Three Reform Proposals of the Most Important Job Training Program You’ve Never Heard Of
Integrated Education and Training (IET) is a set of courses providing career pathways for adult students. Under federal law, including the Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act (WIO Act), local adult education providers such as community colleges apply for grant funding to develop, administer, and teach classes that lead to recognized professional credentials in sectors like allied health care in 6-months or fewer. Students who qualify for these tuition- and fee-free programs include multilingual students with intermediate English proficiency and adults studying to earn their high school diploma via passing the GED test or the National External Degree Program.
In recent years, the federal government and other grantors have moved to require researchers funded by them to publish their findings as open access articles. But to my knowledge, the same is not true for grant-funded curriculum writing. If IET curriculum made possible by WIO Act grant funds administered by state agencies were made public, or even semi-public to fellow grantee agencies (typically community colleges, libraries, school systems, and community-based adult ed providers), it could make a big difference for the quality, scale, and efficiency of IET provision at the local level.
Right now, too often, each local grantee agency is writing curriculum that reinvents the wheel. Curricula to become a certified diesel mechanic or certified medical assistant are siloed and unshared across state, county, and institutional lines. Instead, adult educators could be collaborating by sharing IET curriculum — and federal and state agencies should catalyze this sharing as they have in the grant-funded research arena. Further, we should be using innovative hybrid learning modalities and online seat banks — typically used now only in degree-based higher ed — to incentivize cross-county/institution referrals if the IET classes an adult learner-job seeker in one county is looking for is only available at a community college a neighboring county.
Currently, adult educators and administrators are doing the best we can. If we had open access curriculum, a low friction online seat banking/course sharing system, and funding for full-time IET instructors — especially for instructors of multilingual English learners, who enter IET programs via bridge classes that benefit from extensive co-teaching/planning time with the content expert instructor — we could do so much more to upskill adult learner-job seekers. Small state investments and policy innovations could go a long way to empower IET providers to better play our position in increasing our state’s wealth, wages, and work by empowering workers with in-demand skills via these short-term, tuition-free classes.
