The ongoing crisis in teacher pension funding has led states to consider various reforms in plan design to replace the traditional benefit formulas, based on years of service and final average salary (FAS). One such design is a cash balance (CB) plan, long deployed in the private sector, and increasingly considered, but rarely yet adopted, for…

Adult education, learning and skills providers are familiar with the longstanding national challenge of poor adult basic skills, and many providers use their Adult Education Budget funding to offer English and math classes for adults. In recent years, there has been a focus on supporting unemployed adults to achieve the good literacy and numeracy…

Sweden's first Elementary School Act of 1842 stated that every parish was obliged to organise and fund schools to be offered to all children in the parish. Many parishes were poor and had a difficult time funding schools. In some parishes, local industries, such as ironworks, organised, funded, and managed schools for their workers. Even though…

The employers in our country are claiming students are graduating high school and college without the soft skills to succeed in this country's workforce. This study examined what are soft skills and why are they missing from recent graduates. The study took a historical approach to trace how soft skills have been used and ignored in our nation's…

Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) related fields comprise the top 30 occupations expected to grow the fastest by 2026. This increase in job opportunities, coupled with the evolution of technology, is creating higher demands for diversity in the labor market. Currently all students require innovative training and support from a…

This article describes how public, nonprofit, and private partners in Detroit are working to improve and expand adult foundational skills development opportunities and connect them to workforce training as the city begins to make an economic comeback. It outlines the adult foundational skills challenge in Detroit, chronicles the work of a strategy…

Community colleges are beginning to build on guided pathways reforms in partnership with employers, universities, and K-12 schools to create cross-sector pathways to college and career opportunities for students--particularly those students traditionally underserved by higher education. The aim is to improve economic mobility for community…

As the United States grapples with COVID-19 and the dangerous dislocations it has brought to the American economy, it may be hard to turn our attention to an ongoing issue like workforce development. But we would argue there is no better time. While jobs have been returning, an unprecedented 26.5 million Americans filed for unemployment over a…

For over a year, stories of economic devastation, food and housing insecurity, and the challenges of remote learning have dominated headlines as the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in dramatic changes for education, businesses, and communities. In the Columbus, Ohio region, the pandemic widened existing inequalities, as it did across the rest of the…

Research from industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology indicates that outside of K-12 education, employees' sense of fit with their organizations is often associated with job satisfaction, performance, commitment, and retention. Person-organization (P-O) fit has been conceptualized as the degree of congruence between an…

More than 5 million adults lack both functional literacy (below level 1) and numeracy (below entry level 3); an estimated 11.5 million adults do not have basic digital skills; and one in five adults do not have basic financial capabilities. Around 850,000 people have English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) needs. At the same time,…

This study used a phenomenological approach to explore the lived experiences of three groups of stakeholders of the Botswana basic education program related to the employment and unemployment of graduates of basic education. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 21 participants from three groups of stakeholders, graduates of basic…

As Iraq's Kurdistan region develops rapidly, it is creating jobs that require a solid education and technical skills. The government has launched an ambitious reform of basic and secondary education to increase its quality and has expanded opportunities for tertiary technical and university education. But expansion of secondary vocational…

The purpose of the present study is to ascertain in what ways we in the United States may develop industrial education so that it may be of the greatest service to industry and to industrial workers, as well as to the whole people. The economic viewpoint and economic aspects have dominated the pedagogical, and the practical outcome has at all…