Career-related Education

Career-related Education

Identifying the field problem

According to a survey conducted by a consortium of business research organizations, the new generation of American workforce is facing a growing deficiency of professional, academic and critical applied skills that the market needs as a result of the mass exit of the experienced generation of baby boomers. In May 2006, a survey was carried out by Corporate Voices for Working Families, The Conference Board, The Society for Human Resource Management and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (Wang & King, 2009). The primary goal of this survey was to examine the views of employers on the readiness and efficiency of the new generation that was entering the U.S. workforce, such as recently hired high school drop-outs, high school graduates, and graduates from two-year technical schools, and two-year and four-year colleges (National Research Council, 2003). The report eventually concluded that America's new generation of workforce is ill-prepared for many challenges. High school based career related programs can significantly reduce the rate of dropouts and prepare students to stand up to the challenges of the in the job market, enabling them to compete in the workforce of the future (Wang & King, 2009).

It is an irrefutable fact that the US workforce is undergoing a rapid transformation. The massive workforce that the generation of baby boomers had established is slowly disintegrating due to mass retirements (Wang & King, 2009). As a result, the US workforce is in dire need of hiring more and more skilled people into its workforce in order to satisfy its needs. Unfortunately, the experience, knowledge and wisdom that comes with age, and which was characteristic of the outgoing baby boom generation is something that the new entrants strongly lack (National Research Council, 2003). A typical employer would expect a young applicant to exhibit at least some sign of basic knowledge along with the ability to apply this knowledge in real-life solutions in order to solve problems and overcome challenges related to their work. The alarming number of drop-outs from local high schools and colleges have added to the woes of these businesses since they lack both in education as well as professional skills and expertise (Wang & King, 2009). This significantly reduces their capacity to take up specialized job positions and instead restricts them to taking up odd jobs.

Formal document

The findings of the survey clearly indicate that there are many deficiencies in the new workforce that need to be addressed on an urgent basis. Addressing this issue on an urgent basis is essential in order to allow the new generation of the American workforce to effectively replace the outgoing and gradually depleting workforce of baby boomers and other experienced professionals currently employed in the industry (Maxwell & Rubin, 2000). In order to tackle this problem, career related programs need to be modified so that they are more effective in providing students with a clearer and more holistic insight into the many challenges that they will face as a part of the workforce of America ...