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We advance our mission through research, grantmaking, social impact investments, public policy solutions, Strada-supported nonprofit organizations, and strategic initiatives.
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The Economic Imperative: In a new recession, intermediaries can help spur lower-cost, shorter-term training with a local focus.
The Equity Imperative: Intermediaries can provide vital navigation assistance, promoting simpler paths to quality employment with a focus on advising, apprenticeships, and internships.
Speaking a Common Skills Language: Intermediaries can push education providers and employers to communicate more effectively, use common terminology, and standardize their definitions of skills.
Connecting Supply With Demand: Intermediaries can track labor market demand using active online job postings, helping employers understand hire-ready credentials and applicants understand what skills they already have.
Working Together: Intermediaries can provide the leadership that’s too often fragmented.
The 2020 global pandemic, accompanying economic distress, and growing concern about racial inequity have generated unprecedented demand for improved coordination between education and work in the United States. This report focuses on the pressing need to create and improve intermediaries — bridge builders that play a vital role in connecting local and regional educators, employers, policymakers, learners, and workers, helping them to speak a common language and tackle common challenges.
“Bridge Builders: How Intermediaries Can Connect Education and Work in a Postpandemic World” demonstrates the tremendous potential of intermediaries by looking at promising models from around the world, including many in the United States. It shows how these bridge builders can connect a diverse group of stakeholders to create an education-employment system that will help the economy thrive while increasing opportunities for all, not only during the current global pandemic, but long after. The report grew out of a working group of 10 of the world’s leading education and workforce experts brought together in early 2020 by Strada Education Network and Lumina Foundation to discuss how promising efforts from around the globe might inform plans in the United States to better align postsecondary education and training with workforce needs.
“Bridge Builders” explores lessons learned and strategies for building stronger bridges between education and work, and it offers practical guidance for those who want to create, improve, or expand the role of intermediaries.
Intermediaries — also referred to as bridge builders, boundary spanners, conveners, and other names — fill the critical role of connecting all the parties in the system to empower people with the skills required in the labor force. Those parties generally include employers, educators, workers, and prospective workers. Within these categories may fall many other interests, such as unions, philanthropic and faith-based organizations, advocates for low-income people and racial and ethnic minorities, civic groups, chambers of commerce, political leaders, schools that place students in apprenticeships, and public agencies that help people find jobs. Intermediaries in the United States and globally include quasi-government entities such as New Zealand’s new Workforce Development Councils, nonprofits such as the Mobile (Alabama) Area Education Foundation, employer groups such as the Australian Industry Group, business associations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and higher education groups such as Britain’s Civic University Commission.
Intermediaries must address multiple obstacles clogging the two-way pipeline between education and work in the United States:
This report details, through examples that range from the United Kingdom and Singapore to Montana and Detroit, how bridge building and bridge builders can confront challenges across those five major areas and recommends related actions intermediaries can take.
Whether led by government, business, higher education, or nonprofits, these bridge builders offer practical ideas for other groups to explore:
In a new recession, with especially high unemployment among some types of workers that varies dramatically by region, intermediaries can help spur lower-cost, shorter-term training with a local focus.
Underserved populations continue to have unequal access to education and jobs, and the system is confusing and hard to navigate, including for working adults with families. At a time of renewed attention to social justice, intermediaries can simplify and promote paths to quality employment with a focus on advising, apprenticeships, and internships for students at all levels.
Higher Education-Led: Britain’s Civic University Commission has produced a Civic University Network of more than 100 universities working to prioritize the economy and local quality of life with the support of philanthropic and government funding.
Nonprofit-Led: In Alabama, the Mobile Area Education Foundation is tackling racial inequality and educational inequity through a campaign called Graduate Ready. Overseen by an independent 30-member commission composed of educators, employers, clergy, elected officials, and others, the campaign has led to internships and apprenticeships for students at all levels, fostered programs of study that sync with workplace needs, and simplified college transfer processes.
Intermediaries can push education providers and employers to communicate more effectively — with one another and with learners in general.
Government-Led: SkillsFuture Singapore, part of that country’s Ministry of Education and overseen by a national board that includes trade unions, employers, and educators, provides subsidies for workers to learn new skills through mostly short-term training programs and has created a framework listing what skills are required for which jobs and where people can acquire them.
Business-Led: Detroit Drives Degrees, or D3, led by the regional chamber of commerce, is trying to raise the proportion of adults with postsecondary education to 60 percent by 2030 by creating a common language among previously disparate players and requiring all stakeholders to come up with their own action plans, including ways for employers to help their existing workers.
Intermediaries can track labor market demand using active online job postings rather than other traditional sources that lag real time, help employers understand credentials such as certificates that may be sufficient for hiring, and help applicants themselves understand what skills they already have and how those fit with available work.
Government-Led: Montana has connected its university system, private colleges, Department of Labor and Industry, Workforce Innovation Board, and Department of Revenue to identify and narrow gaps between the supply and demand of labor. This effort helps education providers decide what subjects to keep or cut, and consumers see the demand for various careers and what the highest-paying jobs are.
