Jessica Keach: Thank you, Manda Lee. And thank you to SCOE/TAP for always hosting these spaces for us to present and share some information that we think is going to be really valuable for the field. So I see a few familiar faces and I'm excited for you all to be here today. As many of you know, this is the second session of a two-part series on exploring equity in CAEP programming using the Adult Education Pipeline Dashboard data.

Previously in session 1, we looked at tools and processes to explore equity across CAEP, and today, we're really going to narrow in on career education and dive a little bit deeper into the significance of labor market information for your programming. Next slide, please.

So here on the slide you'll see our presenters for today. We have Blaire Willson Toso who is our senior program manager over the CAEP program, and our partner-- with our partnership with the Chancellor's Office. My name is Jessica Keach. My pronouns are she/her. I'm a senior research associate here at WestEd working on program evaluation and supporting a lot of the CAEP dashboard work that we do.

We're also joined by Ayanna Smith. She's a program coordinator supporting CAEP. And additionally, we're also supported by Alexandria Wright who's our senior research associate here and really specializes in economic and labor market data, and she will be walking you through some really important data and ways to look at equity in some of that career ed and labor market information.

We're also joined by Mayra Diaz, who's the CAEP program lead at the Chancellor's Office, and Lindsey Williams, program manager at the Chancellor's Office. And I will just give it over to Mayra for a brief introduction from the CO.

Mayra Diaz: Hi. Thank you, Jessica. Just want to welcome everyone. Thank you for participating in today's webinar presentation. On behalf of the CAEP office and the Chancellor's Office, we're excited that you have chosen to join us this afternoon. And we're looking forward to hear from our great presenters, so thank you for having us.

Jessica Keach: Thanks, Mayra. And I will turn it over to Ayanna who will walk us through our agenda and objectives for today.

Ayanna Smith: Thank you, Jessica. So first thing today, we're going to go ahead and revisit the learnings from session 1. So if you were able to join us for part 1, thank you for joining us again. And we are going to review what we went over in session 1 for anyone who was not present. Then we're going to talk about equity and career education for adult learners starting off with a Jamboard activity. Then a data review with some data that Jessica Keach put together. And then we're going to discuss some of that data and what we see. And then finally, we're going to have our guest presenter, Alexandria Wright, present to us on labor market information.

Our objectives today are to define and operationalize equity in career education, practice using data to inform and ask questions, and to gain a deeper understanding of labor market and economic data and how it can be used in adult education programming. So now for our session 1 recap.

So during part 1 of this equity presentation, we did a walkthrough of the AEP pipeline and related tools. We also did an equity discussion, we completed a data equity walk, and then talked about what's next after a data equity walk. So here are some of the Jamboard notes that we recorded from our last session. Why do you work in adult education? We wanted to start there. And some of the answers you all provided you'll see on the screen.

So a lot of wanting to be able to help others. You can relate to the students that you serve in adult education through. You see your family members there. Wanting to provide students with resources to support and accomplish their goals. Trying to help people achieve a better life for themselves and for their communities. So a lot of people have a personal connection to the work that we're doing, which is really awesome.

We also discussed, what does equity and adult education mean to you? And again, some of your responses are on the screen. So making sure that there's access, equity for what services are being provided to support learners, targeted support was also really important, making sure they have access to services and information in a variety of languages. So a lot of just personal touch to making sure that students have access to the resources and information that they need.

OK, and I'll pass it over to Jessica to do a recap of the data equity walk.

Jessica Keach: Thanks, Ayanna. So in session 1, we walked through an abbreviated process of the data equity walk, which is a facilitation technique developed by Ed Trust West that encourages you to look at data, reflect on what you see, and record your reflection. So the purpose of the data equity walk was really to answer these first questions all the way on the right in green. What is the problem? What barriers exist? And for whom?

And a lot of this is also to prompt further questions where you can look deeper into the data and really connect with learners and practitioners in the field to get a deeper understanding of why you're seeing what you're seeing in the data. So we pulled out a few of the learnings that folks identified after going through a data equity walk looking at some of the data from the adult education pipeline dashboard.

