Global Stakes: The Challenge of Preparing North Carolina’s Workforce for the 21st Century

Phail Wynn, Jr.

We are all aware that today our national economy — and our North Carolina economy — is competing vigorously in a global arena. Two decades ago international trade hardly figured in the American market. Today, almost 80 percent of the goods we produce are actively competing with foreign-made goods. As we examine the arena of global economic competition, the real measure of success between competing, knowledge-intensive economies will be found in the quality of their human resources.

In this global economy, nearly every competitor has access to big breakthroughs in technology and to the equipment and capital to produce standardized products at about the same time, and on roughly the same terms. The only factor of production that is relatively immobile internationally, and on which the future standard of living of the nation uniquely depends, is us — our competence, our insights, our capacity to work productively together. Human resources are the competitive advantage.

We have heard a lot about the need for America to retool its industries — to increase efficiency and productivity to world-class standards. Let me emphasize the importance of retooling our educational system — to make the curriculum more relevant to the workplace of the 21st century by focusing on the development of those cognitive and interpersonal skills required for success.

Talk of educational reform has been in the air for some time. However, real reform in education should focus on more than just improvements in standardized achievement test scores. Educational reform must also address the goals of secondary and postsecondary education in a changing world and how schools and colleges should prepare young people for entrance into the 21st century. What results do we expect and what outcomes are appropriate for the challenges we face?

We now have an important “window of opportunity” for reform. Either America will do whatever is necessary to create high performance work organizations and the high skill levels needed to sustain them, or else the country will continue to slide toward low skills and the low pay that goes with them. If we want to remain a high wage economy, then we must be a high skills economy.

There are many examples of how declining educational standards and skill levels have impacted North Carolina industries. A survey of 1,150 North Carolina companies conducted by the N.C. Department of Commerce found that 54.4% of the respondents said they “always” or “frequently” had problems finding qualified applicants for entry-level positions. A survey of 306 North Carolina companies conducted by the Sociology Department of N.C. State University revealed a lack of qualified labor as the single most important barrier to future expansion.

In one sense, the advance of technology in the workplace makes work easier by reducing physical demands. But inevitably the advance of technology makes other intellectual and psychological demands. Even those inventions that make calculations faster and easier - computers, for example - require a high degree of adaptability.

Technological developments erode the importance of facts and increase the requirements for associative, synthesizing, problem solving, retrieval, and interpersonal skills. Most procedures that can be stated straightforwardly as “do this, then do that, then do that,” can be computerized and automated. However, what computers cannot do is supply context, make creative linkages between different items of information, make value judgments, deal with the unexpected, or respond satisfactorily to personal interactions.

Of course, secondary and postsecondary education must learn to accommodate these realities. Effective instruction will concentrate both on how to look up facts and how to apply them creatively in the solution of real problems.

I am sure we all agree that sustained economic growth is essential and a high general level of education for our citizens is perhaps the most important key to sustained economic growth. Common sense and careful observation both lead to the conclusion that for any nation, knowledge is power. We can further conclude that excellent education and training are key components of individual and national competitiveness, productivity, and innovation.

The fortunate economic position of the United States throughout much of its history can be attributed not only to the blessings of geography and abundant natural resources, but is surely the result also of certain deliberate decisions to expand and support education. I include here the decisions to provide universal free public education, to establish land-grant colleges, to establish “open door” community colleges, and to support university-based research with generous appropriations of tax dollars. These decisions to invest heavily in education have paid rich dividends. The best evidence of these wise investments can be found here in the Research Triangle region.

The experience of other nations with education and economic progress provides strong additional evidence. For example, after World War II, the Japanese government vigorously pursued a goal of universal high school education for Japanese youth. This was a radical innovation for that hierarchical society. In 1950, 43 percent of all 15-year olds were going on to high school. By 1980, 95 percent were going on to high school or vocational training. The Japanese adopted the American ethic of universal education and have pursued it with extraordinary efficiency. Japan’s efforts and investments in education helped lead to that country’s postwar economic miracle.

It is important to note that the level of basic achievement in Japan is quite high. As Dr. Thomas P. Rohlen reported in his book, "Japan’s High Schools": “The great accomplishment of Japanese primary and secondary education lies not in its creation of a brilliant elite . . . but its generation of such a high average level of capability.”

The challenge to us in North Carolina and in the nation as a whole, as we pursue educational reform to ensure continued economic growth, will be to generate in our current and future workers such a “high average level of capability.” A level high enough to enable us to continue competing intellectually and economically in the global marketplace of the future.

So, we face two imperatives:

First, we must upgrade considerably our definition of basic skills. Our definition of basic skills must expand to include more of the skills that are demanded in today’s technologically sophisticated workplace.

