Randal Tillery: Be correcting us continuously the entire presentation. So thanks for being here today. We are really excited to do this presentation today.

For those of you who've been on some of our presentations around the education to workforce dashboard that we built this last year, we're trying to go a bit beyond that today, to go deeper and mix our pathway development design. And we're going to share some case studies with you as well. So we're very, very excited. Who has control of the deck? Blaire, is that you?

Blaire: Yup.

Just a brief bit about us. So I am the director of post-secondary education and workforce development at WestEd, that is as scary and weird as it sounds. But I want to tell you a little bit about the team that Kathy booth and I lead and the content area that we lead around post-secondary and educational workforce.

Our real focus is on strengthening the role of higher education workforce and economic development programs to improve student access and outcomes in higher education and increase economic mobility for low income families and communities. We're really see ourselves as being the people focused on living wage jobs and pathways from wherever you're starting, whether that be in high school or the community or an adult education to being to leverage different educational systems in ways that allow you to make that journey to success and to achieving the American dream, as unclear as what that is sometimes these days. Blaire?

This is just some of our lines of work. I'm not going to go very deeply into this. Many of you know that the team that I supervise also does the adult education pipeline dashboard. But in addition to that, so in addition to data tools and analysis and research, we do a lot of work around pathway development and planning that people may not know about. So we'll talk about some pathway exploration and development projects that we're actually doing in the field for adult educators right now to help you understand some of the broader context of the work beyond the launch board and the adult ed to workforce data tool.

We do a lot of work around guided pathways in the community college system and how that touches adult Ed and K-12 education and systems that increased student equity and outcomes. We do a lot of labor market and economic analysis. But our real kind of bread and butter, we like to believe is professional development.

And for us, the data tools are only a means for us to focus on having conversations with practitioners to being able to go meet with a consortium like we've done recently with North Alameda or with an entire region like we did in the South Central Coast, to take the tools that we're developing and to help practitioners think about ways to use those to strengthen outcomes and pathways for their students.

This is our team here today. Veronica already introduced us but this slide will also be at the end of the deck and this deck will go out to everybody. So we encourage you to reach out to us. This includes our titles, as well as our email addresses, so please feel free to reach out. There used to be one person on the slide two years ago, and that was me, and so it's really exciting to actually see four faces up there as the work rolls forward.

So we're going to talk about a couple of things today. We're going to talk about why career pathways matter. And that's just a couple of slides up front to really talk about why this work is so important for our students, and to really introduce a framing concept about what a pathway system is very, very briefly, that Blaire will reinforce later on. Allie will talk something about the education to workforce data tool and how that can inform the work of consortia and entire regions to really make decisions about how you connect adult education, CTE, and workforce preparation programs to community college credit pathways and to living wage jobs and in whatever region of the state that you're working in.

Blaire will do-- she will talk about understanding career pathways and in particular, career pathway design thinking. So how can you think about creating a process with your consortia to begin to explore how you can build stronger pathways, what it means to build a pathway system as opposed to an individual training program. Blaire has deep roots in this.

She has been working on a national contract with OCTAE to inform the IET toolkit that is currently developed but has yet to be released. So she has a lot of experience in this area and she's excited to share what she knows about it. Part of that will also be using LMI and employer engagement to build stronger pathways. So we'll touch on that as a part of this career pathway design thinking process.

So when we talk about career pathways, and I am painfully aware that if I sit in a room with 18 people and I use the word pathway or I use the word mapping that there may often be 18 different things going on in people's heads. When we talk about a career pathway, we're really trying to think about not just a training program but a pathway system. Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to build a way for someone wherever they're starting, whether it's that extreme entry level job or whether they're coming out of high school or they're coming out of the military for them to identify a way to get on a pathway that allows them to get that that first educational experiences that gets them to the better job but also helps them understand the next stage and what they can do.

