With growing support for short-term skills training, including the passage of Workforce Pell, the need now is to ensure we create an education and workforce system that delivers for students and local businesses. The outcome of short-term skills training must reliably lead to good jobs and meaningful economic mobility.
One step in the right direction is to learn from people who are navigating choices about education and training options, and what factors help them achieve the results they want. National Skills Coalition spoke with thirty-four people across sixteen states who were enrolled in or had recently graduated from short-term skills training programs and gathered our key findings and policy implications into a brief, Looking for Certainty. The brief outlines how people make decisions about skills training, what people get out of it, and how public policy can deliver stronger outcomes for them.
Key Insight: Workers are eager to pursue short-term skills training as a pathway to better jobs. But without good information about the quality of a program or how it will connect them to employers, people aren’t able to choose programs that reliably deliver on that promise.