One person wrote, a decline in enrollment started prior to the pandemic. Someone else indicated that ESL participation was impacted the most. We're looking at the decline in participants by program area between 2018-19 and 2020-21. Someone said, I want to know more.

And then another person said, not just in this chart, but in many of the others, Asians seem to have been most affected in the time period. Why? Why is this? The results are really consistent, so I'd like to dig deeper and find out what was going on. So this is an example of how folks looked at data and then said, I want to know more and dive deeper into some of these questions. All right, next slide.

OK. So, today we're going to dig a little deeper into career education for adult learners. I do want to acknowledge that at times, conversations around equity can be unfamiliar and sometimes uncomfortable. But we had a really incredible first session and I'm confident that this group is ready to lean into this work and engage in these conversations.

And ultimately, just remember that our goal is to learn from one another, and hopefully we'll close out this professional development series, this two-part series with a better understanding of ways to facilitate conversations around data and equity outside of this space and in your local context.

OK. I want to start off by sharing our mindset as we engage in these discussions, particularly as it relates to discussing data or observations from the field. So as we reflect, let's remind ourselves to frame our thoughts and our inquiry around the systems and programs that exist to serve adult learners. It's really important that we remind ourselves not to attribute data to the intrinsic qualities of people or groups. And ultimately, we just want to stay away from making generalizations about the motivations of students or of people. Next slide.

OK. So we're going to start off with a group discussion. We have a question prompt it's going to help us get to know one another and come up with some different ideas of what equity in career education for adult learners means to you. And I'm going to turn it over to Ayanna who is going to help facilitate this activity.

Ayanna Smith: Thank you, Jessica. So if you don't mind, can you please paste the link to the Jamboard in the chat? And then once you all have access to that link, if you can go ahead and click on that and begin answering the prompt. So what does equity in career education for adult learners mean to you? You can go ahead and create a post-it note here and go ahead and answer that question. We'll give you all the few minutes and then share out.

OK. So we have our first one, access to all. Very important. Efficient and reliable access to programs that lead to living wage jobs. English learners are supported in CTE pathways. Access to education that leads to high wages and promotions, yes. Definitely want to see outcomes.

Access-- or no gatekeeping, minimum qualification, very important. So yeah, increasing access to anyone who needs the resources. And then we have all students have access to the outcomes they want with the support they need based on their individual circumstances. Career exploration upon program entry. And then we have training programs, short and intensive, offered in the morning and evening, leading directly to a job. Identifying good jobs that do not mirror the local demographic makeup and then access that for learners.

Yeah, so based on the responses you all are putting, I think you're really going to enjoy what's coming next, because this is exactly what we mean when we talk about equity in career education. So it's not just having access to the information, but making sure that it's relevant and making sure that it's achieving outcomes that are sustainable for students.

So thank you all so much for participating. . Oh, I see we have one more coming in. Two more. Additional student support services are provided to students. So childcare, transportation, connection to community services, et cetera. Yes, that's very important. And then programming that leverage basic skills training and workforce prep. So IET, IELCE, and hastens the goal attainment, yes. Thank you all for sharing. I'm going to jump back to our presentation. OK.

Jessica Keach: Great. So next up, we're going to walk through four slides using data from the adult education pipeline. And a lot of the goals that were mentioned right in our Jamboard were things around access and achieving outcomes for all groups, particularly those in greatest need. And the only way we can know if we're doing that is by looking at data for different groups and talking to people from various groups to confirm or dispel what we're seeing in the data.

So how do we do that? We disaggregate. And the data that we're going to look at is an example of how high-level information can be disaggregated to uncover interesting differences that ultimately prompt further questions. So as we walk through this data, I'm going to ask you to think about what is surprising to you, what you notice, and what else you might want to know. And at the end, we'll have a really brief discussion where you can share some of those thoughts.