So what you want your adult learners to do. And I used to say this around the idea of transition in the adult Ed consortia, and my own consortium in Contra Costa, that if you're not helping students think about transition to the next stage even in that entry level ESL class or that entry level training program, you're not helping them understand what their pathway could be. But is this idea that you have multiple entry and exit points for entry level, middle skill, and higher skilled workers, it's aligned both to immediate employment that there's a job, because most adult learners if they come to you for a CT program they need to get a job and they need to get it relatively quickly. Not everyone is in a position to spend a year training to get to that first job.

But it also has a bridge to the next level of training. So I used to say, I can get anyone to come and sit down and dig in for 18 weeks to actually finish that first training program and then they go out into the universe, I never see them again. We want them to be able to go to work but we also want them to be able to know they can come back.

If they do another term or another training program, they can go from just $15 an hour to $20 an hour, which in the context for adult learners and adult education is just a really important wage gain. The difference between being food insecure, oftentimes a better job means access to health care and other kinds of benefits. It also means improved outcomes for children and some of those same households.

So helping people think about the whole pathway and then thinking about transition strategy. So it's not just enough to say, Oh, here are all our programs. These things actually line up into some pathway system, but then how do we help them get there?

What's the transition strategy? Are you doing exit advising and exit counseling when they leave in addition to whatever counseling you do when they come in? Do you have ways to help them do an educational plan that actually charts out multiple steps? Do you have transition specialist reaching back out to them after they have been gone a while to see if they're ready to come back to do the next thing.

And what you're trying to do at the end of the day is really strengthen student capacity for lifelong learning and setting future goals. I was on a call yesterday and I said, what I really feel like we're trying to do most of the time is help someone understand and think themselves forward into that next space. Because so many of our students don't see themselves as being educationally proficient. They may not think they're college material if they're starting in the adult school. So how do you help them visualize themselves in that next space or in that future space where they could really be making a living wage and buying a home and really providing for their children in the way that they actually wish they can. Blaire.

We're going to talk about a couple of case studies. We're very, very excited about. These are pretty large scale projects, one of which is we're doing some work in San Diego Imperial County with the adult schools in the super region down there and the respective college noncredit programs.

They want to create original career navigation system for adult learners using all of the training programs they collectively offer and to build some kind of online navigation tool for adult learners to understand where the programs are, how the programs connect together into pathways and what that actually looks like in some online place where adult learners could get better information. Understanding the different schools have different expertise and certain kinds of programs and if adult learner can actually see the entire picture, it may allow them to think about their opportunities in a larger or grander way.

And then secondly, is a project as a Delta Sierra mistyped that. We've been asked to help stand up a sector project focused on transportation, distribution, logistics and advanced manufacturing for the Delta Sierra Adult Education Consortium. Blaire, there we go.

Blaire Willson Toso: I shouldn't drive.

Randal Tillery: Using pull, so we're pulling labor market information. We're actually doing direct employer engagement with 40 employers and really mapping skills and competencies aligned to entry level, middle skill, and advanced skill occupations in both of these industry clusters. The goal is to identify pathway opportunities and not only move vertically within each industry but where they may be translatable skills that allow someone who starts in a warehousing job for Amazon in that County to be able to move over into an advanced manufacturing pathway or vice versa.

So we're using skills to inform a broader regional mapping process. And then we're leading pathway design workshops with faculty and the workforce system to develop a sector approach to how they can actually build a much more highly effective and integrated pathway system that can help adult learners move from entry level work all the way to middle skill jobs. And we'll talk a little bit about that

Alexandra Lozanoff: Randy, we have a question in the chat. Frank asks if the team in San Diego has seen the tool career coach from the folks at NZ or skills match? The other NZ product.

Randal Tillery: So the market for a career coach, Frank and I'm sure pretty well. Well, this has primarily been colleges and a lot of it's based around supply data for programs offered by colleges. Adult school programs are not typically represented in that space. So I will say that the work we're doing in San Diego is as much focused on helping adult educators understand how to organize their courses and their programs and to understand them as programs of studies that can be organized in a way that can inform something like career coach.

