A Research Collaborative to Build Employability Skills for STEM Technology Fields

Changes in the technician workplace are increasing the demand for employees who have skills in adaptability, collaboration, communication, workplace diversity, lifelong learning, and understanding the business mission. This project plans to address this need by developing and testing a professional development model that fosters students' employability skills. The focus will be on students who are enrolled in a new Advanced Manufacturing Technology program/career pathway that will prepare them for careers as advanced manufacturing technicians. The research team will adapt the researcher-practitioner-partnership to support the development of these students' employability skills. The project is estimated to directly serve at least fifty students pursuing associate degrees in the new program, six program faculty, and 25 additional faculty in both postsecondary and secondary technician programs. The project's research activities will investigate: (1) the effectiveness of this approach to developing employability skills; (2) the feasibility of rapid development and testing of new curricula; and, (3) the effectiveness of short-term employability skills development experiences compared to multiple development experiences over time.

The researcher-practitioner-partnership method was developed to improve the flow and implementation of research findings into practice at the K-12 level. This method will be adapted for use in post-secondary technician education. Using a set of research methods and assessments, this effort will study simultaneously the teaching and learning of employability skills while engaging technician educators as co-designers, developers, and knowledge builders. In alignment with the researcher-practitioner-partnership method, the process to validate assessments will identify and define employability skills constructs and identify instructional strategies to ensure alignment of assessments to practice. The research team will use grounded theory and the "plan-do-study-act" approach modified for use in the researcher-practitioner-partnership context to adapt, test, and refine employability skills tools, resources, and methods.