Creating an Educated Workforce in Three Phases

Two weeks ago, I posted about an upcoming panel discussion I was asked to participate in -- a panel on how associations are successfully working to develop a better educated workforce for the industries they represent. That post can be found here.

Well, that panel happened at a conference I attended last Thursday, and I thought I would provide an update. Believe it or not, I had someone reach out to me over email, interested in hearing more. As a quick aside, having readers respond to the things I write here is one of the main reasons I keep blogging. More on that next week.

As I sat up there on stage listening to my co-panelists talk about the work their associations were doing to develop educated workforces for their industries, I quickly recomposed what I was planning to say in my head. I tend to do this a lot, seeing different (and sometimes better) patterns in things when forced to look at them through other people's eyes. Instead of focusing on the four stacked programs I described in my previous posts, I described what I saw as the three phases my association had (so far) gone through in our journey towards building a better educated workforce.

Phase 1 - Building college curriculum

My association's workforce journey really began with our members expressing a specific need. They would hire an engineer out of a good university, or a technician out of a good community college, and the individual would have no background or understanding in fluid power - the technology my association represents. The employer in question would have to spend two years training the graduate in things they felt should have been part of their educational experience.

To respond, our association began building partnerships with instructors at 2-year and 4-year colleges, and providing them with resources to develop the curriculum pieces they needed to teach our technology in the frame of their existing programs. We thought if the schools would only teach our subjects, the people hired out of those schools would be ready to go to work on day one.

Phase 2 - Developing middle and high schools programs

But it wasn't enough. Especially at the 2-year level, our curriculum was an elective, and too few students were electing to move into it. Now that we had the college education programs we wanted, we had to build a pipeline of students interested in studying those subjects.

That meant creating outreach programs for middle and high school students. We had to get younger people interested in and excited about our industry, so we built several programs designed to engage middle and high school students in fluid power-themed design/build competitions. Our most successful, the Fluid Power Action Challenge, started with twelve students in one competition, and has now grown to encompass more than a hundred events and 21,000 students.

Phase 3 - Stacking everything in the same communities

But that wasn't enough either. As those Action Challenges rolled out across the country we realized that it did little good that have a great middle school program in one community unless there was also a great high school and tech school program in the same community.

This is really when the strategy described in my previous post came online for us, where we are now consciously building "Fast Track to Fluid Power" Hubs in communities around the country. Each has a community-wide middle school Action Challenge, a series of local high schools with fluid power-specific programs in each, a central community college with a validated fluid power degree or certificate program, and, perhaps most importantly, a committed group of industry members willing to serve as judges, coaches, and mentors in these various programs.

After the panel, I got a lot of good feedback from people who had been in the audience. Evidently my comments had resonated strongly with them, but one consistent question kept coming up.

How? How does your association manage all of this activity?

I could tell the people asking the question were coming from a place of already over-taxed association resources, where any foray into workforce development felt impossible because they had no spare resources or staff people to dedicate towards it.

And I'm pretty sure my answer didn't help set their mind at ease. There is no magic formula. Like everything else in our world, if you want to succeed you have to dedicate resources to it. In our example, out of a staff of twelve, we have four full-time positions dedicated to these programs, including a newly-promoted Vice President of Workforce Development.

We certainly didn't get there overnight, but our Board, recognizing that "creating an educated workforce" is one of the four major objectives of our association, has supported this growth in resources every step of the way.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Developing an Educated Workforce with Technical Colleges

I've been invited to speak at an upcoming conference I'm attending on how my association is successfully working to develop a better educated workforce for the industry we represent. I won't be speaking alone, since this is not a challenge that confronts only my industry. I'll be part of small panel of others, each of whom is trying to tackle the problem facing their industry in their own way.