But I will say, the other platform they're looking at and thinking about, there is a tool developed in Orange County called Program Finder that's doing something like this related to K-12 pathways and the connection to community college. But they haven't really settled on the platform. What we're doing is helping them understand how to organize their programs and their offerings and what counts is a post-secondary credential or program of study and what doesn't, so they actually know how to populate the data set.

So that is my piece of this. I'm going to pass this now over to Allie Bollella. Allie is so embedded in this education to workforce data tool that we've wanted to call the Bollella tool occasionally and just to market it that way. So Allie, why don't you go ahead and take us forward.

Allie Bollella: Absolutely. Thanks so much. I'm excited to share this work with y'all. It's been a year and a half in the making and we're starting to dig into the deeper work in the case study. So I'm excited to share the origination of all this work and the data work we've done. Next slide.

So the purpose of the project has really been to understand the continuum of CTE and career courses offered both by noncredit and adult education practitioners across the state of California because we don't have a common data set for our course types and descriptions and the classification system for how they all fit together. A second purpose was to map the relationship between CTE programs and career offerings, the Standard Occupational codes and credit programs and into the regional labor market.

The third one is really to support consortia pathway development and conversations using labor market data and other resources for CAEP students. So out of that the data work that we've done, we created a data set that is publicly available for you all and it also informs the data tool we have which I hope will help your pathway conversations and it's also informing how we're moving forward into the deeper work of professional development in different regions which you'll hear about in the case studies. Next slide.

So really, the big picture project goal has been to map K-12 college offerings and demand for employment into the labor market in this kind of pathway idea and to really map out the curriculum and bring adult education into that mapping process. So this is an example of one of the OG maps, the original maps of planning the pathway and thinking about how a student could transition from adult schools into the community college. Next slide.

This is an example that has brought in those industry recognized certifications along with jobs and wages at different levels of the career pathway. So at a very detailed nuanced level it gets complicated, but this is helpful information to have. And a lot of our project has been thinking about how to clearly communicate pathway data at a high level but also make sure that we can drill down and get to the detailed level of information so we can actually help build pathways but also look at things at a very high level, regional level and strategically across the state. Next slide.

So we did data collection for about four months, four, about four months. And we scanned 521 institutions across the state of California and we found 225 agencies providing CTE workforce preparation courses. And that included over 7,000 course offerings of Career Technical Education in adult schools and noncredit. Next slide.

So from that we created of classification system for having some common terminology and understanding of different levels of the types of CTE courses that are offered in adult schools. So the first being workforce preparation, which is just general workforce readiness, OSHA certifications, general skills necessary for success in the workforce. The next one is the occupational skills builder level, which is offerings that advanced skills related to a specific industry but that in and of themselves wouldn't allow an individual to get a specific job. But they can be really important specific skills for helping advance someone in their current career path or to help someone pivot into a new career path. And these are really important courses to help upskill individuals really quickly.

The last one is the occupational credential programs or training programs. These are programs/courses that are sufficient in duration and intensity and provide skills for individuals to enter a specific occupation in a specific industry usually. Next slide.

So this is an example of how we think about it in a construction pathway. We have the OSHA 10 workforce preparation that someone already in the field may just need to get, someone who may just be interested could get. Then we have the blueprint reading, which is a specific skill within construction that would be helpful for an individual but wouldn't allow you to get a full construction job in and of itself. And then we have a construction training program that's really has all of the skills bundled together and packaged in a way that would allow someone to hopefully immediately get a job right after the program but enter into a specific occupation related to that training program.

One of the things we did as we started to map all of the more specific occupational training programs and some of the skills builders as well, to map them to Standard Occupational Codes and to aggregate them at this high level of clusters is we realized that there were a lot of training programs that had really important skills across the 23 distinct Standard Occupational Clusters. So we further aggregated them into general meta cluster areas.

