Emily Stover DeRocco Speech
Learning Strategies Consortium
Washington, DC
July 26, 2005
Thank you, Phyllis, it is great to be here this morning. I am happy to see so many people vested in developing new learning strategies for improving our nation's military and civilian workforce.
For years, many of the cutting-edge training strategies and tools have been developed for use by the military. Commanders understood that the best trained soldiers and sailors were the ones most likely to survive and succeed. That principle is now becoming part of the civilian world as well, driven by an economic reality unlike any we have experienced before.
Advances in the fields of communication and technology and travel have torn down the barriers to global commerce and removed the borders from the global economy. Competition now comes not only from the company across the street, but also from the company across the ocean.
These competitors understand the imperative of an educated and skilled workforce. It is the talent of their employees that will determine which companies succeed in the global economy and the talent of its citizens that will decide which country leads that economy.
That is why President Bush has committed to an aggressive education and workforce strategy. Too often in the past, education and employment were two separate and distinct parts of your life. You went to school to get an education, then went into the workforce and learned how to do your job.
It also used to be that a high school education was enough. With a high school diploma you could get a job and build a career successful enough to support a family, own a home, and secure your retirement.
Today though, success depends upon a continuum of education. It starts with a solid foundation in math, science, and communication skills learned in school. The President's initiatives in this area are critical, setting high standards, inspiring excellence and demanding accountability in our nation's public schools.
But that is not enough. Over 80 percent of the jobs in the fastest-growing fields require education or training beyond high school. To obtain that education, the traditional method has been to attend a four-year college or university. This is still the best approach and the one that all of our students should strive for.
But today, there are also other options. Our nation's community college system offers a wide-array of both academic and technical courses and many have established partnerships with local employers to ensure the training they deliver leads directly to a job and career pathway. Recognizing the value of the community college system to our nation's workforce, President Bush has launched a $250 million initiative to build the capacity of community colleges and to train more new workers and career changers.
Another postsecondary alternative is apprenticeship. To many in my generation, that conjures up an image of blacksmiths at colonial Williamsburg, but to today's leading industries, it means integrated on-the-job and classroom learning that produces so me of the most qualified employees. We have launched new apprenticeship programs in health care, IT, and geospatial technology.
No matter how it is delivered, education is the key. In 2003, individuals with an Associate degree made over 20% more than workers possessing only a high school diploma. Projected out over the course of a career, that is over a quarter of a million dollars in increased income. For people with a Bachelor's degree, it is nearly three times that figure.
As the speed and integration of the global economy increase, that disparity will only continue to grow. The well paying jobs of tomorrow are going to require ever greater levels of education.
We at the Labor Department are committed to preparing American workers for those jobs. As the Assistant Secretary for Employment and Training, I oversee the nation's workforce investment system. It is a system with a $14 billion annual investment that delivers services through 3,500 career centers nationwide.
And, like our nation's schools and our nation's industries, the workforce investment system is being forced to transform to respond to the changes in today's economy. The workforce system was founded and run for nearly seventy years on what could be called a social services model. The process of helping an individual was more important than the outcome that was achieved and the services that were provided rarely had any connection to local employers or the local economy.
In a static, production-based economy, that was adequate, but in today's innovation economy, it is simply not enough. Our system must be demand-driven. It must be an integrated, employer-focused, talent development system that is responsive to the dynamic needs of the local economy.
This is a critical transformation because, as I said before, talent determines success in the global economy. The natural corollary to this statement is that talent development is economic development. This is confirmed by recent surveys that show the availability of talent as the top factor companies' use in determining where to locate.
So, to help our system with this transformation, we have been implementing President Bush's High Growth Job Training Initiative. Its goal is to understand the dynamics of the new economy and its labor market and to use the workforce system to me et these new demands.
To implement the Initiative, we identified a dozen different industries or sectors of the economy on which to focus. These ranged from cutting edge industries like biotech and geospatial technology, to industries undergoing a significant transformation such as manufacturing and energy, to traditional industries expecting significant job growth such as health care and construction. What each one has in common, though, is job and career opportunities that require specialized skills.
