The Case for Merging Academic and Career & Technical Education for Effective Workforce Development

Academic+ CTE Intgeration I have always been fascinated by charismatic leaders. I love to check out profiles of the company's C-Suite employees over LinkedIn. My observation tells me that most leaders whose profiles I encounter, usually have a liberal arts educational background. In some cases, they hold an MBA as a terminal degree. I am not surprised at this at all. Being a leader or being involved in higher-end management, one needs to have communication, collaboration, leadership, innovation, analytical thinking, etc, or soft skills. Great interpersonal skills, data management, and analysis, emotional intelligence, and ethics come from the academic part of one's educational background. Whereas, technical expertise, domain-specific knowledge, or hard-skills, come from the vocational aspect of one's educational background. I have also observed a change in management style from centralized to decentralized placing more empowerment in an individual employee. This shift has placed a need for an academic + vocational course integration in any certification, license, or degree program. If the technology impact on CTE (the timelines of the industrial revolutions) has brought about the development of a diverse set of technical skills in employees, it has also created a need for math, scientific research, presentation, and effective communication skills. The Employability Skills Framework developed by the Department of Education (Links to an external site.) integrates CTE and Liberal Arts (LA) education. This interactive framework has three areas:

• Effective Relationships

• Workplace Skills

• Applied Knowledge

Each of these areas indicates a mix of CTE and LA course requirements to promote employability skills. CTE/Vocational Courses in Liberal Arts/Academic Programs As an instructional designer in a liberal arts college, I have seen a growth in skills-based programs rooted in liberal arts education. We have a Professional Studies Department at Carthage College that intentionally integrates liberal arts general education courses along with the vocational education courses to create a comprehensive and holistic career pathway for the student. For example, like all business programs at Carthage, the Accounting and Finance Department (this falls under the 16 Career Clusters in Wisconsin, under Business Management and Administration (Links to an external site.)) utilizes the College’s proprietary READY™ curriculum design. “READY” stands for “Real-world Experience And Developing You.” We can see evidences of academic and vocational mix in credits. The completion of the program prepares the student to take the CPA Exam (Certified Public Accountant). The following is a snap-shot of the program requirements:

• The Carthage Plan (Carthage Core Courses, that are liberal art based) (Links to an external site.)

• The Business Program Requirements (core disciplinary courses) (Links to an external site.)

As an institution, Carthage more enrolment and degree completion in its Professional Studies department. Stone & Lewis (p. 113, 2012) confirm this observation: integrating vocational/CTE courses in programs improves student engagement and achievement in academic courses. Academic Courses in CTE Programs Another great example is the High-Quality CTE Framework (Links to an external site.), which has evidence of CTE and LA course requirements for programs:

My Approach to combine CTE and LA Personally, for my faculty consultation purposes, I have selected the TIM(Technology Integration Matrix). (Links to an external site.) This framework is basically a tool to encourage the integration of technology in classroom pedagogy. TIM promotes intentional development of learning environments with technology that are Authentic, Collaborative, Goal-Directed, Constructive and Active – all of these promote both hard and soft skills development in students. I use TIM to encourage the development of authentic, real-world simulated, job-contextualized and productivity performance tools-enhanced instructional strategies that yield learning outcomes that are a mix of academic and vocational skills. References Stone, J. R., & Lewis, M. V. (2012). College and career ready in the 21st century: Making high school matter. Teachers College Press.