning” model in which students live together, take classes together and collaborate on multidisciplinary problems.

n Lifelong learning: Industry and academia can partner to help workers update their knowledge quickly or make a midcareer shift from their undergraduate training into new, in-demand occupations. A good example is the collaboration between the State University of New York-Empire and the Flatiron School, a programming boot camp in Manhattan that was established in 2012. Under the program, an economically diverse group of students take basic classes in the humanities and sciences at Empire while they learn web development at Flatiron. In 2015, according to Flatiron, 98 percent of the program’s graduates got jobs, at an average starting salary of $74,000.

n Hands-on learning: Nothing prepares students for a career better than actual work experience integrated with their studies. … Northeastern University’s cooperative-education program – in which students alternate semesters of classroom learning with those spent at full-time jobs – involves a network of 2,900 U.S. and foreign employers.

n Research partnerships: The best teaching is enlightened by research, and here too industry and academia can do more together than in isolation. Embedding industry researchers within a university is the central feature of the University of New South Wales’ Engineering Industry Research Fellowship. Launched in 2015 in Sydney, it allows 25 private-sector researchers – who remain employees of their companies – to partner with the university’s world-class engineering faculty for up to a year on projects of mutual interest.

These are just four potential approaches to collaboration; others might center on partnerships around managing and utilizing big data or on intellectual-property commercialization.

The American higher education system has long been the envy of the world. To maintain that primacy in a globalized era, our universities are going to have to find partners in the commercial world, while corporations will need to help shape the next generation of young workers. n

Joseph E. Aoun is president of Northeastern University. Wes Bush is CEO of Northrop Grumman Corp. Distributed by Bloomberg View.

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