by Candi Sparks
Today, President Obama will announce a new national public-private partnership to address high levels of long-term unemployment. The initiative, Skills for America’s Future, will foster relationships between local employers and community colleges. As reported in the New York Times, this new initiative is intended to help better align the employment demands of local companies with community college curricula. The program seeks to address the skills gap as it relates to unemployment.
It will be run by the Aspen Institute, a not-for-profit, private research organization, accompanied by a new government task force with representatives from the Department of Labor, the Department of Commerce and other agencies. The Aspen Institute will announce an executive director for its new program on October 25.
Private employers participating in the Skills For America’s Future initiative thus far, include Gap Inc., Accenture, United Technologies, P.G.& E. and McDonald’s. Under the initiative these companies will build in part on their existing training programs. “The goal is to encourage community colleges and other training providers to work in close partnership with employers, to design a curriculum where they want to hire the people coming out of these programs right away,” said Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the president‘s Council of Economic Advisors.
Penny Pritzker, a board member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, said, “We’re trying to bring together the government, the private sector, labor and community colleges and students to really address what is one of the structural problems facing this country right now.”
The Pritzker Traubert Family Foundation is providing 2500,00 to the Aspen Institute to start the program. Private partners have contributed donations in the form of scholarships to community colleges, equipment donations and student field visits. Funding for the program is coming from private foundations and no requests have been made to the government to support these efforts thus far.
The web site for the Aspen Institute states that its mission is twofold: to foster values-based leadership, encouraging individuals to reflect on the ideals and ideas that define a good society, and to provide a neutral and balanced venue for discussing and acting on critical issues.
Hopefully the private partners and colleges will create a curriculum that prepares student candidates for responsibilities beyond an entry level position and on a trajectory into management, senior management and executive positions.
Candi Sparks is the author of the “Can I Have Some Money?” books series.
