Bridging The Skills Gap

IT Skills Gap

Leading Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) industry and professional associations, ICT practitioners, students, educators and government agencies have formed the WhyITNow.org Workforce Preparation Initiative and petition in order to express strong support for ICT Workforce Preparation.

What is the WhyITNow.org ICT Workforce Preparation initiative and petition about?

http://whyitnow.org/ict-workforce-preparation-initiative

How Do We Get Students Ready For the Jobs of the Future?

This story is the second in a seven part editorial series exploring the balance between student learning and job skills. We’re asking leaders and thinkers in education and technology fields: Can America educate its way out of the skills gap? This series is brought to you by GOOD, with support from Apollo Group. Learn more about our efforts to bridge the skills gap at Coding for GOOD.

http://www.good.is/posts/how-do-we-get-students-ready-for-the-jobs-of-the-future

Class Central - MOOC

A complete list of free online courses offered by Stanford, Coursera, MIT and Harvard led edX (MITx + Harvardx + BerkeleyX), and Udacity

http://www.class-central.com/

Partnering to Better Serve Adults

Partnering to Better Serve Adults

Click on the attached article for examples of the partnerships promising strategies for serving adults with prior college credit in a number of areas—prior learning assessment, the usability of web portals, stackable certificates, just to name a few

http://adultcollegecompletion.org/node/138

Merrimack Valley Partners for Progress

Middlesex Community College and Northern Essex Community College are co-founders of the Merrimack Valley Partners for Prmogress program, an initiative designed to forge alliances between companies across the region and the regions premier educational institutions. In addiition to being strong academic institutions that can boast high transfer rates to four-year schools, Middlesex and Northern Essex have made workforce development a cornerstone of their mission.

http://www2.necc.mass.edu/mvpp123/index.php

Merimack Valley Partners for Progress: A business perspective

Building a Competitive Workforce: The Community College Advantage
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“We all know what the power of a skilled, educated, and motivated workforce can do for productivity, innovation, quality, and competitiveness,” said Ryan. “Our people make the difference…Our challenge as employers is to ensure that we have the right skills in-house to meet quickly evolving business needs, as well as to retain talent, and have a talent pipeline for long-term success.”

Ryan shared details on Raytheon’s collaboration with Middlesex and Northern Essex community colleges, including a series of 80- noncredit courses that was created to train production workers in the late 1990’s and the Electronic Equipment Technology Program, a 29-credit program currently offered onsite at Raytheon.

He called community college workforce training programs “affordable, flexible, and comprehensive.”

Merrimack Valley Business Leaders Focus on Building a Competitive Workforce

For Profit Schools

Obama's victory promises continued scrutiny for For Profit schools

The re-election of President Obama isn't likely to result in a slew of new regulations aimed at for-profit colleges. But with student debt and the cost of college expected to remain high-profile issues in his second administration, industry observers foresee little let-up in the focus on the for-profit sector.

Chronical Article For Profit Education

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Phoenix fourth quarter net income has fallen 60 percent from the year before. The number of new students enrolling had slumped by 13 percent, and yet costs were up. Phoenix closed more than half of their brick and mortar campuses and laid off almost 5 percent of its staff.

Is this a momentary downturn as the industry adjusts to a new reality of greater oversight and savvier students, or is it the beginning something more profound -- a bubble's big burst. It's still too early to pin down a definitive answer. But there's reason to think this is more than just a blip.

Did For Profit College Bubble Just Pop?