So, here, we're looking at the demographics of CAEP participants in 2020-21 by gender. The blue bar represents all CAEP participants, and the pink bar that's overlaid on top of the blue bar represents CAEP participants in CTE so as a reminder, participants are students that have attained 12 or more hours of instruction in CAEP programming. Due to some of the reporting challenges, in 2020-21 for non-credit community colleges, a coding exception has been applied for non-credit community colleges and an enrollment record is used as a proxy for that hour threshold for non-credit community college students.

The impacts of that coding exception are fairly muted when you look at statewide data, but I do want to point out as we walk through that this represents a best case scenario of CAEP participant enrollment. So based on this data, it appears that there's a slightly higher proportion of male students in CAEP CTE compared to all participants statewide. Just going to go ahead and pause for a second and allow you to look at this data and reflect on what stands out to you.

All right, next slide, please. OK. Here, we're looking at the demographics of participants in 2020-21 by age. So again, the blue bar represents all participants and the pink bar represents CAEP participants in CTE. Based on this data, it appears that there's a higher proportion of students ages 60 and older in CTE compared to all participants statewide. And I'll go ahead and pause again just for a few seconds to allow you to look at this data and reflect on what stands out to you.

All right, next slide. Our third slide on demographic makeup of participants is showing CAEP participants in 2020-21 by race and ethnicity. So again, the blue bar represents all CAEP participants, the pink bar is CAEP participants in CTE. And based on this data, it appears that Hispanic students represent the highest proportion of participants in CAEP. However, we are seeing a lower proportion of Hispanic students in CTE compared to overall. I'll pause one last time, allow you to take a look at this.

All right, next slide. So our last slide is showing you the decline in the number of participants in CTE by race and ethnicity between 2018-19, which is a pre-pandemic year, and 2020-21. So, for example, between 2018-19 2020-21, the total number of participants in CTE declined by 23% statewide. That's that yellow line.

However, the number of participants who identify as Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, or Black or African American declined by 27% to those first three bars all the way on the left. OK. Next slide. Now that we've looked at some data, some disaggregated data I'd love to know if anyone is willing to come off mute and just share something that you noticed. It doesn't have to be really profound, just something simple that stood out to you in one of those four slides. And feel free to just unmute yourself and share out with the group.

Audience: Good morning, this is Sue from Saddleback College Adult Education. I wanted to share with you that I noticed, when we looked at the gender differences, there were more males that were participating in CTE even more than the CAEP program.

Jessica Keach: Yeah, yeah. I thought that was very interesting as well, because overall, there's more females, but when you look at the comparison between CTE to CAEP, there's more males in CTE, which I thought was very interesting. Anyone else want to share something that stood out to them?

Audience: I'll just second that and say that it's also true in our region that there seems to be-- it's not proportional to the overall. Even though our gender demographic proportions are relatively similar in South Bay, we also see here, we tend to see the proportion in CTE being slightly more male than overall.

Jessica Keach: Thanks so much. I was a little bit surprised by the higher proportion of older adults in CTE. Did anyone else find that surprising? Or is that something that you see as well in your local programs?

Audience: I did. I would-- we often-- we see a lot in the-- like on the CAEP fact sheets, we'll see 40 to 50, and then 50 and over as being the vast majority of our students to the point where I'd love to see those broken out in the same five-year buckets. I think you used the iPads buckets for age.

And the 25 to 44 is such a huge bucket that I think there's-- it causes multiple things-- kind of like dodging the question, but it kind of-- I think it causes some-- it can cause like a-- I think your brain to do some things with the proportions, because that 60 and over group probably represents a smaller overall component, so it would maybe be a little bit more sensitive.

But it is still surprising-- like I guess maybe nice to see that there-- of the-- compared to the percentage of CAEP students overall in that age demographic, there's a higher percentage in CTE. It would be interesting to dial in on that group specifically and what kind of CTE? What are the stories of those students who are skilling up over 60? That's really interesting.

