Adult education programs play a vital role in encouraging students to identify, strengthen, and apply workforce skills.* Students need these skills to find a job or advance in their current role. A program-wide approach to defining and teaching these skills ensures that staff and students have the language and tools they need to be successful.

Teachers and students are likely already using essential workforce skills in your program. Most teachers and advisors intuitively draw on skills such as teamwork, communication, and critical thinking, and all programs have a mandate to integrate skills such as digital literacy and respect for differences. A program-wide approach helps coordinate and strengthen this work.

Program leaders have a critical role to play in uncovering the ways this work is already happening, building shared understandings, and aligning staff efforts toward a common goal. If you are looking to strengthen your program’s approach to teaching workforce skills, consider these three core components:

• Shared understanding: What do we mean by “workforce skills”?
  • Naming specific skills, describing what they look like in action, and clarifying their value to adult learners strengthens instruction and supports collaboration among staff. 
• Shared framework: How do we incorporate workforce skills into instruction and advising? How do we coordinate and reinforce skill building?
  • Using shared ways of identifying workforce skills in curricula, units, and lesson plans build accountability for staff and help students to name the skills they are building.
• Shared approaches: How do we bridge skill-building and application?
  • Sharing and collaborating across roles strengthens understanding of how students might apply workforce skills when searching for and securing a job. Advisors have a wealth of knowledge to share here.

Underlying all of this is support from program leaders. Program leaders shape the why, when, and how of developing shared understandings and accountability structures.

Strategies for Program Leaders

Following are examples of how you might build on the work that staff are already doing to shape a more concrete program-wide approach. Choose one or two as a next step--there's no need to do everything at once!

• Highlight what is already happening. Facilitate a discussion about workforce skills. Create a shared definition with your staff, and name the classroom and advising strategies staff are using to make these skills visible.
• Choose a framework: See the article in this newsletter called, “Integrating Workforce Preparation Across All Adult Education Programming,” to learn more about workforce skills frameworks.
• Formalize expectations: Add a row to your program’s lesson plan template for instructors to name the specific workforce skills being taught. Incorporate workforce skills into your classroom observations.
• Facilitate skill-building: Share a sample lesson plan and ask staff to identify the workforce skills it addresses. Check out sections 1-5 in the Inspiring Career Development and Action (ICA) Curriculum Guide for lessons to use in your discussion, or have staff participate in relevant professional development to support collaboration and shared learning.
• Focus on student agency: Facilitate a discussion with teachers and advisors about how to support students in naming the workforce skills that they are learning—or already have acquired. Then discuss how to help students to use them in the job search process.

This work requires time together to reflect, collaborate, and create. Ensure your teachers and advisors have common planning or meeting times, with structures or supports to guide the conversation.

Resources and Support

SABES offers a wealth of Professional Development (PD) and resources! Use these with your team both to deepen your collective understanding of workforce skills and to build on the many ways you’re already integrating them into your program’s instruction, services, and policies every day.

• ICA: This curriculum guide includes lesson plans and materials that model career-contextualized teaching by integrating academic and workforce skills. Although the guide is written with individual instructors and advisors in mind, the related Inspiring Career Development and Action: Strategies for Teachers and Advisors PD offering promotes a program-wide approach by supporting collaboration between instructors and advisors.
• Continuous Improvement Planning: This course supports program leaders and teams as they develop and implement program-wide goals and action plans.
• Program-Based Coaching and PD: Not seeing what you’re looking for in these resources? SABES also offers program-based coaching to support your specific goals and challenges and can work with you to tailor existing PD to your program’s needs. Visit the SABES Coaching Hub for more information.

*In this article, "workforce skills" means both transferable, soft skills as well as those important for specific jobs.