Promoting the Development of STEM Tech Employability Skills: A Review of Practices and Needs in the ATE Community

Recognizing the importance of a highly qualified technician workforce, industry and education leaders look to community and technical colleges' technician programs for innovations, lessons learned, best practices, and guidance on cultivating critical academic and career skillsets (non-technical skills) that contribute to the health and security of the nation's Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) infrastructure. Practitioners in the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) community and policy makers face an urgency to re-envision learning and environments and workplaces to better support individuals in building critical and complex non-technical employability skillsets. Based on a review of the research and practitioner literature, the cognitive employability skills associated with problem solving appear to enjoy a relatively robust level of investment and visibility, but the employability skills associated with interpersonal skills and the intrapersonal skills of coping and maintaining a positive "mindset" (e.g., positive attitude, persistence, and flexibility) are likely to occur informally and under the radar. However, unlike technical skills, employability skills are ill defined. Findings from the qualitative research study will yield research-based guidance for practitioners in education, policy makers, and employers to make informed decisions on how to promoted the development of employability skills and to advocate for needed resources.

Addressing a gap in the literature on academic and career development in technician education, the targeted research project addresses will feature a qualitative research study that examines and synthesizes the literature and expert knowledge on employability skills. Three questions are investigated in the exploratory empirical research study. What are the employability skills? learning principles identified in the research and why are they important in technical contexts, such and Information Technology (IT) and Advanced Manufacturing (AM)? What are the practices used to develop ad measure employability skills in IT and AM and how do the specifically support the needs of underrepresented groups? What are the most promising directions for future development and evaluation o employability skills in workforce programming practice, research, and policy? Three qualitative research methods will be used to answer the research questions. This overall approach replicates the approach one taken in a previous investigation into general programs for supporting chronically unemployed and underemployed individuals and underrepresented minority adult students in post-secondary education and entry-level employment. The narrative research synthesis is informed by the conceptualization of research syntheses proposed by Cooper (1998, 2006) and Campbell and associates (1992). The Interviews with expert informants in workforce development, technician education, and the industry selected industry sectors will deepen an understanding of employability skills. The systematic examination and iterative refinement of the synthesis of the research and expert knowledge will assess data saturation (e.g., knowing how many interviews are needed to provide sufficient codes and themes for replicable findings) and ensure support the development of stable data categories.