My association, through its associated and strategically-aligned, tax-exempt charitable foundation, is addressing our industry's challenge on two fronts -- only one of which I think I will have time to talk about at the conference. That front has us partnering with 2-year technical colleges to create and support degree and certificate programs that teach the competencies our industry has already identified as representing the workforce skills they seek and have trouble finding.

But it's not just the technical colleges that get our attention. In order to make sure there are enough students in the programs that they offer, we also have to work with high schools and even middle schools in the same communities to make sure there is a "pipeline" of students interested in pursuing this line of education and getting jobs in this industry.

We actually use the word "pathway" when talking about these programs. We seek to create a pathway into our industry. We are building a series of programs that first introduce our industry's technology (i.e., fluid power) in middle schools, then provide fluid power educational experiences in high schools, then fluid power degrees and certificates in tech schools, and finally connections to jobs in the fluid power industry.

To help keep all these programs connected -- especially in the minds of the companies that support and want to engage with them -- we have recently organized them under a single brand, something we're calling the Fast Track to Fluid Power. “Fast Track,” we tell potential supporters and participants, is a workforce development pathway that connects local technical colleges with industry partners and high school teachers. The network creates awareness and interest in fluid power and leads students along a path that leads to careers in our industry.

There are four connected program pieces in this pathway:

1. The Fluid Power Action Challenge engages thousands of middle school students in learning about and having fun with fluid power. It raises awareness among students, educators, and parents. Industry partners serve as coaches and judges.

2. Fast Track High Schools are each equipped with fluid power lab equipment and curriculum. They teach real-world fluid power and generate interest in fluid power careers. Industry partners visit the schools frequently and provide mentorship and career encouragement.

3. Fluid Power Scholarships are offered to graduating high school students in order to pursue fluid power degrees or certificates at designated technical colleges. Industry partners serve on the scholarship review committee that makes funding decisions.

4. Fast Track Technical Colleges are schools with a 2-year degree program validated to teach core fluid power competencies. Industry partners provide on-going curriculum guidance and student internship opportunities.

Notice how we have defined a role for industry partners in each one of these connected programs. This, we have discovered, is absolutely essential to their success. The association can do a lot to provide support to the schools and to resource the programs, but only the companies in the industry itself can connect with the students and bring them into the positions that they are trying to fill. Their participation is a make-or-break proposition for our entire strategy.

These are some of the details and observations that I hope to share at the upcoming conference.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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https://www.amc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/787146/accessories-flight-keeps-mcchords-c-17s-airborne/

Risk and Reward

I think I've written on this blog before about the Technology Roadmap that my association maintains for the industry we represent. If not, as a quick introduction, our Technology Roadmap describes an industry-wide consensus regarding the pre-competitive research and development needs associated with improving the design, manufacture, and function of fluid power components and systems. We update it every two years, and we share its results broadly, hoping that companies, universities, and other research organizations will use it to guide their decisions on research projects of importance to our industry.

We are in one of our update cycles right now. We've already identified the eight broad areas of development that we think are important to help our technology meet or better meet the needs of our industry's customers, and we are now conducting a series of conference calls -- one for each of those areas of development -- so that a working group of industry and academic representatives with expertise and interest in each area can help us define the specific objectives for research projects that would help us make the appropriate advancements.

Our industry is a broad and diverse one. Having been through this update cycle a few times now, I know that every time we open up conversations like these, we wind up with more research objectives than our research partners can possibly act on. To help provide some focus, I usually ask each working group to not only identify the appropriate research objectives, but to prioritize them as well.

Imagine that we had limited resources, I often say (which, of course, is not far from the truth), and we could only invest in one of the many research objectives we just identified. Which one would we pick? Which one do we think we are most likely to see successfully achieved?

And every time I say that, someone, with the best of intentions, will start asking me questions about risk and reward.

Wait a minute, this person might say. Why are we focused on the one that is most likely to be successful? If we're prioritizing, shouldn't we pick the one with the largest possible reward for our industry? After all, you know what they say. Low risk, low reward; high risk, high reward.