Second, after revising our definition of basic skills, we must mobilize our educational system to teach those new skills. We must sustain the efforts already underway to transmit to all of North Carolina’s students higher levels of the skills required to function productively in today’s workplace. These levels must be sufficiently high to afford them choice and opportunity in our competitive economy. In addition, raising the lowest achievers to a “high average level of capability” is a significant part of this imperative.

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has written that our educational system must prepare far more people to take responsibility for their continuing education and to collaborate with one another so that their combined skills and insights add up to something more than the sum of their individual contributions.

Learning to collaborate suggests a different kind of education than one designed to prepare a relatively few talented young people to enter various professions. Instead of emphasis on the quiet and solitary performance of specialized tasks, what’s needed is a greater emphasis on interactive communications linked to group definition and group solution of problems. Students should learn to articulate, clarify, and then restate for one another how they determine questions and find answers. Rather than be trained simply to communicate specialized instructions and requests, students should also learn how to share their understandings and build upon each other’s insights.

Communication skills are only one aspect of collaboration. Young people also must be taught how to work constructively together. Instead of emphasizing individual achievement and competition, the emphasis in the classroom should be more on group performance. Students need to learn how to seek and accept criticism from their peers, how to solicit help, and how to give credit to others, where appropriate. They must also learn to negotiate - to articulate their own needs, to discern what others need and see things from other’s perspectives, and to discover mutually beneficial outcomes.

A cursory comparison of the college preparatory curriculum and the general and vocational curricula offered in public high schools across the nation reveals a major shortcoming: the preparation offered young people who are not bound for four-year baccalaureate programs assumes that they do not need to understand and master the concepts that support the effective use of mathematics, science, and the English language. The curriculum fails to challenge them and assumes that they will not need to think for themselves.

In the workplace of the 21st century, virtually all workers will need to be able to think for themselves, to communicate orally and in writing, to solve problems working with others, and to work independently.

The impact of the “information revolution” and the application of information-intensive technologies are altering in some radical ways the skills that are required of workers. The skill requirements for virtually every job in North Carolina’s economy are changing under the pressures of new technology, new business practices, and stiff international competition. As Lester Thurow pointed out in a "New York Times" editorial, recent advances — such as participatory management, ISO 9000, TQM, and just-in-time inventory systems — require workers to master complex skills, and these techniques cannot be implemented unless the workforce has better math and problem-solving capabilities than it has now.

The problem is not limited to entry-level workers and to the question of how much and what specifically they should know. Readiness for training and retraining will be an essential requirement for all workers. Seasoned workers are frequently called upon to return to the classroom or to learn new skills on the job. Many in recent years have found that they lack the basic skills in reading, math, and the principles of science that support their efforts to acquire new skills.

The National Academy of Sciences recently came to a conclusion that was both simple and profound. The primary responsibility of the public schools must be to provide “core competencies” to all students. Other goals, whatever their merits, must come second. “Those who enter the work force after earning a high school diploma need virtually the same competencies as those going on to college, but have less opportunity to acquire them. Therefore, the core competencies must always come first during the high school years.” The academy’s report, "High Schools and the Changing Workplace", acknowledged that students may vary widely in capability and in learning styles, that no one curriculum will satisfy the needs of all, but that the goal for all must be the same: to develop a set of basic skills and competencies needed for lifelong learning. The remainder of the report described these core competencies — skills in reading, writing, computation, reasoning, and problem solving that enable a person to apply what he or she already knows to a new situation.

The jobs of today and the jobs of tomorrow will require workers at all levels of the economy to be engaged in lifelong learning. We must devise a postsecondary educational system that allows, even encourages people to enter and leave as appropriate to their individual needs, a system that provides flexibility while ensuring high standards of academic achievement and professional excellence.

The National Research Council, in a study entitled “High Schools in a Changing Workplace”, made the following observation:

“What defines and limits a career is the individual’s ability to learn throughout life. Technology will change, businesses will change, the content of a given job will change, and one’s employer will change. What will never change is the need to adapt to new opportunities.”

Finally, young people entering the workforce of the 21st century will need to have a global perspective. High school, college, and university leaders must work with their faculty to broaden the curriculum to impart larger world views to all students. All students should receive more instruction in foreign languages, literature, and history, but not just from the western world. Student and faculty exchange programs should be expanded in number and scope to include Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America. Cross-disciplinary seminars on intercultural matters should be included in all curricula. In the global marketplace, cross-cultural understanding will be a requisite for economic survival.

A colleague of mine describes this potential future scenario: Our future workforce will either compete with Germany, Japan, and South Korea, or it will be relegated to competing with Jamaica, Mexico, and Vietnam. Our only viable option is to educate, train and use a labor force that the world has never seen before, and one that would be difficult for other nations to duplicate. After all, we have done it before.

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