A great example of this is business. A lot of business pathways are a bit amorphous. Students can move around and there are a lot of common skills across occupations. So that's another really great example. And we found that this has been helpful for us to think about how pathways connect to each other and connect to regional labor markets and help move away from a linear idea of a pathway and really think about the many to many connections of how a student could move through their career and education. Next slide.

And these are all of the meta clusters, occupational clusters as we call them and their own at two digit SOC cluster groupings essentially. So we tried to group things in a way where there would be a common set of foundational skills that would be important even within the skills builder courses. And that's what really helped us cluster in this larger way. And that's helped inform the data tool that we have. So you'll be able to search that data tool by these meta clusters and really look at a higher range of occupations related to the training programs.

And Next slide. So just a little bit of overview from the data set is that we found the overwhelming majority of CTE courses are those occupational skills builder courses. It's really only in the health and construction repair services sector where the occupational training courses get close to matching the amount of offerings and occupational skills builder courses. And this chart is far across the entire state of California. We also found that the majority of workforce preparation courses fell into Microsoft applications, basic computer skills and the general workforce readiness courses.

Some higher level findings that we've glean from doing this data work and scanning through all of the course catalogs and websites and brochures is that we found California had a really diverse mix of occupational training courses and skills builder courses and a diverse mix of occupational sectors. There wasn't really a common trend that one region was offering far more of one sector than another or that one region or one area was offering a lot more occupational training programs. They mix of sectors and occupational training programs and skills builder courses were the same across the state. Overall, about 60% of courses were the skills builder courses.

At least a third of the adult education courses that we found-- sorry, I can't see the screen. The PowerPoint.

Alexandra Lozanoff: While Blaire is switching that back, we do have a question-- Oh, great. I think Blaire is getting that. But we had a question whether this data is available now, Allie or if it's still in progress and what year is the data derived from?

Allie Bollella: So we did our data collection, the years are getting wonky now. It's been a year of COVID. But we did the data collection for fall 2019 and spring 2020, in those four months over before and after Christmas. And so we tried to capture what would theoretically be available in about the fall 2019 to about spring 2020.

I realized that most adult education courses aren't on the semester system but we are hoping to capture fall-spring courses. And so that is currently available. There is a link to the public data set and it's also the information that informs the data tool.

Randal Tillery: I will share whether they are related to what Allie is saying, that one of the things we're trying to determine this year is based on the additional work that consortia come do as they say that want to do with the data set and the tool, we'll probably inform the way we support this in future years. We're trying to figure out an appropriate use case for it and the way it supports the right conversations.

And the two case studies that we're talking about are just two places work of consortium have said, this is exciting. Hey, help us get to the next place with it. We are open to continue to update it. But the data set related to K-12 adult education courses in particular is very difficult to get except manually. So that's one of the things that is challenging about doing this on a regular basis.

Allie Bollella: Definitely. And we did find as we're scanning through all the course catalogs and brochures and websites is that we found about a 1/3 of adult education schools didn't have any CTE or workforce preparation courses listed. And that's not to say that they don't exist at those schools but we couldn't find any publicly available evidence of it in the time frame that we were searching for courses.

From the public information we were able to find, it was also difficult to identify whether or not those schools were offering integrated or IET programs. But we did feel that the emphasis on skills builder courses is strongly aligned with the mission of adult education to get adults upskilled very quickly in areas that are relevant to their needs.

So this is the front of the dashboard. And we'll go into a live demo quickly. But we wanted to give an overview of how it's organized.

So on the left is all the educational data and on the right is all of the labor market data. And we designed it in this way to connect the occupational codes to pathways at a high level to start looking at a better view of what's available across the state or in a particular region. And it organizes those pathway courses into broader meta clusters.

So as we search through, you'll see all of the occupational training courses and credit programs aligned to those occupational meta clusters. So we're really looking at a high level view. And it really distinguishes between courses that build occupational skills and courses/programs that lead to a specific job. Next slide.

