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In this research paper, we compare the alignment between advanced manufacturing (AM) competencies in Florida’s Career and Technical Education (CTE) AM Curriculum Framework and the U.S. Department of Labor’s Advanced Manufacturing Competency Model. AM educators are guided by state department of education documents that specify program content, while employers track the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that AM technicians require to successfully function in the workplace. The Curriculum Framework, created with input from educators and industry, shape AM curricula and course syllabi because they specify the learning outcomes that AM graduates upon completion of two-year AM degree programs. The Department of Labor’s Advanced Manufacturing Competency Model, crafted by federal policymakers and industry representatives, includes personal, academic, industry-specific, and managerial competencies needed by successful AM technicians; the Model is intended to influence technicians’ hiring, training, and evaluation. Although these documents were created by different sets of stakeholders, they “bookend” AM technicians’ school-to-career pathways. To determine the extent to which the 2019-2020 Florida AM Curriculum Framework aligns to the Department of Labor’s Advanced Manufacturing Competency Model, we used text mining to extract and compare the key competencies found in both documents. Through this approach, we compared these documents and identified: 1) frequently addressed topics; 2) verbs that guided the complexity (i.e., Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy of Learning Objectives cognitive level) of the course learning task versus workplace competency; and 3) overall match between the documents. Our results suggest that the documents overlap very little, with significant misalignments in higher-level Bloom’s verbs. We present implications for educational institutions, AM policy makers, and industry; suggest a revision cycle and process; and propose an ongoing assessment model to improve the congruence between what employers want and what is taught in two-year AM degree programs.
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Reconsidering College Student Employability: A Cultural Analysis of Educator and Employer Conceptions of Workplace Skills
In this research article, Ross J. Benbow and Matthew T. Hora explore the employability narrative, a view that focuses on whether colleges and universities provide students with the skills they need to be productively employed after graduation. Using sociocultural theory to problematize this narrative and qualitative methods to fore-ground the experiences of postsecondary educators and employers, the authors investigate conceptions of essential workplace skills in biotechnology and manufacturing fields. Their results show that though work ethic, technical knowledge, and technical ability represent core competencies valued across these communities, considerable variation exists in how members of different disciplinary and occupational subgroups value and conceptualize important skills. They found that respondents' conceptions of skills were also strongly tied to geography and organizational culture, among other contextual factors. With these results in mind, the authors conclude that skills are best viewed as multifaceted and situated assemblages of knowledge, skill, and disposition—or cultural models—and urge the adoption of more nuanced views among educators, employers, and policy makers that take into account the cultural and contextual forces that shape student success in the workplace.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1348648
- PAR ID:
- 10265860
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Harvard Educational Review
- Volume:
- 88
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 0017-8055
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 483 to 515
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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In this work-in-progress paper, we present the preliminary results of semi-structured interviews conducted with advanced manufacturing (AM) employers in rural communities to understand the workplace skills they seek. This study, part of a larger effort to document Northwest Florida’s rural AM employers’ desired competencies, identified employability skills valuable for entry-level technician positions. The employers who participated in this study represented the growing AM industry sub-sectors of timber, pipeline, and textiles. Our findings suggest that rural employers face challenges common to all AM employers: 1) the need for workplace skills, such as a strong commitment to teamwork and ongoing professional development; and 2) difficulties in encouraging employees’ transitions from job to career pathway, thus increasing their in-field persistence. These results have implications for educational institutions that offer AM degrees and for graduates who seek rural employment in the AM field.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-88.4.483