It is an excellent point. And if we were building a roadmap that we actually had the capacity to act on comprehensively, I'd probably be the first person to agree. We should probably develop an entire risk vs. reward matrix, and plot every research objective on it.

But one of the things that's different about our roadmap from those developed by other organizations is that it really has no directed execution phase associated with it. We're not taking a holistic approach to its resulting recommendations, allocating resources in accordance with its prescriptions and predictions. We, the association that sponsors and organizes this roadmapping activity, has no such resources to invest.

Our goal, as strange as it may be to say, is not to actually develop any new technology for our industry. It is, instead, to engage the academic community in research projects that are important to our industry. We certainly want those research projects to be successful -- yes, for the industry that stands to benefit from the research discovery, but more importantly for the principal investigators and graduate students that create it. That is how they become interested in our industry's technology, and how they decide the devote their research and teaching careers to it.

And that is actually the reward we're looking for -- a group of academic faculty teaching our technology to a new generation of undergraduate students. When we're prioritizing our objectives, therefore, let's make sure we pick the ones that are most likely to get people interested and excited about our technology.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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https://leanconstructionblog.com/7-ways-to-make-shared-risk-and-reward-sustainable.html

Back on Campus

I took a short break this week to do a college visit with my 17-year-old son. He's thinking about studying engineering (or math), and so we've been touring a couple of relevant universities to help him decide where he does and does not want to apply.

This past week's visit was to the same university that both my wife and I graduated from, now almost 30 years ago. Being back on that campus was nostalgic in so many strange ways. Look! There's a brand-new building. What was on that corner when I was here? Look! There's the off-campus house I lived in. It's still that ugly shade of green.

But the trip was for my son's benefit -- not mine -- and I did the best I could to see things from his point of view. We actually did three tours: one for on-campus housing, one for the campus in general, and one for the engineering school. And based on the discussion I had with my son on the car ride home, I'd have to say he was favorably impressed with all three.

One thing my son found appealing that neither my wife nor I remember having access to when we were students was the depth and prevalence of tutoring and acclimatization resources the university offered. It's a big school, and many children and parents are probably worried about students getting lost and struggling to navigate its many rules and diversions. But on every tour we went, we were told and we saw how hard the university works to make sure incoming freshman are safe and have access to the tools they need to help them succeed. Free tutoring, learning communities, student groups and clubs -- our tour guides seemed to bend over backward to stress both their importance and their availability.

It made both me and my son feel more comfortable about his prospects at the school. So much so that, by the end of the tour, I think my son was thinking that this university might be leading the others that we had visited.

Reflecting on that makes me realize how much college is a time for social as well as professional development. Looking at my son and the other high school students that were on our tours, and comparing them to the college students that gave the presentations and led us on the tours, I could see how much distance there is between those two groups of people. High school kids are still kids, but college students are young men and women. That gap was clear, but so were the ways in which that gap could begin to be bridged.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/education/university/uw-madison-engineering-program-stripped-of-national-ranking-over-incorrect/article_78465d3e-e514-5c7e-a1eb-cbb1a8f04349.html

Engineering for Eighth Graders

My association sponsors an outreach and education program for eighth graders. We call it the Fluid Power Action Challenge, and we've positioned it as it part of a series of programs to introduce the technology my association represents to young people and then to provide a pathway of activities through high school and college that brings them into careers in our industry.

We often talk about the difference between its perceived and actual value in strategy sessions with our leadership. We know it touches several thousand students a year, but other outcomes are hard to come by. Do any of those kids fall in love with fluid power and decide to pursue it as career as a result of their participation? We don't know, and frankly, we probably wouldn't like the answer if we could learn it.

But I'll confess, regardless of how many students the Action Challenge bends towards our industry, the program retains a special place in my heart. I helped launch it within our organization eleven years ago. In that first iteration, we had a total of twelve students, competing in three teams of four, who were only there because I had met a middle school teacher at one of the conferences I had attended and had pitched him hard on the idea. He called a friend and the two of them brought some of their students in for the experiment.