And then I think, click through one more time so they can see. So as we go through the live demo that we're going to do, I'd like you guys to think about a couple questions. How could you imagine using this information to build or strengthen a career pathway? How could it inform student advising? And what conversations between adult education and college practitioners could you have using this information?

And feel free to start typing into the chat and we can have a conversation about what ideas are coming out from the chat after we do the live demo.

Blaire Willson Toso: I might stop sharing my screen so you can take it away.

Allie Bollella: Thanks Blaire. Can everyone see my screen? Thumbs up. See the dashboard. Awesome.

So when you land on this page, the first thing you'll see is this is now a representation of all the education offerings in the state of California, and also all of the occupation data in the state of California. So like I said before, all the education data is on the left, all the labor market data is on the right. And as you scroll down, there will also be a list of occupational skills builder courses.

So this table will be filtered as you go through and start using the filters at the top to specify a specific occupational area or a specific region. This table will also filter along with all the charts up above. And down below, we have a data update request. So if you have any questions or if you see something that's really off with your specific school, you can contact us through this form that's embedded right into the dashboard.

So the first place we'll want to start selecting information is to start looking through a specific meta cluster, let's say, IT and engineering. So we can select that specific one and all of the charts will now be modified or filtered based on that initial filtering. So we're now looking at all of the educational offerings and all of the occupation data related to IT and engineering for the entire state of California.

And then we can go in and we can specify a specific region. I am currently in Oakland, so I'm going to look at the Bay Area and see what's going on there. And so we can see there's a number of-- here in the blue, these are the adult education occupational training courses and there are a number of IT technician, network associate, and web developer.

If you click on one of these, so I've clicked on IT technicians, we can drill down and look at the schools that are offering that specific occupational training program and then we can see all the community college noncredit courses. We can click on program and developer and drill down onto see where this noncredit course is being offered at which college. And then we can also drill down and see the number of community college credit awards. So these are just the number of degrees that are offered in this area. And so we can click on architecture and drill down and see the colleges that are offering that specific program.

And hopefully this will help start thinking about how you possibly could be built from education, adult education, occupational training courses all the way through to credit looking at aligning some of the training programs and degree offerings that exist. Over here on the right, we can start sorting through the occupational data. So for the Bay Area, I want to make sure that all of the occupations being demonstrated are meet a self sufficiency hourly wage which is from the insights on our calculator. And that I believe in the Bay Area is $22 an hour. So we can click on that filter and now we know that everything that's popping up in the occupational data meets at least a self-sufficiency wage.

We can also narrow down a little bit so the Centers of Excellence has a skill category ID for all their soft codes. So we can look at only middle skill occupations which would be mostly aligned to an associate's degree, post-secondary certification level of occupation. So now we can see that within the self-sufficiency hourly wage and at the middle skill level, so require an associate's degree or some post-secondary education.

Computer user support specialists are really at the top here. And then computer occupations all over and network computer systems administrators. So we can see there's some alignment here with the network associate and network computer systems administrators. So that's really cool to see. We can also go down and then look at all of the specific occupational skills builder courses being offered to support this area and the specific sector.

Are there any questions about how the dashboard works or any ideas so far? I just dropped the link to the dashboard in the chat so you guys could have access to that and can walk through it.

Blaire Willson Toso: I was curious. Do any of you see how this might be useful, particularly in informing student advising? And how you might be able to use this. It's a quiet group out there today. In other--

Rose Sandoval: Hi. I'm from Hacienda La Puente Adult Education. My name is Rose Sandoval. Hello, everyone.

I see it's kind of like a directory. So I could see maybe taking a student if they tell me, Oh, I'm interested in taking licensed vocational nurse or if someone at another campus has a student but they don't have that class then they could see that we were on there Hacienda La Puente adult and then maybe they could assist that student with getting on our interest list or finding out more about our school if they're in this region. Again, because it narrows it down to the region, then maybe that's a good thing or if maybe a student is moving from this region to another and wants to either continue their education or look for a different pathway, something like that.

