SkillsEngine Fuels Better Career Outcomes by Aligning Employers & Educators to Move at the Speed of a Rapidly Changing Labor Market
Nonprofit offers unrivaled collaboration and access to real-time, localized occupational skills and competencies for career and workforce success.
AUSTIN, Texas, Oct. 7, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- SkillsEngine, a nonprofit aligning educators, employers, and workforce development interests through a common skills language, announced today the extensive impact of its workforce technology solutions in driving better career outcomes across public and private initiatives and its soon-to-launch community-curated skills platform.
In building a comprehensive set of offerings that result in a living library of knowledge, competencies, and skills requirements for the jobs of today and tomorrow, SkillsEngine's technology has done what other labor market solutions cannot: unlock a translatable, collaborative, and localized understanding of talent needs across industry lines.
"There are great efforts to facilitate a more collaborative relationship between employers and educators, but the challenge lies in that collaboration happening in real-time, using one language, and offering a holistic view of role requirements," said Michael Bettersworth, Founder, SkillsEngine, and Vice Chancellor, Texas State Technical College (TSTC). "Through hundreds of unique use cases, we've demonstrated alongside our partners that if you create the right technology townsquare, where anyone can access and engage with job requirements at the most detailed of occupational and regional levels, incredible things across the career spectrum will happen."
Three technology solutions, Calibrate, Builder and Data Services, have pushed well beyond traditional means of aggregating and validating market needs to align disjointed skills terminology and build employer-validated job profiles for a broad swath of occupations. For the first time, educators, employers and workforce interests have access to a robust and clearly defined lexicon and roadmap of required role and industry competencies.
This intelligence has been applied to a multitude of user-specific applications, four of which are now highlighted by SkillsEngine, but all of which share a common fabric of skills clarity to drive more effective career training, workforce hiring, and individual professional growth.
"Our partnership with SkillsEngine has ensured the Office of Personnel Management can deliver in new ways on its promise of inclusive employment practices and creating equal opportunity for all federal employees. SkillsEngine's Data Services have unlocked a common, unbiased language and enabled turnkey means for our workforce to connect with new skill sets and professional opportunities in an on-going and seamless manner," said Michelle Earley, USAJOBS Program Manager, Office of Personnel Management.
Although SkillsEngine's partnerships expand across public, private, nonprofit and government workforce interests, it's the value in aligning institutions of higher education and employers that has witnessed the most dramatic and extensive impact.
"The amount of forward momentum SkillsEngine has created in a short amount of time is unseen in traditional higher ed," said TSTC Chancellor, Michael Reeser. "From research that has led to TSTC smartly sunsetting 14 programs that no longer align with labor needs, to providing a platform for immediate employer validation of our current and emerging curricula, to moving well beyond Texas to offer this know-how and technology to nonprofits, trade associations, employers, and other educators, we see immediate adoption and deeply-rooted partnerships continue to positively impact career readiness and success."
In traditional efforts to deploy relevant career-building education and job-ready graduates, educators most commonly rely on in-person, time-intensive employer advisory convenings or survey-based collaboration to secure industry validation of curriculum. Due to a number of constraints, these efforts commonly result in lagging market indicators and insights, specifically for those industries who experience rapid changes to labor requirements.
SkillsEngine's tech-driven solutions have overcome these challenges by connecting faculty with industry subject matter experts within one user-intuitive platform to aggregate, verify, and validate skill and competency requirements at both a local, regional and global level.
"Calibrate has unlocked a comprehensive understanding of industry-wide approaches to inform our curriculum and its ultimate goals," said Dr. Eric Dunker, Vice President of Workforce and Economic Development, Arapahoe Community College. "We now have a 360-degree view of what each company means when using specific terminology and the nuances of regional-to-global requirements, providing us a new level of perspective in support of a fully-integrated employer partnership. These enhanced insights have changed our partnerships with local to Fortune 500 companies by night and day."
Calibrate's functionality has also enabled unprecedented strides forward in career-building education. In facilitating real-time and on-going collaboration with employers, educators are not only deploying and sunsetting programs at record speed, but also iterating on curricula term- over-term in unseen ways.
"Calibrate offered solutions for our training provider partners to rapidly develop and modify programs by facilitating immediate feedback from employers to line-item check skills and competencies that informed curriculum development. One of our most innovative partners, the Sturm Collaboration Campus at Arapahoe Community College, moved from ideation to program deployment in six months because of Calibrate. The labor market moves quickly, and this enables educational providers to act as quickly to align programs," said Alexandra Peterson, Senior Manager at the Markle Foundation.
SkillsEngine's tech suite can be leveraged in a number of ways, including providing a starting point when state agencies, educators, and employers collaborate to develop a career pathway for historically overlooked roles.
"The support from SkillsEngine was simply amazing. To create a first of its kind credit-based curriculum, HealthForce Minnesota had to start from ground zero. SkillsEngine utilized their extensive skills library to pull competencies from tangential roles, which we were able to use as a starting point to dramatically expedite the process of pathway and curriculum development," said Valerie DeFor, Executive Director, Minnesota State HealthForce Center of Excellence.
SkillsEngine now turns its eye to deploying a publicly available, community-curated skills library to underpin the understanding of the labor market as a broad community. The platform will share insights collectively, by aggregating institutional, employer, and workforce user input, and publishing labor trends, while providing one comprehensive source of truth for skills fluency across the U.S.
"We've utilized Calibrate to conduct career impact audits for institutional partners, and to say this technology is game changing is an understatement," said Dr. Jennifer Dirmeyer, Managing Director, WTEA, a quality assurer certifying excellence in career-building education. "With SkillsEngine's next generation of capabilities, we're tearing down the walls between employers, educators, and individuals, to result in unprecedented equity, access, and understanding of how to professionally thrive in the modern economy."
SkillsEngine plans to launch its newest platform in early 2023, and is currently welcoming partners to trial this new technology. To learn more, visit https://www.skillsengine.com/next.
SkillsEngine is a nonprofit aligning educators, employers, and workforce development interests through shared technology and a common skills language. SkillsEngine was born from a state of Texas mandate that publicly-funded colleges and universities demonstrate curriculum-to-employer alignment. To address the mandate, Texas State Technical College (TSTC), Texas' only technical college whose operational funding is tied to student career earnings, established the Center for Employment Outcomes (C4EO), whose research gave birth to SkillsEngine. In partnership with nationwide institutions of higher education, public and private employers, and non-profit organizations, SkillsEngine moves beyond current labor market solutions, offering a smarter way to collaborate, align, and share in skills knowledge.
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