And, as I have told the story many times in the intervening years, I knew we had something special when, after the pizza lunch had been delivered, we had a hard time tearing the kids away from the task of building their fluid power machines so that they could eat. Fluid power was more compelling than pepperoni!

This past Friday, I attended the latest of these Action Challenge events. What was once twelve kids in a middle school classroom was now two hundred kids in a tech school gymnasium. And that event, while the largest in the state of Wisconsin, was only one of dozens that are being held around the country every year.

As the program has grown I've stepped away from it as its primary organizer -- that task now resting firmly in the hands of my staff and a dozen or more members of my association. But I still try to go to at least one such event every year and, if you watch the video I've tried to post below, maybe you'll understand why.

Eighth graders built this. They designed it and then built it, cutting the wooden supports and gluing them together, and positioning the plastic syringes in just the right places to create the movement they sought. You can see that their task is to pick up the wooden cylinder and place it on the platform -- repeatably, and as many times as possible in a two-minute competition.

And, of course, what makes the machine work is fluid power. Each syringe is connected to another by a thin, plastic tube, and each of those systems is filled with water. As each student presses in or pulls out on the syringe in their hands, the water, acting as a hydraulic fluid, transmits that action to the corresponding syringe attached to the machine, making it move in its precise, engineered direction. One movement clamps down on the cylinder, a second lifts it into the air, and a third swivels the whole machine so the cylinder can be placed on the platform.

I find it hypnotizing. Not just the graceful movement of the machine and the choreographed directions of the students, but also the forethought, smarts, and skill that went into the machine's design and function. Of course I hope these kids grow up to be fluid power engineers, but in a way, that's beside the point. Whatever it is they decide to do, something tells me they're going to excel at it, and that gives me hope for our future.

That's what I find more compelling than pepperoni pizza.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

We Are Making a Difference

It's not always obvious. In fact, sometimes it feels like you're not making any progress at all. But then, something happens that allows you to see what you've accomplished from an outsider's perspective, and suddenly, you realize that you ARE actually making a difference.

What am I talking about? Eleven years ago the association work for launched an affiliated charitable foundation to help raise money to support outreach, education, and research initiatives in our industry. The goal is to create a better educated workforce. They hired me as the association CEO at about the same time, and I remember being told that I was the CEO of the association AND its foundation after accepting the position. It hadn't even been mentioned during the interview process!

In the early years, the going was extremely tough. No programs to speak of. Not enough donations to fund the experimental programs we were trying to launch. Donors not feeling engaged or appreciated enough for their support. Only slowly, over time were we able to gain an understanding of what needed to be done, construct a strategy designed to provide it, communicate that strategy to our donor base, raise funds, and deploy targeted and effective programs. Any objective measure of our focus and activity today will show a tremendous advance over where we were when we started.

But still, the need is great, and most of the time it feels like we're emptying the ocean with a teaspoon. It's easy to lose perspective on all the good things we've accomplished when the problem we were tasked with solving remains unresolved.

This past week, however, I received a phone call from a colleague. She runs an association like mine and wanted to pick my brain because her association, like mine of eleven years ago, is contemplating the creation of an affiliated foundation to help them better tackle the workforce challenges that exist in their industry.

I'll admit, it was flattering to hear her talk about all the success she could see that we have had. She'd been on our website and had reviewed all of our programs. She had been observing us from afar, reading our newsletters and tapping into our social media feeds. She wanted to get my advice on how they should start and what they should focus on because we obviously knew what we were doing and had driven a lot of success for our industry.

That was good. But even better was the feeling I had when I started answering some of her questions. They forced me to go back in my mind and reconstruct the steps we had taken to build what we had now. And that, more than anything else, helped me see our progress for what is was: substantial and meaningful. Compared to where we were when we started, we -- and the many partners we have worked with along the way -- have made a tremendous impact for our industry.

