Bridging the Skills Gap: IYF’s Systems Change Approach to Workforce Development
Bridging the Skills Gap: IYF’s Systems Change Approach to Workforce Development
Bridging the Skills Gap is IYF’s evidence-based approach to transforming education-to-employment systems. Leveraging this approach, IYF has inserted over 4,000 hours of demand-driven curricula into public school curricula around the world, with over 52,000 young people enrolled in IYF developed curriculum every year. This leads to important outcomes
- For students: On average, 60% of graduates from IYF developed curricula secure formal employment 4 to 6 months after completion and earn 26% more than their peers.
- For firms: On average, 90% of firms employing graduates report high satisfaction with their work and preparation. This lowers their recruitment, selection and training costs, and increases productivity.
- For regional economies: By moving at the speed of industry, regional workforce systems have been able to attract additional investments to grow critical sectors, like aerospace, IT and tourism.
IYF has applied its Bridging the Skills Gap methodology with 11 economic sectors (aerospace, advanced manufacturing, agriculture, automation, automotive, banking services, energy efficiency, hospitality, information technology, logistics and trade, energy), helping employers and education and training providers respond to economic megatrends including digital disruption, the advent of AI, and climate change.
Skills Gaps Undermine Productivity & Employment Around the World
As global trends like digitization, the energy transition, nearshoring, and energy security concerns upend industry, education and training providers struggle to keep up. This means that young people are often trained in skills that have little to do with labor market demands. IYF has developed an agile, demand driven approach to bridging the skills gap between public education and training providers and labor market demand.
IYF’s Approach to Aligning Talent Supply with Demand
IYF facilitates the transformation of these systems through analysis and assessment, industry-engaged curriculum development, and expanded capacity of education and training providers. IYF has developed a proven systems approach for aligning the talent supply chain with industry demand. IYF aligns curriculum as well as enrollment so that young people and their families learn about opportunities in their local labor market and how to access them, young people face fewer barriers to access opportunities, young people develop critical skills for high paying jobs in growing sectors, and firms can find graduates with in-demand skills. This approach aligns interests as well as curricula and enrollment, so that key players have the incentives and capacity to sustain changes over time—creating lasting change at scale.
Bridging the Skills Gap includes:
- Undertaking a quantitative comparison of supply and demand
- Building consensus among industry partners from the identified sector about critical and scarce entry-level skills up and down their supply chains in the regional labor market
- Developing solutions to address the skills gap with industry partners and training providers
- Identifying barriers to carrying out these essential practices and determines how adjustments to roles, routines, and rules within a system could address those barriers
- Making system adjustments to ensure sustainability
IYF’s 5-Step Approach
Around the world IYF facilitates the transformation of education and training systems through analysis and assessment, industry-engaged curriculum development, and expanded capacity of education and training providers. IYF has developed a proven systems approach for aligning technical training curricula and teaching practices with industry demand, thereby improving the work readiness of young people. This approach aligns interests as well as curricula, so that key players have the incentives and capacity to continually update curricula – creating lasting change at scale.
IYF’s Bridging the Skills Gap approach begins with a quantitative comparison of supply and demand. To identify the quantitative demand, IYF conducts a big-data analysis of vacancies collected from public (National Employment Services) and private jobs portals (OCC, Indeed, LinkedIn, other local job boards) to determine which economic sectors offer the highest volumes of attractive entry-level positions for a given population in a particular region. To identify the quantitative supply, IYF reviews enrolment, graduation, and labor market entry data for the relevant degree programs at the terminal educational level appropriate for the target population. | |
Next, IYF builds consensus among industry partners from the identified sector about critical and scarce entry-level skills up and down their supply chains in the regional labor market. This step serves two purposes: 1) defining the skills required to fill workplace skills gaps among new recruits, 2) cementing the alliance with private sector allies by demonstrating that they are unable to address the skills gap as individual firms or as a sector, but rather need to call on public-sector players to change enrolment and curricula in relevant degree programs. IYF leverages a design-thinking interactive workshop format built around industry defined competency models. | |
IYF then looks for room to maneuver to develop missing skills given 1) the core reasons for the skills gap and 2) the institutional constraints faced by the training providers. Using curriculum analysis tools aligned to industry competency models, IYF works with training providers to identify the core reasons for the priority skills gaps amongst graduates (i.e., lesson content, teaching practices, instructor knowledge, equipment, and others.). Additional problem areas may be identified that contribute to insufficient graduates for an industry’s needs, such as too little career orientation or guidance that is not based on labor market information. IYF ensures that proposed solutions address the core reasons are within the room to maneuver of the training providers and builds political will for continued public-private collaboration by analyzing buy-in, institutional autonomy, interest groups, budget rules, and incentives by leveraging its institutional diagnostic & transformation plans, actor-based power analysis and other systems change analytical tools. | |
IYF then builds solutions to address the skills gap with industry partners and training providers. In some cases, IYF draws upon existing solutions, such as its industry leading life skills curriculum, Passport to Success, or its proven career orientation methodology, My Career My Future, to build life skills demanded by industry partners or orient young people to opportunities in their regional labor market. In other cases, IYF works with industry-identified technical experts and experts in 21st century skill building to design bespoke solution that respond to industry demand for critical skills and the room for maneuver afforded by the training partner. Products of this work can include complete training programs ready for adoption by training partners, improved methodological guides for existing technical learning outcomes, teacher training programs, or updated references and materials. | |
The activities described above (identifying industry demanded skills, updating curricula, aligning enrollment, and retraining instructors) are recognized as essential practices among TVET providers, however, they are often imperfectly applied, due to perverse incentives and other barriers. As IYF works through the steps above with industry and TVET providers, IYF identifies barriers to carrying out these essential practices and determines how adjustments to roles, routines, and rules within a system could address those barriers. Having built critical alliances with decision makers to change curricula, teacher practices, and other youth-facing solutions, IYF now turns to the system adjustments needed to sustain ongoing curricular alignment work among regional ecosystem actors. These systems adjustments, such as changes to teacher contracting mechanisms or industry-education sector committee rules and responsibilities, build political will and institutional capacity for sustained curricular alignment work. |