This report, conducted by the Illinois Community College Board, highlights and summarizes accountability activities and initiatives described by Illinois' 48 community colleges in their 2002 Accountability/Program Review Reports. The report provides evidence that Illinois' comprehensive community colleges play a vital role in the state's…

Includes 26 articles on increasing workforce quality and competitiveness, the primary task of employment and training professionals. Looks at the larger picture, strategies, and decentralized national employment and training programs internationally. Examines debate over research methods, national research, and state and local efforts. Includes…

The Skills Standards Projects have provided further emphasis on the need for benchmarking U.S. vocational-technical education (VTE) against international competition. Benchmarking is an ongoing systematic process designed to identify, as quantitatively as possible, those practices that produce world class performance. Metrics are those things that…

Most industrialized nations of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have entered a new economic era characterized by new industries, new forms of production and competition, and a much higher premium on skills. Those with low levels of literacy and basic workplace skills find it increasingly difficult to obtain or…

A reflective self-assessment process was used to evaluate Project RISE, a 1-year, federally funded workplace literacy project. The goal of the evaluation was to help staff understand their collective experience in a way that might help them to serve their clients more effectively in the future. A list of the most critical problems faced by staff…

This essay deals with a series of methodological issues involved in assessing training priorities in developing countries. It is argued that the present methods of arriving at these priorities leave much to be desired, and a number of suggestions are made that might lead to more informed policy decisions on education and training. (CT)

Seven job-related basic skills identified as skills employers want are as follows: (1) learning to learn; (2) reading, writing, and computation; (3) oral communication and listening; (4) creative thinking and problem solving; (5) personal management, including self-esteem, goal setting, motivation, and personal and career development; (6) group…

The seventh annual manpower report is presented in three parts: The Employment Record, Manpower Policy and Programs, and Manpower Research and Experimentation. Discussion of the employment record addresses employment developments and their economic background, patterns of employment growth, unemployment and underemployment, developments in the…

This document contains three papers on issues in evaluation. "Evaluation of the Method of Modeling: A Case Study of the Finnish Steel Industry" (Ville Nurmi) describes the method of modeling as an educational strategy to support both specific goal-directed transformative learning focused on work process and learning in workplaces, and it…