We ARE making a difference. I don't think I will doubt that again.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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https://www.macomb.edu/future-students/programs/fluid-power-technology.html

Build Before You Change

As I write this I am on the plane out to my association's annual strategic board retreat. For those who wonder when I find the time to write my blog posts, airplane rides are great for my output.

I just finished re-reviewing the report I've prepared and will give to the board. Our annual retreat comes right at the end of our fiscal year, which gives us the ideal opportunity to both look back at the year just ending and to look forward at the year just beginning. And my report attempts to do exactly that. To look back on the successes of the year just ending and to look forward on the metrics and goals that will help determine our success in the year just beginning.

My summary comment on the whole package goes something like this: We've had a very successful year. Member participation and engagement is up, pretty much across the board, and our outreach networks to stakeholders outside our association have also grown substantially. As we look ahead to next year, a key priority will be exerting better leverage on those networks for the outcomes we seek.

That's especially true, I think, when we look at our efforts to see more of the technology our association represents being taught in our nation's universities and technical schools. One key focus area for us has been in building better stakeholder networks in these areas -- essentially engaging with the instructors and administrators in these institutions who would be in a position to actually do and facilitate this teaching.

We've offered a number of research and curriculum grants through our charitable foundation to many of these individuals, and the beneficial outcome of those activities extends beyond the creation of new curriculum pieces focused on our technology. We now have a substantial body of university professors and technical school instructors who are familiar with our association and interested in working collaboratively with us.

And only now that this network has been built do I feel that the time is right to try and leverage it for the wholesale change that we seek. In retrospect, building the connections took a great deal of time, but it was time that was necessary. Without the right partners, there is little chance that we would be able to create the kind of change we feel we need.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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http://www.sunny923.com/2016/01/06/investing-in-legos-is-smarter-than-putting-money-in-stocks-or-your-401k/

Get Specific About Your Workforce Needs

Like a lot of manufacturing based trade associations, our organization is working hard to tackle the workforce issue our members consistently cite as the number one challenge facing their companies. Given the multi-faceted challenge this represents, we have been deliberate in our strategy conversations about what piece of the problem we will try to fix.

Our members have a wide spectrum of workforce needs, and, given the availability of other workforce development programs in the market, we need to acknowledge that our efforts can focus effectively on only one portion of that spectrum. In other words, if you need a welder, we can point you to the nearest tech school with a welding program, but we're not going to spend our time and resources on developing a welding program specific to our industry.

Our attention is more appropriately placed on the development of skill sets that would otherwise be ignored by the marketplace, those that are unique and specific to our industry.

Truth be told, it took us a fair amount of time to reach that conclusion. For too long, our strategic discussions were hampered by a lack of clarity and consensus around this core issue.

Everyone was talking about workforce development, but some were talking about welders, some were talking about maintenance techs, and some were talking about degreed enigineers. While everyone was talking about fruit, it wasn't always apparent that some were talking about apples and others were talking about oranges.

We've seen that getting specific is key to having any chance at success. Picking a category and describing the desired skill sets is absolutely crucial. Only then can you apply your resources in a way that maximizes your chances of delivering what your industry decides it needs.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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http://www.applegazette.com/iphone/apples-and-oranges-problems-with-european-iphone-releases-continue/

Success Happens at the Arrows

My association has been working on the workforce challenge facing the industry we represent for longer than the ten years that I've been its chief staff executive. In all that time, we have invested a lot of time and money in programs designed either to bring awareness about our industry to young people, or to educate students at various education levels in the knowledge and skill sets relevant to it.

Recently, we've started connecting several of these awareness and education programs into discrete workforce development pathways. Students in our high school programs, for example, are encouraged to continue their education in one of the tech school programs we support, and then to move into a position at one of the companies in our industry.