Jessica Keach: Yeah. And is it-- I wonder-- and this is just a question for further research. Is it some of that workforce reentry or workforce prep? Is it related to any kind of technology? Those, I think, are further questions. What kinds of CTE courses are those older adults more represented in compared to the overall population? And you make a good point about looking deeper into some of those age brackets in that middle category. So that's a lot of students in there.

All right, are there any other comments about some of that data before I turn it over to our guest presenter? No? OK, well, I-- without further ado, I will turn it over to Alexandria Wright who's going to walk us through some labor market information.

Alexandria Wright: Thank you so much, Jessica. It's a pleasure to be here with everyone today. We can go ahead and keep that deck up, actually. I'm sorry, I thought we could share presentations and I hadn't downloaded a separate one. So thank you so much. So we're going to go into some labor market data today. And we're going to talk about a variety of things. And I'm going to stop and pause, and just like we did that equity gap walk analysis, we're going to stop and pause and take a look at some things that have to do with labor market data.

So if we go to the next slide-- my apologies, I have that separately so I could transition this. So this is a sample of a data deck that we put together using information from US Bureau of Labor Statistics Emsi's Database. Some of you might be familiar with Economic Modeling, Inc. That is used a lot in an educational institutes.

And also, US Census data. And then also, job postings analytics That we go through talking about skills a little bit. And transferable skills is a very meaningful thing when it comes to adult education. So the first thing that we always look at, this deck happens to be-- you can see these little footnotes at the bottom. This happens to be for San Diego County. So all the information that you're going to see in here is very explicit to San Diego County.

So the first thing that we want to discuss is the industry sectors. And what are industry sectors actually telling us? It tells us what the demand is for products and services in our region. But even more importantly for adult educators, it's telling us what types of contextualized skills students need to be valuable in the labor market.

So adult education has-- we have our basic ABE, right? We have our GED/HSC programs. If we're lucky and have capacity, we're running IET and IELCE. And so all of those programs can be contextualized to a certain degree. So even our basic skills-- reading, writing, and arithmetic-- can be contextualized, can incorporate contextualized exercises that reflect the local economy.

The one thing that we know is irrespective of what major a student has, what level of education they have, degree, they end up finding jobs where they live. So their jobs-- so their skill set really has to reflect the local economy in order for them to be valued in the local labor market. So for example, as we're looking at this-- and San Diego County granted is very, very large. And so there's lots of micro-regions within the county. But if we're looking at it county-wide, we see obviously we have health care right there at the top.

You also see manufacturing trades. Those are two areas, two industry sectors that have a great amount of momentum as we move up the ladder. So you can start at these entry-level wages, entry-level occupations. You can attain credentials, industry credentials through traditional education or other venues as you move up that letter. And you can move right up into a sense of economic mobility, which is our goal here, equity and economic mobility.

And so when we look at this economic landscape and we see health care here, we see manufacturing-- oh, we see construction there. All these numbers that you see are the quantity of employees per sector. So that's why the little squares are different sizes. And so what we can do in reading, writing, and arithmetic is engage the context of these industry sectors and exercises.

So perhaps something like a manufacturing standard operating procedures, an SOP. Working with a lot of manufacturers in my career and in a lot of adult ed IET as well as pre-apprenticeship programs, I recognize that SOPs-- reading and interpreting and writing standard operating procedures is something that employers are looking for, and it is the very applied praxis right of basic skills. Can you interpret it in a standard operating procedure? Perhaps that's an exercise that can go into the classroom.

Health care and social assistance, we can just start with an application. With the forms that you fill out when you walk into a hospital, when you walk into a clinic, they themselves are so nuanced and complex, they would be great exercises for students. Let's go ahead and go to the next slide, please. Thank you.

This next slide is about the most posted skills in your region. So this spanned a year's time. So 2021 to 2022. And the little numbers that you see in there is the frequency with which those skills are posted-- are seen in job postings. So as you can see here, we have communications. You have management and operations.

