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Aligning Education with Workforce Skills

Project Team Members:

Scott Seagroves, Lisa Hunter

Project Description:

ISEE plays a major role in the Akamai Workforce Initiative (AWI), including leading an investigation to correlate education and workforce skills. Early in the current AWI project, we undertook a survey of the STEM workforce needs in Hawai‘i. We examined years of Akamai Internship projects [AWI1, AWI2] to try to situate the kinds of practices interns were engaging in within existing engineering skills frameworks from K-12 and post-secondary settings. When this work seemed to lead in interesting directions, we followed up with structured interviews of industry partners to determine what kinds of activities they value in their work and what skills they would like to see in new employees [AWI3].

Synthesizing these many inputs – curricular ways of thinking and industry perspectives – led to an engineering technology skills framework [S&H 2010] that continues to inform AWI’s workforce development efforts in curriculum, co-curricular education, internships, and more. See our graphic table summarizing this framework from S&H 2010.

Distinctive features of this framework include:

  • Workforce needs span a continuum from approximately associate’s degree level, through bachelor’s degree levels and on to graduate and post-graduate training.

  • Skills needed in “real” positions do not cleanly divide this continuum: Some entry-level positions require relatively advanced skills, and positions that require more training nevertheless rely heavily on “technician-like” skills as well.

  • Project management skills are not only required of group leaders, middle managers and above, but are increasingly needed from every position in the industry no matter the level.

  • A consensus among our industry partners was that these skills and practices are at least as important as – and some argued are more important than – technical expertise and content knowledge.

Publications:

[AWI1] Hunter, L., Hoffman, M., Armstrong, J., Reader, E., Seagroves, S., & Raschke, L., 2009. “Internship Skills Inventory: Review of Akamai Internship Projects on Maui” Technical Report #1, Akamai Workforce Initiative, Pukalani, Maui, Hawaii.

[AWI2] Seagroves, S., Hunter, L., & Armstrong, J. 2009. “Internship Skills Inventory: Review of Akamai Internship Projects on the Big Island” Technical Report #2, Akamai Workforce Initiative, Pukalani, Maui, Hawaii.

[AWI3] Seagroves, S., & Hunter, L. 2009. “Building a Community Consensus Engineering Technology Skills Framework for Maui and the Big Island of Hawai‘i” Technical Report #3, Akamai Workforce Initiative, Pukalani, Maui, Hawaii.

[S&H 2010] Seagroves, S., & Hunter, L., 2010. “An Engineering Technology Skills Framework that Reflects Workforce Needs on Maui and the Big Island of Hawai‘i” in Learning from Inquiry in Practice, L. Hunter & A.J. Metevier, eds, Astronomical Society of the Pacific vol. 436, p.434.