That's not rocket science. Once the programs were in place, it only seemed logical to connect them in such a fashion. The end goal, after all, is neither educating high school students nor employing tech school instructors, but to produce educated employees for our member companies. But it wasn't until we started constructing these pathways, and more specifically, started drawing them as flowcharts in our strategy agenda materials, that a critical understanding occurred.

Success happens not at the flowchart boxes, each representing one of the programs in the chain, but at the arrows that connect them. Educating students is an important part of the process, but what matters most is moving students from one program to the next. In this example, from high school to tech school and then into a job.

It's difficult to exaggerate the importance of this insight. Only after it was made, I think, were we able to look back on the decade or more of activity that we have been engaged in and realize that we have probably been measuring the wrong thing.

Growing the number of high school students we educate seems critical as long the justification we have for that activity is a strategic objective that aims to increase the number of high school students who know about our industry. Once we realized that the metric that matters is not how many high school students we teach, but how many we teach that then go on to study our technology in tech school with the intent of making a career out of it -- only then did we begin to realize how useful all those years of activity might have actually been.

That’s currently where we are on this long journey. We're beginning the difficult work of understanding not just what's happening in the boxes of our flowcharted strategy, but what's happening at the arrows. We fully expect that analysis will produce a different evaluation of our success than the one we have been using.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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http://www.efoza.com/post_story-flow-chart_360602/

Starting With the End in Mind

I recently had a great experience at the Winter Leadership Conference of the Council of Manufacturing Associations. I recently posted on the fact that I had been elected to their board, and it is experiences like this one that helped me decide to put my hat in that ring. Whatever I can do to help facilitate experiences like these for me and my peers, I'm all in.

It was in a session on "Industry Workforce Solutions." Nearly every staff executive in the room is facing the challenge of developing an educated workforce for the industries they represent. I know I am. Bouncing ideas, sharing successes, and raising red flags in such an environment is where I typically find the most educational value at these conferences. Take the outside expert off the stage and let me get into the problem solving trenches with my peers.

At one point, I asked the room a question. How many of you have a specific target for the number of students you're looking to educate? In my association, I told them, we're trying to define the scope of the problem so we can bring the right amount of resources to bear. For example, if we determine that there are 5,000 positions in our industry with a certain skill set, and we assume a 5% annual attrition rate among those positions, then we had better make sure that our programs, whatever they are, are producing 250 graduates with those skill sets each year, and that we're finding ways to connect those graduates to jobs in our industry. In other words, how many of you are starting with the end in mind?

Not a single hand in the room went up.

That really surprised me, but perhaps it shouldn't have. The discussion I described above is something we've just started having in my association, and we've been working on the educated workforce issue for more than 15 years now. Up until recently, the focus has only seemed to be on more, more, more.

How many educated workers do you need? More! How many grants and scholarships should we give? More! How much money should we spend? More, more, more!

I forget which of my board members said it, but a few board meetings ago, one of them forced the question. How much is enough? What are we trying to generate and how many resources should be dedicated to that purpose? It was a startling insight at our board table, just as I hope it was for some of my fellow staff executives at the CMA conference. Like most things we do, when it comes to creating an educated workforce, we have to start with the end in mind.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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http://tech.co/sell-your-tech-company-2014-09

Research Is Education

My posts from a few weeks back (here and here) on the role of associations in the work of educating next generation professionals for the industries or professions that they represent have been getting some attention. Beyond the usual tweets and retweets, this time someone actually reached out to me, wanting to know more. In the ensuing discussion, as I began thinking more concretely about the work of my association and the challenges it has been designed to address, a couple of additional thoughts occurred to me.

One is the idea summarized in this post's title: Research is Education.