Then we worked to connect employers within those industries 1) to the workforce system to access the manpower we have and 2) to educators to turn that manpower into talent. Thus far, we have given over $200 million in support of 112 partnerships nationwide to illustrate the power of bringing employers, educators, and our employment system together.
While these High Growth grants represent important partnerships, they are actually rather limited in scope. The real goal of the Initiative is to model how services should be delivered through the $14 billion workforce investment system. With those 3,500 centers nationwide, the job training system has the reach and the resources to make a difference to the economies of nearly every state and local area.
But, to make that possible, the job training system must first undergo a serious reform. Since its inception over 30 years ago, the system has been created piecemeal with decades of legislation targeted at specific subgroups. This has resulted in artificial divisions between training programs, costly duplication of administrative expenses, and overly rigid and confusing eligibility requirements.
To address these problems and make the system viable in a global economy, President Bush has proposed a sweeping reform. His proposal, now working its way through Congress, is based on the key principles of strengthening accountability, reducing overhead, and increasing flexibility.
These changes would transform the job training system from one that is focused on staff and bureaucracy to one that is focused on training solutions and economic development. And the partnerships modeled under the High Growth Initiative are the key. The flexibility provided under our job training reform would allow these partnerships to flourish around the country and develop innovative training solutions to our workforce needs.
In many cases, the partnerships evolving on the ground from putting this economic development lens on workforce development are employing more innovative learning techniques than simply classroom education. We're focusing on the potential of these strategies.
When you and I learned math, it was by memorizing the different aspects of trigonometry or drawing graphs of parabolas. It was usually accompanied by complaints and the oft-repeated question “Am I ever going to use this again?”
Well today, we have new interest in the success of schools that are incorporating calculus and trig and even physics and chemistry into larger projects. We are supporting several of them known as career academies. The construction and design industries have been at the forefront of using and advocating this approach.
For example, students will be tasked with designing a bridge and will simultaneously learn about the physics of loads and the mathematical equations used to calculate them and the chemistry of compounds to avoid rust and corrosion. These activities are, of course, supported by advanced computers using simulation and AutoCAD. In August, we will host a meeting of the nation's experts on career academies to explore more effective ways to use WIA youth training resources.
While career academies are specific to the high school and community college environments, the tools of contextual learning, like simulation and gaming, can be used at any training level. In fact, as our society advances and innovation continues to power the economy, these advanced learning objects and strategies must be used to maintain our advantage in talent development.
For years, we have talked a great deal about e-learning and its extraordinary opportunities to expand education and training beyond ivy-covered walls. I believe the realities facing employers in this competitive global economy will result in an explosion of innovation in the e-learning environments. We hear from 24-7 industries, like hospitality and health care, of the pressing need to deliver training just in time, on-demand, at the worksite. I've watched 21st century lean and cellular manufacturing firms bring instruction on-line, to each cell on the production line, reinforcing the skills required to work on the integrated systems assembly line of today's manufacturing plant.
Of course, for these learning strategies to be successful, as defined by developing talent, they must train to the specifications of industry. That is why it is so critical for educators and training institutions to partner with employers to develop learning strategies and curriculum. And with the accelerated pace of change we are witnessing in today's economy, a one-time collaboration with employers is not sufficient. An established relationship with continual review is needed to keep our training efforts up-to-date and capable of meeting businesses' real-time demands.
This is particularly true given the realities of today's economy. The private sector still spends over $50 billion annually on training, between four and five times more than the federal government investment. However, that is down over ten percent in the last two years. Competition is forcing companies to cut overhead costs, even ones as important as talent development.
In doing so, they will increasingly look for the most efficient ways to obtain the needed talent. In so me cases, that will be sending current employees to the most efficient training locations possible, and in other cases, it will simply be replacing current employees with individuals possessing the needed skills.
Either way, the responsibility is falling to education and training providers to develop the needed talent the most efficient way possible. Those providers that succeed will be the ones that develop and implement the most innovative learning strategies and align them with the talent demands of our nation's employers.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak today and I would be happy to answer any questions that you may have.