Business-Led: The Australian Industry Group, or Ai Group, has created a so-called “higher apprenticeship” model focused on applied technology, which — in collaboration with Australian universities and training providers — offers a diploma through vocational education and training institutions, followed by an associate degree accredited by universities.
Intermediaries can provide the leadership that’s currently fragmented and craft shared interests and commitments to connect the various players in the education and employment process, as well as hold them accountable for the results.
Government- and Industry-Led: New Zealand’s Workforce Development Councils, currently being established with government funding, will convene industry-appointed employer boards to project skills demand and then design and set standards for education and training for six groups of industries. These WDCs will advise the country’s Tertiary Education Commission on how, and how much, to invest in vocational education, with the secondary effect of increasing employers’ ownership of and interest in the process.
The challenges and lessons identified in the examples throughout this report suggest opportunities and strategies that can be viewed as part of a menu most effective when adapted to specific needs and places.
The work is hard, but experiences from around the world show it can be done. And it has to be done. Whatever particular problems a given city, region, or community is trying to solve, intermediaries that tailor efforts to the unique needs of time and place — individual, institutional, and economic — will have the best prospect of lifting these places to more prosperous futures.
The ultimate goal of intermediaries in every case is not only to address the obvious and critical economic need of educating people for available jobs, but also to fill the very human one of helping the workers the existing vacuum often leaves behind.
Authors and Contributors
The State Opportunity Index was developed to help states build a stronger connection between education after high school and equitable pathways to opportunity so students realize the full value of their education and employers have the workforce they need to fill high-demand jobs.
New research highlights what states and institutions can do to help more graduates secure college-level jobs.
To better understand the value community colleges provide to individuals and communities, we need to acknowledge the range of needs they serve.
A wide range of experiences prepare students for success beyond the completion of their college degree. The evidence for the value of interning on students' future careers is strong.
In an era of student enrollment declines, tight labor markets, rising college costs, and a growing lack of confidence in the value of a postsecondary education, community colleges and employers have ample reasons to partner together.
Partnerships between community colleges and employers have the opportunity to address local and regional economic needs through a range of tools, including supporting student success through resources and services, integrating work-based learning, and building career pathways.
The list of benefits associated with earning a college degree is extensive and oft-repeated. It includes higher average lifetime earnings, employment security, greater self-esteem, and better health, among many others.
Amid all of this disruption, the number of U.S. workers leaving or changing their jobs sharply increased. Known variously as the Great Resignation, Reshuffle, or Realignment, the trend has been cast in the cultural imagination as a collective desire on the part of the American workforce for more rewarding or meaningful work.
Over the past 80 years, our nation has made great strides in improving access to college, and then ensuring that many more students could complete a college degree.
Spring 2022 enrollment numbers from the National Student Clearinghouse reveal a fifth straight semester of enrollment declines, with more than 1 million fewer students enrolled compared to spring 2020
Higher education’s measurement of student success is in the midst of an evolution. For nearly five decades, success efforts focused on access, then two decades with completion as the horizon for success, and now the focus is extending to student outcomes beyond completion.
Applied connections between education and work are increasingly a part of undergraduate education in the United States.
Two centuries after the first historically Black colleges and universities were founded, the 101 accredited HBCUs in operation today continue to deliver on their legacy of expanding educational opportunity for Black students that leads to successful and fulfilling lives.
As a field, higher education has experienced a continuing evolution in how to measure success. For nearly five decades success efforts were focused on access, followed by the past decade and a half pursuing completion, and the field now has a growing focus on the value of a degree and student outcomes beyond completion.
Strada’s prior research on undergraduate perceptions of the value of their education demonstrates that students value their education most when they receive support to connect their education and career interests.
In the wake of historic pandemic-related enrollment declines, postsecondary institutions have responded by developing and expanding innovative approaches to engaging learners.
The baccalaureate degree remains the surest path to economic mobility, employment stability, and a host of associated social benefits.
Steep declines in undergraduate enrollment during 2020 and 2021 threaten to widen existing equity gaps in college completion and career opportunities.
Nondegree credentials have been growing rapidly for decades. During the COVID-19 economic crisis, interest in nondegree credentials and skills training options was especially high. Questions about their quality and value, however, remain.
The high school classes of 2020 and 2021 have endured massive disruption to their education.
From its onset in early 2020, the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has upended life across the world, leading to uncertainty around health, work, finances, education, and a host of other issues.
The pandemic has led to a national crisis of widespread disruption to both work and education for millions of adults in the U.S., especially those from historically marginalized groups.
We asked alumni nationwide who had borrowed money to go to school if their loans were worth it. Strada Education Network and Gallup surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 6,000 student loan holders.
Our mission is to improve lives by forging clearer and more purposeful pathways between education and employment.
How Intermediaries Can Connect Education and Work in a Postpandemic World