The industry my association represents is engineering and manufacturing-based. One category of high-skilled workers my member companies are looking for is college-degreed engineers with detailed knowledge of my industry's technology and products. The challenge is that only a tiny fraction of our nation's universities teach that technology as part of their engineering curriculum. As a result, most of my member companies are used to providing their own professional education in our technology. Their preference, however, would very much be that university graduates come to them with a pre-existing knowledge (and interest) in our technology, and much of the work my association has been engaged in is in an attempt to make this a reality.

The challenge is not a simple one. Getting universities to add something to their engineering curriculum generally means getting them to remove something else, and everything that's already there typically has well-entrenched advocates in place. We've tried numerous times to develop new courses and curricula in our subject matter, and also watched numerous times as the developed programs were rejected or failed to perpetuate in the larger curriculum the way we intended.

So, on the advice of some of our academic partners, we tried a different approach: supporting research projects related to our technology on the intended campuses.

There was some initial (and still some lingering) pushback from our member companies on the idea. They didn't easily see the connection between sponsoring research and educating undergraduate engineers in our technology. But, as I reported in one of those previous blog posts, we had already demonstrated that the number one factor in encouraging engineers to enter our industry was a positive experience with an academic faculty member already engaged with our technology.

What better way, then, the get faculty engaged with our technology then to sponsor research projects in our area? Research is key to a faculty member's tenure and career advancement. And since most research faculty are also educators, it is almost axiomatic that those faculty would be drawn to develop curriculum and teach courses that closely align with their research work. If you'll forgive the coarse way of phrasing it, we decided to stop paying faculty to develop and use curriculum they weren't interested in, and start paying them to pursue intellectually-stimulating research challenges related to our technology, and allow them to naturally bring that interest to both their graduate and undergraduate classes.

It hasn't been without its challenges, but so far, the process has worked pretty well. New classes related to our technology are generating on the campuses where we have supported research, and graduates from those universities are being hired in higher numbers than before by our member companies. And when we ask our members how satisfied they are with those hires, compared to the candidates coming out of the same schools ten years ago, we're consistently told that there is no comparison. They no longer have to introduce them to our technology.

Truly, we have seen that research is education.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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https://engineering.purdue.edu/Maha/news.html

Fixing the Leaky Pipeline

Last week, I wrote a post titled Education Is Not Enough, in which I argued that associations interested in developing a better educated workforce for the industries or professions they represent have to do more than just create new education programs. If they really want to close the gap in qualified employees that is facing their members, they have to also create new connection programs--programs designed to bring their members into contact with the students being educated in the association's education programs. I concluded with post with:

There's no guarantee that the people you educate are going to find their way into your industry. If your experience is anything like ours, the pipeline you think you're building will prove leakier than you expect.

I wanted to expand on that concept this week, and describe three key reasons why I think these connection programs are essential.

1. We don't control the flow. My association enjoys some long-standing partnerships with the academic institutions that educate our industry's future workforce. One of those partnerships recently resulted in a comprehensive study of how our industry's employees (primarily engineers) found their way into their positions. We wanted to understand the typical pathways and inflection points that steered successful people into our industry rather than someplace else. The conclusions surprised us. Time and again, at multiple points along a successful person's educational pathway, it was an educator--not an interaction with a company or someone in our industry--that helped bend that person's trajectory towards our industry. Academic faculty--in high school, in community colleges, and in universities--exert tremendous influence over an engineer's future career path, and they are the people in a position to direct the flow of future employees through what we might otherwise choose to think of as our employment pipeline.

2. Company employees are busier than ever. My association has developed several successful education programs that are preparing and providing better educated employees for our industry. And some of our member companies are there on the leading edge of these programs, ready and willing to scoop up the best of these candidates as soon as they matriculate. But most of our member companies are not. The vast majority of them are not even aware that these education programs are in place. The demands of our marketplace keep them focused almost entirely on running their operations and keeping their companies meagerly profitable. The news that a school three states over is graduating well-trained engineers that are looking for jobs in our industry is received not with excitement but with trepidation, because the time and resources needed to develop and maintain a relationship with that distant institution and its on-going series of graduating classes are more than they feel they can spare. It sometimes feels that if we're not able to deliver qualified candidates to their office for regular Monday morning interviews, the swift running river of their business will keep them forever separate from the people they need to keep that business growing.