But you have-- and going directly to the livable wage skills. So sales and customer service, lovely skills, lovely skills. Those are not the livable wage jobs that we are looking for these students. The jobs that have the livable wages are the ones that are requiring Microsoft Office skills. Digital literacy. Microsoft Excel.

So again, while we're looking at these skills, we have the industry sectors, we have our occupations that we're going to get to in just a second, and we have the skills. And the combination of looking at all of them allows us as educators to be much more contextualized and further effective in the classroom in making sure that that student, traditional and non-traditional aged students, obtain the skills that they need to make them more valuable in that labor market. So again here, let's go to go ahead and go to the next slide. Thank you, Ayanna.

So we put together this little slide because I wanted to make a real strong point here. Adult education, when we think about adult ed IET programs, which are a fabulous combination of adult basic skills plus industry credentials and technical training, we tend to float around three primary industry sectors. So the easiest ones. Health care, manufacturing, and construction.

So those three sectors are, again, sectors that contain a lot of mobility in them. You can get your entry-level jobs that are unskilled and move right up that ladder as you gain more education. But remember, in each one of these sectors, verbal and written communication, digital literacy and basic math, and time management and organizational skills are essential to being an effective employee and having further opportunity to move up that ladder.

So one of the key equity strategies that we speak about is ensuring that students can articulate the transferable skills that they have learned. Now, I'm not just speaking of mock interviews. I'm speaking of exercises in the classroom that allows them to practice articulating, because one of those-- that big social equity gap or that big gap in social equity-- or social capital, I'm sorry, is not having the luxury and the privilege of a family that had you speak all the time or had you-- pardon me, I'm going to sneeze. Sorry, guys. That had you constantly communicate and articulate.

And so one of the things that we can do is increase the practice in a contextualized way. So you heard me mention health care. You heard me mention standard operating procedures for manufacturing. So those are a couple of different exercises that you can engage in the classroom and then have the students talk about.

I used to work with welding instructors. I've had the welding instructors assign a 350-word essay for their students. Now students often get very bored. They get bored in the classical English and math classes. So they're sitting there reading Jane Austen right or Jane Eyre and it has nothing to do with the world that they live in and the problems that they deal with on an everyday basis, which is something that's unique to adult education. You work where the rubber meets the road with these students. This isn't some privileged hierarchy of education. You are there with the students that need assistance because they're trying to put food on their table and trying to pay these rents.

And so again, in order to help them with their economic mobility, they have to be able to articulate the skills that they've learned. One example was in an adult ed program that I worked with, we did a quick eight-hour exercise. 8 hours. Four of which was basic math, but within the context of manufacturing.

So where you were looking at dimensions and tolerances. So something very applied. And then we just spent the other four hours in reading comprehension and communication in the context of lean manufacturing. For those of you who aren't familiar, lean manufacturing is that concept that came out of Japan and [inaudible] that essentially is elimination of waste.

So that one eight-hour class, that one eight-hour class reduced the turnover rate at one of our local large, large manufacturing plants by over 80%. And a lot of those students that were transferring in were students that we were coordinating without coming from Goodwill Industries into the adult education program and then into placement.

So that's why I'm just emphasizing the ability that adults educators have to go ahead and contextualize the reading, writing, and arithmetic basic skills training that ABE training to your local industry sector. And then from there, you can start to build up into the IET programs, preferably engaging industry credentials in those IET programs.

I've worked with construction, with a nationally industry-recognized-- national industry-recognized construction program that some of you may have been aware of. So we use that as a pre-apprenticeship. I would design contextual pre-apprenticeship programs for manufacturing that all employers in the local area were aware of. And so it was like a nice 40-hour course with that credential that was recognizable by those employers.

There's several different options that you can do here. Agriculture is another one. California's huge on ag. We ran it at my recent institute that I was with. We ran an agricultural supervisor academy that started out as a corporate learning training for ag supervisors in Spanish, and it ended up being turned into an adult education IELCE program where we were now engaging English language learning with the technical skills, and we had two levels of that by the end of it.

