We recently published an ebook in collaboration with Unicon that asks, “In the education-to-employment system, who is ultimately responsible for giving someone the skills to be successful in the workforce?”
Explore key themes from the ebook, “Who owns frontline skilling?” below.
Holding accountability for job readiness
Most of the American workforce is frontline. Nurses and medical assistants, diesel mechanics, welders, machine operators, patient care technicians, the people who keep water treatment plants running. These are specialized occupations that cannot be performed by anyone who has not been trained for them. They are also the roles employers report the most difficulty filling, and the roles almost nothing in the education-to-employment system was built to serve, because for the most part, both education and corporate learning were designed around the knowledge worker.
That mismatch produces what employers describe as a talent shortage. Employers respond to that shortage by hiring whoever comes closest to the requirement and absorbing the cost of finishing the training themselves, or by leaving the role vacant and running short on headcount.
When you ask an academic institution how a person becomes qualified for one of these roles, the answer describes a handoff. The institution educates a student and awards a credential, and from that point the employer takes over and develops the person into the job.
For corporate employers, on the other hand, hiring proceeds on the assumption that the person is ready for the role. When a new hire cannot yet perform, the employer reads that as an education problem: the curriculum was misaligned to the role, or the institution spent two years producing competence the employer needed much quicker. What the employer does not conclude is that developing this person has now become its own responsibility.
The failure in this scenario sits between holding a credential and performing the work. Education is accountable for graduating students. Employers are accountable for filling positions. Neither is accountable for whether the person graduating can do the job being filled.
What sits in between is practical training. A college has no reason to teach beyond the point where the credential is awarded, and an employer does not budget for it either (since recruiting budget is spent on finding candidates rather than on training people hired). So nobody pays for the training, and roles remain hard to fill. Employers work around it by hiring below their requirements, and the talent shortage is treated as a fact of the market rather than the outcome of decisions each party has made.
The problem: every function in the system reports on something other than job readiness
The previous section leaves an open question — if nobody pays for practical training, why has no institution been forced to confront the fact? Organizations are held accountable for what they measure, but nobody measures job readiness.
Colleges report enrollment and completion, and both funding and accreditation depend on those figures. College certifying bodies set standards for what a program must contain rather than for what a graduate can do once they graduate. State workforce agencies report programs funded and people served. Inside the employer, talent acquisition reports time to fill and cost per hire, and L&D reports on the programs it runs and who participated in them. Tuition assistance, meanwhile, is administered by the benefits team as an employee benefit, and reported on like one: how many people used it and what it cost.
Each of those measures is legitimate. What none of them captures is whether the person ended up able to perform on the job. A new hire can fail and leave within the year while every organization that trained and placed them still reports a good result. Nothing in that chain of reporting registers what actually happened.
The untapped opportunity for frontline: tuition assistance
Many large employers fund education through tuition assistance, a benefit that pays toward an employee’s study, capped in most policies at the annual limit the IRS allows before it becomes taxable income. In most organizations a portion of that budget goes unclaimed every year.
That money could pay for the practical training that would qualify a frontline worker for a higher-paid role. Three things in how the policies are designed prevent it:
- What they cover. These policies pay for degrees. Certificates, GED programs and English language instruction sit outside them, and those are the qualifications most frontline employees need.
- Who qualifies. Some policies require a year of service, and some exclude hourly or part-time staff, which removes much of the frontline workforce from the outset.
- Reimbursement. The employee pays the institution and claims the money back afterwards. Few people on an hourly wage can front a semester of fees and wait.
Three functions, one budget, and no shared view of the problem
Policy design explains part of why the money goes unused. The rest is organizational.
Tuition assistance is typically classified as an employee benefit, so it sits with the benefits team rather than with L&D. L&D owns the development programs, and talent acquisition owns recruitment for the roles that cannot be filled. Where those functions operate independently, nobody is positioned to point the education budget at the talent shortage.
Employers could redesign their tuition policies and have benefits, L&D and talent acquisition work together. They could also align pay with the roles people are training for. All three would help, but none of them changes who pays for the training or when. A more interesting question is what happens if the funding model reverses altogether.
Read more in the ebook
Preparing frontline workers for success requires more than education and hiring. It requires shared accountability for job readiness.
Explore the challenges and opportunities for building better pathways into frontline careers in our ebook with Unicon.
Download the ebook: Who owns frontline skilling?