But I could see it as a counselor utilizing this as a directory to advise students information about courses that we may not have or other schools could refer here that kind of thing. Thank you.

Amos Nugent: I can build on that. My name is Amos Nugent. I'm with-- I'll go on and turn my camera on. I'm with Pleasanton Adult and Career education here in the Bay Area as well. And so we are part of the Mid-Alameda County consortium.

And so our CTE work group this could definitely be a research tool as we start thinking about trying to just build out and align our pathways regionally. So helping to ensure that it's informed. And with our local community college, this is some of the work that we are already beginning to work on. So I like how this is here and is readily available.

So a question that I had is, how does this compare or tie into information that our local workforce development board would have in terms of labor market information. I think so that way we're ensuring that we're using what is recognized as the standard versus a couple of different things because that's a place where we're at in the early planning processes.

Randal Tillery: Now just a response that. We pull from basically the same LMI data tools that most of the workforce boards in California do all of which is fed by the BLS, the Bureau of Labor standards. And oftentimes you'll see slight discrepancies like if someone's using Bernie Glass as opposed to NZ as opposed to directly using BLS or EDD read data, but generally, the arc of demand around occupational demand and wages is pretty consistent. So it shouldn't be too far off.

I saw a question that related to how things are classified. And in terms of experience, it is often a little distressing to see the way in which the BLS classifies the education level attained and needed to attain a certain job. For example, the BLS still says that the police officers only need a high school education and don't need any post-secondary education. And we know that the peace officers all attend basically, police trained police academies are training programs that would be considered post-secondary education whether or not they're actually offered by a college.

So the data sets are never perfect. But in terms of a general guide or a place to start, and I'd like to say that labor market information is the great conversation starter. A data set like this is the conversation starter for deeper questions about what you want to show your students or how you want to identify shared work across the institutions in your consortium.

Rose Sandoval: So one of my colleagues had a question. So if this tool is available, would everybody be able to see it? Like if I'm in high school, I'm a high school student, would I be able to have access to this directory or would it only be the counselors?

Allie Bollella: No. It's a link that's totally open for anyone. So if you have a link, you can look at it.

Rose Sandoval: OK. Thank you.

Allie Bollella: I will just also add, adding on to what Randy says is that, I've looked at some of the NZ data versus Workforce Development Board, LMI data, and sometimes they're slightly off. The annual openings might be different by like five annual openings but this is a great tool to start. So if you're looking at this area and you want to look into computer user support specialists or even the IT industry, then you'll have some starting points to go talk to your workforce development board and get some more detailed information about how that specific occupation might slide into different industries that are active or growing in your area.

Alexandra Lozanoff: I think there was one other question. Will the LMI data be available down to the zip code level?

Allie Bollella: I don't think we pulled it by zip code, I think we pulled it by county.

Blaire Willson Toso: And Randy further answered that MC can provide the LMI database code.

Frank Gerdeman: that was a loaded question, Randy. We actually have that. Of course it was--

[interposing voices]

But the reason it's a loaded question is in a situation like Tahoe's, where El Dorado County data really skews to the Western slope and doesn't give us anything, any other casino data, we really need that zip code a little area. And I'm imagining there are probably some other small rural schools that would need that access as well.

Randal Tillery: Yeah. I mean, there's challenges in a tool like this in terms of what's the grain size. And we could provide this like the offerings information at the consortium level then we would have to map those consortia service areas to the zip codes for the LMI data they have, which is a much more complicated. You're both programming and mapping effort.

Not that we aren't up for that kind of thing, but this is sort of a prototyping exercise to figure out if we put these data sets in the same place and to have a productive conversation about what would something like this look like from the future.