So this is the kind of stuff that you can start to harness. Remember, in the 21st century, 21st century pedagogy and andrology is three things. Learning must be participatory, it must be productive, and it must be personalized. We are a different creature than we were in previous centuries and millennia. There is much more technology, there is much more-- and with technology comes the ability for one to imagine themselves and self-actualize themselves. So again, we require, we demand-- the students demand that learning, again, is participatory, productive, and personalized.

All right, we can go to the next slide now. So let's get into some jobs. OK, so we have two slides here that we're going to look at with regard to occupations. So the first one is a table that you probably have seen before, which is largest occupations. Everybody always looks at that. What are the largest occupations in my area?

You see here that we looked at a five-year projection so we could best understand what the trajectory of these occupations were going to be in the next five years. And we also do median hourly earnings. But look over here on the left-hand side. When we put together the data, we want to ensure that we are comparing hourly earnings to a livable wage.

Now remember, this is median hourly earnings. So if you're working-- if you have a nice Institute that you can look at it-- and this is available through-- I'm sorry, I forgot to mention. The first thing I should have mentioned was your CAEP fact sheet. So a lot of this information came from the LaunchBoard Adult Education Pipeline as well as the 2021 CAEP Fact Sheets.

So you'll see median hourly earnings in there. So they are medium, they're not entry level, but it gives you a nice understanding of what's going on with the character of that occupation. So it's always a good thing to keep in mind the living wage. The living wage that we used for the state of California is coming from the California Insight Center, which is what the Chancellor's Office would prefer to use. There are other living wage calculators out there such as the MIT Living Wage Calculator.

So as we go through it, we also color-coded-- thank you very much for that link to the adult ed fact sheets. We color-coded. Green meaning jobs are growing; orange, jobs are projected to decline. Now if you look at your local area and you see an orange and the decline is only by a handful of jobs, take it with a grain of salt. We're looking for big declines, 20, 30 job declines in order for that to be really meaningful.

So in adult education, we can start with these largest occupations. And these are largest occupations, by the way, that require some college or a certificate. So not necessarily even an associate's degree. This is largest occupations that require some college. So that's the other filter that you want.

Both adult educators and community colleges always had a tendency to simply look at largest occupations, period, without looking at that skill level qualification. Luckily now we have databases where we can actually filter for that. So these occupations that you're looking at are actually the ones that require some sort of credential. Like I said, not a formal degree, but definitely some sort of credential.

So this is where you can start looking at when you start contextualizing your basic skills training, and if you are interested in developing an IET program or an IELCE program. And then so you combine this with the equity gap analysis that Jessica was showing you earlier. You find-- you have to identify your target populations, those historically marginalized communities, what's going on with them. Then you identify your target pathway. What industry sector, what occupations are you looking at?

And then furthermore, you identify your strategy, your learning strategy. Is it going to be contextualized ABE? Is it going to be an IET or IELCE program? Is it going to be a non-credit pre-apprenticeship that buddies up to a local community college? So that's the fourth thing you gotta do.

And then finally-- or the third thing you gotta do. And then the fourth thing that you finally have to do is look at your system partners. Adult educations are part of this wonderful workforce system. I say that-- again, take it with a grain of salt. I know we've all had our experiences with the workforce system, but the point is, we have federally funded partners to assist with actual access for a lot of these programs. And for the connectivity and the cross-referencing of students.

Finding those students, they just-- I was lecturing earlier today to a college in Colorado, and a gentleman was very concerned over the lack of GED and high school graduation rates-- he was concerned about the dropouts. And he said, where can I find those dropouts? Where are they? Because they're not even in our adult schools yet. They literally just dropped out of high school, and I said, well, this is where the system-- the pathway system partners, the workforce system partners come into play.

You find these people through goodwill partnerships, your local community-based organizations that serve target population racial and ethnic groups, or gender or age, whatever it is. But you have to buddy up to those pathway partners, those system partners in order to find the people, and then you start coalescing all the services.