3. They validate that the education programs are actually working. But getting the companies engaged, no matter how many time and resource barriers stand in the way, is necessary, because it not only delivers the help these companies need, it validates in a way nothing else can that the education programs themselves are actually meeting their needs. Lots and lots of current degree and training programs produce professionals who are not educated in anything that the industry that is looking to hire them needs. Only by getting industry into a position where they can evaluate the quality of the candidates being produced by your education programs, and then giving them a mechanism to actually change the your program's content, will you find yourself on a pathway towards success. In my experience, it usually takes several iterations to get something like this right. Just pouring money into curriculum development doesn't actually solve your problem.

So there it is. Three reasons why the workforce pipeline you're building may be leakier than you think. Your association doesn't control the flow of students, your member companies are too busy to engage, and building education programs without industry feedback won't produce education your industry needs. Figure out a way to patch those holes and you might actually have a chance to succeed.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://davidjpfisher.com/2015/02/23/fix-3-delegation-leaks-costing/

Education Is Not Enough

I just finished reading the latest white paper from Elizabeth Weaver Engel of Spark Consulting, this one written with Shelly Alcorn of Alcorn Associates Management Consulting, entitled "The Association Role in the New Education Paradigm." If you'd like a copy, you can download it here.

Dealing with the fundamental thesis of the white paper--that there is a crisis brewing in the global education-to-employment system, and that associations are uniquely positioned to provide useful solutions--is a massive undertaking. And indeed, fully half of the document is dedicated to laying out the case for action--from increasing student debt levels to increasing misalignment between what is being taught in post secondary education and what skill sets are sought by employers.

I'm not going to dispute any of the cited facts or figures. Indeed, I hear a lot of supporting comments from my own members, who are just as frustrated with the quality of community college and university graduates in their industry as those quoted and described in the white paper. What I find much more interesting is the white paper's prescriptions for what associations should do about it.

Fix it.

With an educational system that is being disrupted, college students graduating with degrees that fail to provide them practical job skills, and more adult and nontraditional learners than ever, associations stand at a crossroads. There are enormous needs we can meet: creating high-quality, competency based education; fostering social learning; and providing clear pathways to employment for students, the long-term employed, returning veterans, or those individuals who are about to see their jobs significantly affected by the rise of automation and artificial intelligence. It's a big opportunity--and a big challenge. In what follows, we offer some practical advice about how to start meeting it.

In other words, it's time for associations to step-up and solve these problems. What follows this paragraph in the white paper is indeed some practical advice, including:

• Conduct ongoing in-depth workforce analysis;
• Clearly define actual competencies needed, including soft skills;
• Clearly define career pathways;
• Consider alternative delivery methods and new technologies;
• Professionalize content development and delivery;
• Provide quality certification programs; and
• Create effective alliances.

It's a good list. My association has been working on the "workforce issue" for about twenty years now (nine under my leadership), and in that time, we have taken all of these steps either directly or in partnership with other organizations. But in my experience, the list remains incomplete because it deals only with the first half of the "education-to-employment system."

I've recently adopted some new terminology in my association when talking about this problem. Yes, I generally say, we must support and deliver "education programs"--courses, curriculum and certifications meant to educate more people in the competencies and soft skills required by our industry. But we can't stop there. We must also support and deliver "connection programs"--websites, career fairs and conferences that are designed to bring hiring managers from our member companies in contact with the people being impacted by our education programs.

The white paper is a good read, with real practical advice. But don't focus solely on education programs when trying to address the challenges it effectively describes. There's no guarantee that the people you educate are going to find their way into your industry. If your experience is anything like ours, the pipeline you think you're building will prove leakier than you expect.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.