Technician Training

An unusual nonprofit bets big on earn-and-learn to build on Ohio’s recent industrial wins, with an initial focus on technician roles. Also, a former principal developed a curriculum to teach students the networking skills that schools leave to chance, and an essay on how the rules for entry-level hiring have changed but our structures for preparing students haven’t. (Subscribe here.)

Experiential Learning and Ohio’s People Problem

Ohio has been on a roll with industrial projects, attracting new and expanded investments across a wide range of manufacturing-related sectors. But the state faces a serious talent gap and will need a projected 230K+ technicians to fill emerging roles over the next decade.

A new $300M experiential learning program from JobsOhio seeks to bulk up the workforce pipeline. The 10-year project is grounded in economic development. Its first phase will focus on technicians, with performance-based financial incentives for employers who invest in earn-and-learn programs.

“Technicians are the backbone of modern production,” J.P. Nauseef, president and CEO of JobsOhio, said after announcing the fund. “It’s a practical investment with benefits for the entire ecosystem.”

The focus includes workers who enroll in qualifying two-year degree programs, registered apprenticeships, and technical certificate training, as well as paid on-the-job training for students as they earn credentials. Target industries include advanced manufacturing, aviation and defense, pharma, energy, healthcare, and tech.

Participating employers will be able to receive up to $10K for each worker who enrolls in an approved earn-and-learn program. The funding will be tied to performance milestones beyond initial enrollment. Those details have yet to emerge, but the program will reward employee progress and completion.

The goal is to reach 25K Ohioans during the fund’s initial phase. Each pathway will be paid, with a required minimum wage of $20 per hour. The program is designed to be flexible for companies, with support services that will be particularly helpful for smaller firms. It also seeks to avoid duplicating short-term education and training programs, including new federal Workforce Pell grants and the state’s successful TechCred initiative.

Demand for technicians is intense across the state.

“They’re incredibly hard to find,” Amy Thompson, director of HR for Worthington Enterprises, a major industrial manufacturer based in Columbus, said during an event hosted by JobsOhio. “We have to cast a very wide net.”

The company offers a one-year upskilling program through a partnership with Tolles Career & Technical Center, where manufacturing operators train to become maintenance technicians. Each week participants spend four days on the job and one day of instruction at the CTE center.

Quadri Jennings completed the program. The flexibility of being able to attend classes while on the job was key for Jennings, who works 12-hour shifts for Worthington Enterprises.

“They gave me the time to do that,” he said during the event. “They actually sent me there and paid me, which was great.”

Demographic Headwinds: Reactions to the fund and its structure have been positive. Workforce and education pros called it a welcome and serious attempt to encourage deeper participation in experiential learning.

“This is a win-win where industry gets significant human capital advantage, governments get broadening of the tech ecosystem due to increased interest from companies, and the employee benefits greatly,” says Anshul Sonak, Intel’s global director of digital readiness programs.

He says the approach can be replicated elsewhere and sees similar models in many countries where Intel has factory operations.

JobsOhio is somewhat unusual. The private, nonprofit development corporation is wholly funded by managing the state’s liquor enterprise. That money has helped it attract companies to the state. But JobsOhio also periodically draws calls from lawmakers for more transparency and oversight, mostly recently citing its minor role in the scandal that led to the ouster of Ohio State University’s president.

In addition to funding experiential learning, JobsOhio has sought to incentivize companies to bring more workers to the state. Experts say Ohio’s demographic headwinds, including an aging population, pose a challenge to the state’s recent economic successes. The greater Dayton region, for example, will face a projected labor shortage of roughly 60K by 2030.

“In our state, very simply, we need people,” Mike DeWine, Ohio’s governor, wrote this week in an op-ed for The New York Times. The state will need a projected 540K STEM and technically skilled workers—including the 230K technicians—over the next decade to meet employer demand.

“I share the concern about where all these people will come from,” says Lavea Brachman, interim director of remaking local economies at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, who wrote a series of briefs for Work Shift about the semiconductor workforce.

Brachman applauded the new JobsOhio fund, calling it a key acknowledgment of the need to significantly skill and upskill the state’s workforce. But she asks if the program can help address the long-standing disconnect between where people who need these jobs live and where the technician training and jobs are located.

“We have seen routine evidence that transportation access and childcare prove to be substantial barriers,” says Brachman.

