Meeting of the 21st Century Skills Collaboration

In describing a general set of worker competencies, the Department of Labor presents an array of skills and competencies that include personal skills, academic competencies, workforce competencies, industry-wide technical competencies, and occupation-specific technical skills. The conference, Meeting of the 21st Century Skills Collaboration, will assemble NSF-ATE funded collaborators and industry colleagues to initiate an effort to validate interventions and measures associated with the development of professional or 21st century skills aligned with worker competencies that cut across technician education. In terms of intellectual merit, the joint industry-academic forum will initiate an effort to address gaps in practice and the research, specifically in (1) translating what employers say is missing from new graduates into performance measures and (2) validating what professional development interventions improve student performance in the workforce. With a rigorous future-oriented agenda, the project's broader impact is in its continuous engagement of stakeholders in coordinated effort to investigate and improve the development and measurement of 21st Century skills.