Employment is the single greatest issue worldwide with approximately 30-45 percent of the working age population either unemployed, under employed, or inactive in the marketplace. The global population is growing quickly and we need to develop a method for billions of new people to be able to generate threshold wealth to sustain a decent quality of life. The question is, how? The answer is to create employment-centric education, education that provides the skills demanded in the modern economy. This concept lies at the heart of the Education 2 Employment Bridges initiative.
Currently colleges and universities are proving inadequate for the task of preparing graduates to enter and thrive in the work force. The priorities of the existing academic system places the emphasis solely on instructing students with inadequate attention placed upon helping students secure a high skill job. The problem is that university presidents and corporate presidents have different goals. The priority of a University president is academic reputation, while the priority of a corporate president (in terms of hiring entry level workers) is to hire workers who are day one ready with the necessary employment skills. Lacking substantial contact with employers colleges and universities fail to provided their students with the skills that are in demand. This has produced a growing phenomenon commonly known as the “Skills Gap”.
Innovative Enabler of Prosperity.
We create entrepreneurs and trained, qualified job seekers.
The goal is to offer higher education to make students employable and productive on day one, or to start companies of their own. We do this by revamping curriculum to include core domain skills, critical career skills, and hands-on apprenticeships.
This is the Last Mile in Higher Education.
The internet and Cellular technologies will proliferate.
Mobile computing devices will be ubiquitous.
Data storage will be abundant and cheap.
Cyber security and information security will be critical for every individual and organization.
Globalization is here to stay.
Global commerce and travel will increase.
Urbanization will accelerate.
The “Skills Gap” is the widening expanse between the skills possessed by workers and the skills in demand by employers. This has created a situation in which jobs are left vacant due to a failure of employers to find qualified candidates.
McKinsey & Company reported that by 2020 there could potentially be a surplus of 90 to 95 million low-skill workers compared to a shortage of about 38-40 million high-skill workers. This failure to swiftly fill job openings stifles economic growth and affects millions of individualswho are either unable to find work or must accept low skill jobs that offer no prospect for personal growth and prosperity. This problem is particularly severe for recent graduates burdened massive student loans.
Currently in the US, only half of recent college graduates work in a job related to their degree. Higher education must be a truly value-added institution, the spiraling cost of a college degree must be justified by the ability of the graduates to secure meaningful high-skilled employment.
The goal of E2E bridges is to make wealth creation attainable for all hard working people. We believe that education for its own sake is not enough, education must lead to employment. The methodology for altering the situation is a multifaceted approach that changes the way that students are assessed, instructed, and guided by educators.
This is done by creating personalized curriculums, students only take the courses relevant to their career ambitions or to strengthen skill sets in which the student is weak, and by directly partnering educators with firms seeking workers. This will help to keep the cost of higher education low and ensure that students are only paying for courses that are relevant to their personal situation. By bridging the gap between those that instruct students and those that hope to hire recent graduates, employers will have the ability to participate in creating courses to ensure that the skills they require are being imparted to the students. Creating these partnership will streamline the process for people to maximize their potential by making the path from education lead directly to a job on the other end.
To make this vision a reality the Bridging Nations Foundation has established two colleges, The College of Energy, Environment, and Sustainability in 2011, and the E-Lock Cyber College which is scheduled to launch in early 2015. Both institutions have been designed from the ground up to embrace the E2E Bridge philosophy of employment centric education. As the fields of renewable energy and Information Technology, cyber security, in particular, are rapidly expanding they are the ideal areas to begin to put our model into practice.