Frank Gerdeman: Just one last thing and then I'll be quiet. Because I don't run the next meeting. So Randy you can breathe a sigh of relief no more loaded Frank questions today for you. The idea of filtering by zip code level is really how it works for us and that. That's one way around having to map it from the beginning.

Maryann Pranke: So if I may, this is MaryAnn Pranke with the Verdugo workforce development board and I'm also the adult education coordinator for Glendale. And one of the benefits of integrating the two is that we do have access to the data that is the most current. Pulling EDD LMI data, and by the way the LMI data that you would have available here is very helpful and easy and accessible to get initial information. But if you want any specific information, including information on specifically per zip code or per city, then your workforce board should be able to help you with that. That's where we get our information.

We do have access to data that is not available to the general public, it's not available. Even though it's EDD data, some of it is also, we have access to a EconoVue which has Dunn and Bradstreet data. So we can get very, very specific data customized to what our college needs.

So your workforce board should be able to do that for you. Not all workforce boards are created equal however, most of them do want to be a resource to adult schools and credit, noncredit as well and be able to provide that information to you. So there is specific information. Right now some of the most critical information is, you can pull data from EDD LMI.

Everything looks great because it's all 2019 data when our economy was doing great. That is not reflective of today. Right now we have the impact of the pandemic and what it's done, how it's affected our businesses and workforce. So that 2019 data may not be all that helpful when you're trying to make decisions on how to address needs and issues right now as a result of the pandemic and that's where the workforce board can help you.

Randal Tillery: It's definitely a struggle. So in the San Joaquin County project, we'll talk about at the end of the presentation, we're having to look at things like WARN notices to get kind of a better picture of what's happening on the ground with business and industry. Just because it provides a picture of where layoffs are occurring, they may not be reflected in the actual LMI data sets yet.

Maryann Pranke: I'll correct Randy. And the WARN notices are now available on the EDD website as well. However, once again, WARN notices are not required right now.

The governor did sign an executive order that waived the WARN notices. So your workforce boards are really going to be able to give you a good idea of what the layoffs are because they are talking to the businesses that never submitted a WARN notice. So it's going to be, whatever the WARN notice is for a particular area, you can probably quadruple that number and that's probably closer to what it is and your workforce boards can give you that information.

Randal Tillery: So people have this because this PowerPoint will be distributed. We have this slide where Allie has put the links for both the public data set and the dashboard itself. But I think we're actually going to move it forward into our first case study and then on to the career pathways design process discussion.

So I'm going to talk about this a little bit. So we are doing a project with the San Diego Imperial County, which is both an economic region and the community college system and it's a super region in the adult education system in California, where they asked us to help the adult schools in the noncredit programs using the data tool and the underlying data set as a starting place to build a comprehensive really map and listing of CTE training programs in the region offered by adult education to then secondarily connect that up to community colleges. So if they want to build their own career exploration advising tool for adult learners, that would be publicly available online.

The tool that Allie showed is not really designed to be-- it's publicly available but we're not really meant to be a student facing tool. The idea would have built something that would be highly accessible to adult learners in the region even folks with relatively low levels of literacy to understand where they can get education and training leading to better jobs.

Alex, I think I've got another piece in the slide. So what we're trying to organize and classify the CTE courses to help them build a career pathway system and a career navigation platform across the SDIC region and super region. Next slide.

This shows some visualizations that we helped them develop. What we're doing is we're taking the typology of courses in the data tool, which is there's these occupational skills building courses that do not necessarily lead to a job directly but help people build skills that are highly relevant to the workforce. And as Allie identified, that's an enormous percentage of the CTE courses offered by adult schools in California. Which I think is completely consistent with the mission of adult education as being a place where an adult learner who doesn't have a lot of time, they want to improve their skills to actually continue to move their career forward. And they can go take a course to do that in the same way they would do like where they would go sit-in on an ESL course or in an open entry and exit ESL course. It's a way of building skills that are really important for the adult learner population in California.