Teaching Networking as a Skill

As a high school principal in New Jersey, Rebecca Agostino saw firsthand how much students struggled with professional skills. Many were afraid to talk to an adult on the phone or approach people they didn’t know. They worried they might mess up so, often, they didn’t try at all. 

Several years later, when she was working as a vice president for the U.K.-based apprenticeship platform Multiverse, she saw something similar: While students were getting their foot in the door with apprenticeships, many lacked previous professional experience—and employers noticed. 

“I saw this danger of students skipping all these earlier experiences and going right to apprenticeship,” says Agostino. “Employers are making a big bet and expecting ROI, so they have high expectations. If students don’t have the earlier experiences to ladder up to that, they won’t be able to deliver.” 

The Big Idea: So last year, Agostino developed her own solution: a scalable curriculum for high schoolers that teaches them durable skills and networking in a low-stakes environment. The idea behind the curriculum, which she called Prentix, is to teach students to recognize and build professional networks that already exist in their communities.

Earlier this year, Agostino piloted the curriculum at seven high schools. In an attempt to reach more students, Prentix joined forces with the education AI platform Curiously this month and is now operating under that name. This fall, Agostino and Curiously will partner with more high schools, as well as universities and workforce organizations.

The timing is prescient. Employers are increasingly voicing their need for durable skills over technical ones, which are more likely to be absorbed by AI. According to a recent research report from the Cleveland Fed analyzing more than 2,300 skills across 600 occupations, demand for soft skills topped the list.

Curiously joins a few other organizations attempting to shift the focus in education and workforce to social capital and the kind of skills needed to build and sustain it. These include Career Launch, Climb Together, Connected Scholars, and Social Capital Builders. But the field remains small.

“No one will outwardly say relationships, networks, and soft skills don’t matter, but curriculum for these things is not yet a line item for most institutions,” says Julia Freeland Fisher, director of education at the Clayton Christensen Institute and author of the book Who You Know: Unlocking Innovations That Expand Students’ Networks. 

“But if we’re thinking about what students—not employers—need, tools and curriculum like this are giving young people something that historically we’ve left to chance.” 

Read the full article, which dives into Agostino’s curriculum and students’ experiences in the pilot, on Work Shift. —By Colleen Connolly

Open Tabs

Shrinking Workforce
The U.S. labor force has fallen by nearly 1M workers during the past two months. Retirements among boomers and the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration are helping to drive the decline. The labor force participation rate was 61.4% in July, according to federal data. The rate has declined by 0.7 percentage points since January. Participation fell sharply among prime-age workers in June, but stabilized last month.

Critical Minerals
The U.S. Department of Energy announced a $100M program to strengthen the workforce for the critical minerals supply chain, which faces substantial talent gaps. The initiative will feature scholarships and other incentives aimed at higher education, the department says. It will seek to strengthen partnerships among industry, community colleges, and national laboratories, while boosting internships, apprenticeships, and other experiential learning opportunities.

AI’s Impacts
Six regions will work together to better understand how AI is reshaping local economies and how to respond, as part of a new AI Readiness Lab run by Opportunity@Work and the Brookings Institution. The work will be led by business and economic development groups in each of the regions: Birmingham, Ala.; Syracuse and central New York; Indiana; Cleveland; Minneapolis–St. Paul; and San Diego—and will focus heavily on workers without bachelor’s degrees.

Industry-Recognized Credentials
The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce has updated its list of approved industry-recognized credentials, which K–12 students can earn to meet alternative graduation requirements. The list lacked quality controls and had grown to 700+ credentials, writes the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Aaron Churchill. The new list of 70 credentials and 21 credential bundles was developed by tapping demand data and outcome information.

Workforce Pell
Very-short-term certificates accounted for about half of the certificates awarded by public colleges in Washington State from 2015 to 2023, finds a report from the PEER Center and the Washington Student Achievement Council. The researchers describe credential programs in Washington that are likely to be eligible for federal Workforce Pell grants. They found that typical earnings varied widely across all forms of certificates awarded.

Job Moves
The New Jersey Council of County Colleges seeks a director of AI strategy and innovation for its Consortium for Workforce and Economic Development. The director will lead and support statewide efforts related to AI-enabled teaching and learning, workforce and academic programming, and more.

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