The U.S. Census Bureau recently released this report that states that, as of Fall 2012, more than 50 million U.S. adults (about 25 percent of the adult population) had received a professional certification, license, or educational certificate that was not a degree awarded by a college or university. Of the awardees, some 34 million had a professional certification of license, 7 million had an educational certificate, and 12 million had received both a professional certification or license and an educational certificate.

A substantial skills gap exists between the education and training of the labor force and the needs of employers in many high growth industries, including healthcare and manufacturing. This gap results in unemployment while good paying jobs go unfilled. At the same time, many low-skilled adults persist in low wage work with little opportunity for advancement.

Career pathways programs, like the Pima Community College (PCC) Pathways to Healthcare HPOG programs, are an approach to fill a vital need for skilled workers in the economy and offer low-wage workers the opportunity to obtain occupational and other skills and advance into the middle class.

This brief was produced by Abt Associates as part of the Innovative Strategies to Increase Self-Sufficiency (ISIS) project, a random assignment evaluation of nine promising career pathways programs that aim to improve employment and self-sufficiency outcomes for low-income, low-skilled individuals. (author abstract) 

This practice brief from the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) comes out of the ongoing evaluation of the five Tribal HPOG grantees, each of which was awarded a demonstration grant for a period of five years. Within the Tribal HPOG programs, supportive services are offered alongside the career pathways model used to train students for careers in the health care field. These services are a key component of the programs, as students often face multiple barriers to completing their training. This brief highlights the supports offered by the five programs and examines the similarities and differences among programs.

This Jobs for the Future report highlights the findings from a Breaking Through partnership facilitated by Jobs for the Future, the National Council for Workforce Education, and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. This eighteen-month initiative focused on piloting workforce and education strategies to better serve low-skilled students at Tribal colleges and universities.

MDRC released a policy brief that discusses the issue of low-income, college-ready students "undermatching" – enrolling in colleges for which they are academically overqualified or not going to college at all. Early results from the College Match Program in three Chicago high schools suggest that it's possible to help students navigate the college application process and make more informed decisions.

Young adults formerly in foster care are less likely to be employed or enrolled in college at age 19 than their same-age peers nationally, contributing to greater economic instability in their early adult years. Social workers, educators, and policymakers question whether youth are adequately prepared for work but have difficulty assessing their job preparedness. This brief, prepared by the Urban Institute, uses data collected as part of the Multi-Site Evaluation of Foster Youth Programs to examine: 1) how youth in foster care rate their preparedness for work at age 17, and 2) whether their assessments accurately predict education and employment two years later. The results indicated that a high sense of job preparedness, particularly when combined with high reading skills, was associated with more employment and college enrollment among young adults currently and formerly in foster care. (author abstract)

ConnectEd released a video about the Exploring College and Career Options (ECCO) curriculum, developed by MDRC and Bloom Associates, which includes lessons and activities that help students prepare for college and careers that expose them to real-world experiences on college campuses and in the workplace.

The College, Career & Technology Academy Toolkit developed by Jobs for the Future, provides detailed instructions, tools, and other resources for practitioners seeking to prepare off-track, out-of-school youth for postsecondary success.

This report provides a synthesis of research and existing ACF resources for serving at-risk youth. It describes what we know from research about at-risk youth. It then describes how at-risk youth are currently being served by ACF programs and by programs outside of ACF that have been shown to put youth on a path toward self-sufficiency. Based on the review of research and resources, it identifies issues to consider in creating conceptual frameworks for developing and enhancing ACF programs that can or do serve at-risk youth. In the remainder of this chapter, we state the key questions that guide the synthesis, define some key concepts, and describe a number of at-risk youth populations served by ACF programs. (author abstract)

As part of the Aspen Institute's Workforce Strategies Initiative (AspenWSI) funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, this report provides an overview of programs developed as part of the Courses to Employment (C2E) demonstration. The three-year demonstration was designed to help build programs through partnerships between community colleges and nonprofits and learn how these partnerships support low-income adults in post-secondary education and beyond in employment opportunities.