However, there also are programs that the adult schools offer. You see a list of them here in the middle. That are like, certified nursing assistant, dental assistant, EMT, home health aide. Where it's a program clearly designed that if you complete this program it gets you a specific job or occupation in an industry.

And we actually use the definition for a post-secondary credential in Whyalla and in Cape to inform this distinction. That there are certain characteristics for these more fully blown out training programs. It's more instructional hours. It's really pointing much more towards a specific job than a general set of skills. And we map these out and created this distinction so that they can then sort code those courses so using Standard Occupational Codes. So you can actually then using the ONET codes identify the specific job they're supposed to get which would also allow you then to connect that to labor market information related to those jobs.

The vision of the folks of the adult educators down there is they want to start with the job. So they're not thinking about top codes or zip codes, they're thinking about what's the occupational code for the training programs we have that can we could use as part of a data set to inform an online tool to help adult learners identify the jobs they want to get and where the training programs are to actually be able to access those. Next.

So the structure and focus, just a little bit, it's the greater San Diego region. So this is like 10 adult schools across two counties and 10 community colleges that will eventually be connected through this online tool. We're not building the tool, what we're doing is we're leading a process to help the adult educators in particular right now organize their courses and identify what their occupational programs of study are and then to help them build a coding structure.

We're actually teaching them how to soft code their programs and then having them go and actually meet with their consortia to go through their courses and their programs to actually apply codes to them that will actually inform the tool. And it's a way of putting the power of the data on their own hands which is really what's most important to us here. We're doing three train the trainer [inaudible].

OK, Alex. Now, Blaire can do that but you can't. So we're doing three train the trainer sessions for consortia reps. So each consortia has identified one or two folks who are learning all about ONET about Standard Occupational Codes, about the definitions that really apply to a post-secondary credential so that they can actually lead the work on their own consortia.

So we're building capacity on the ground for people to be able to do this work once we're no longer in the room. And I should say, we're doing this in partnership with another WestEd team who actually is working with the strong workforce consortia down that region to do a whole bunch of career related work across that region. But they brought us in specifically because of our expertise in this area.

So they are actually have been meeting independently to categorize and soft code their courses and programs. WestEd people have been sitting in on some of those meetings to answer questions. And then eventually, we're going to develop and populate the data set so that all of the schools can basically upload their data around their programs into one place, into one database that will be used to then develop some form of online tool.

We will probably not be involved in the online tool development. The folks in WestEd who maybe. But we're kind of helping them to the expertise and the capacity. And this is all work inspired by the data tool that Allie created for us to help them actually begin to develop a vision for what they could use that data to help inform. The next steps would be align this with the community college credit pathways and then explore the development of the online career platform.

This is just a timeline of where we're at. We're trying to wrap up the aggregation information in March that may slide into April, we started this in December. There was a whole set of preliminary conversations with leadership in the region. We presented to the super regional group that has all the adult schools in the non-credit programs of working together. And we've been having these train the trainer events now for a couple of months.

And so we just have a couple of prompt questions here. And you can feel free to reference these in the chat or if you want, quickly just reflect on them here. Is this the kind of project that you think could benefit the region? We did hear people talking about almost using the data set like an advising structure. And I put a comment in the chat about that where you could actually say, hey, it would be great if the adult school down the road knew that they have a student who has this kind of interest who could benefit from this kind of program and that we actually have that program over here.

And as much as people work together, they don't always know what each other have to actually support that. And then what kinds of support do you think you would need actually to take on this kind of project? Silence is golden.

So maybe in the interest of time, what we'll do-- Oh, here we go. Oh, I like the process-- Rose says, I like the process of being able to share information.

Also, if you have interest in doing something like this in your region or if you want to explore this more with our team, I would say please indicate that in the chat. And then we will be printing the chat afterwards and then maybe trying to follow up with people who have indicated that they have a strong interest in doing some additional work with us or supporting a work across the state right now in a variety of locations doing things similar to this or even just having career pathway development design conversation.