Page 46 - CNC West Oct-Nov 2021

THE CRITICAL NEED FOR CAREER TECHNICAL EDUCATION IS NOT A MYTH
David Goodreau
President, Small Manufacturers Institute david@sminet.org
44
www.CNC-West.com
CNC WEST October/November 2021
It is well known that California enjoys the world’s fifth largest economy. This is partly due to 50/60 years of an infrastructure built around manufactur- ing entrepreneurs, workers, schools, and customer supply chains. But, as they say, “Houston, we have a problem.”
There is growing evidence that California’s school systems have internal, critical issues that are having a negative impact on career and technical opportunities for students and the companies that ultimately hire them. The result is that businesses in the trades and industry sectors are suffering severe skills shortages for want of a technically trained workforce.
What’s causing this?
Simply put, there are three common findings throughout the various studies that explain the decline of “SHOP” training programs in California middle schools, high schools, and community colleges as well as in the California University system that re- quire attention:
1. The growing retirement of existing Career Technical Education (CTE) teachers.
2. The lack of a pipeline for new CTE teachers.
3. School counselors that lack the necessary familiarity with CTE career opportunities, providing sufficient motivation to encourage students to consider the benefits of a CTE career.
The result could be disastrous for
the future of California manufacturing
industries. Why?
According to an article by Boston Consulting Group entitled Made in America: The Future of US Manufacturing, the primary resource manufactur- ing companies need to succeed is, “...a bigger, more highly skilled workforce...(with) digital skills but also adaptive skills like critical thinking and complex
problem solving in order to install, operate, maintain, and optimize the new technologies.” Unfortunately, there is a shortage of this type of worker, largely due to a diminishing number of teachers necessary to train them.
So, where is this workforce going to
come from?
The hard truth is that there is no easy answer. For instance, we can’t rely solely on policymakers. While policymakers are often vocal about how important manufacturing jobs are to the economy and the skill level needed to fuel those jobs, what they fail to understand are the components necessary to populate the jobs with skilled workers.
For instance, according to a survey by the Small Manufacturers’ Institute (SMI) with 300 California Career Technical Educators between April 18, 2020, and May 14, 2020, a majority of high school and col- lege teachers who participated in the study are nearing retirement and participants reported difficulty in finding replacement teachers when someone does retire. To make matters worse, as more experienced teachers with graduate degrees retire, newer teachers who replace them with less education and less experience may not be able to teach students to industry standards, further putting manufacturing at risk because graduating students could potentially fail to meet employment expectations.
Survey participants also pointed to the lack of an adequate number of CTE teacher training programs fun- neling teachers into local community colleges and trade schools. Today, there are no California State Universities (CSU) offering traditional degrees in multi-discipline Industrial Technical Education. Instead, these universi- ties offer single subject credentialling programs, and the California Community Colleges are attempting to bridge the teacher gap with a program called Teach California. These institutional solutions have been marginal and the question over the next three to five years will be if these efforts will be enough to fill the pending gaps.
Clearly, we need a specialized workforce pipeline.