I know this isn't news to everybody there. You've all sat in your Title II workforce system lectures, I'm sure, and talk to your partners about co-enrollment and leveraging resources. But this is a way that you can do it using your labor market information and your economic data and that sociodemographic data as the core from which you build this larger project.

So let's go ahead and go to the next slide. Thank you so much, Ayanna. This is actually my favorite slide. It's highest paying occupations requiring some college or credential. The reason why this is my favorite is because, again, we're not just starting with the entry-level wage jobs. These are truly the pathways that are going to help our students with economic mobility.

You see the same color-coding here, you see in the same five-year projection and the median hourly earnings. We also put again here your livable wage, which, again, is sitting in your adults ed-- your CAEP fact sheets, 2021 fact sheets. But here's where you really start to get to the meat of how to contribute to your students with regard to economic mobility.

So we have the contextualization of basic skills looking at our industry sectors. And keeping in mind those transferable skills, we can integrate those contextualized transferable skills not just into basic education ABE, not just into just into GED/HSC programs, but we can start to use other strategies like IET, like IELCE, like non-credit pre-apprenticeships, all of the above.

And then we take that a step further and we start to really zone in on the credentials and the occupational training. So if we look at this list right here, there's a lot of stuff here that actually comes already with industry credentials, nationally recognized industry credentials. So if we go down a little bit here-- of course, you have-- OK.

So we have mechanical drafters. So I'm just going to stop right here. It's one of the higher-paying jobs requiring one credential. So mechanical drafters are really using AutoCAD now. It's computer-aided drafting. You don't need an associate's degree. You don't need a bachelor's degree. You need some understanding of basic math and you need to understand how to use the software, and it needs to be of interest to you.

So that is actually something that you could probably engage in an IET. Or at least the prep for. A Solidworks program at your local community college or AutoCAD program. So you start by engaging the student in this field of mechanical drafting in an IET program. So you're talking about AutoCAD, you're showing them Solidworks. You're using your basic math lectures and your exercises as an applied theory for mechanical drafting.

And again, mechanical drafting is used all over the place. I've seen it in every form of manufacturing from custom-made clutches in auto manufacturers to dental implants to the design of actual products. So this job, even though you don't see a terribly amount over here, you're still seeing a growth rate, and that's because, again, it's very modern. It's something that you can apply immediately.

So let's go ahead and go to the next page. Thank you so much. Now we're going to get into some more of that institutional data that Jessica was showing you earlier from the CAEP system. So what did we look at? We looked at industry sectors, we looked at skills and transferable skills, and then we looked at occupations.

And then we talked about the four steps of identifying the pathway that will contribute to economic mobility. Identifying the strategy, identifying the target population. And then fourth, identifying those workforce system partners. So now we come back to the data. And we start to look at, who is transitioning? This is, again, in your CAEP Fact Sheets I believe on the third or the fourth tab on those CAEP Fact Sheets.

And you can actually see who's transitioning from basic education, GED and ESL programs, into either CTE programs at their local community college, into the community college in general, or just, if you wanted to be very explicit in your view, who is transitioning to non-developmental courses? And that's something that's probably of great interest to all of you.

So as you were looking at Jessica's charts that came from AEP, we can start to look at this specifically for your consortium. So this is for the San Diego Adult Education Regional Consortium. And this is, again, just came from your CAEP Fact Sheets, it's just visualized a little differently. And so we're looking at the existing students coming out. What do we notice? I'll just pause here for a second because I've been talking a lot. Does anybody want to speak up about anything you're noticing on this chart? And take a minute or two. Or is there anything else you would want to know?

Rick, anything you notice or anything you want to know?

Audience: It doesn't seem super equal from what I'm noticing. Not to be too on its face about it. The-- just a clarifying question. What else composes the transition to post-secondary besides CTE and credit non-developmental? In other words, how do I-- like, what's missing, I guess, from that? Like how do I get-- for overall, how do I get to 24 from-- what are the other categories I might be looking for?

Alexandria Wright: I'm going to hand that to Jessica or Blaire.

Jessica Keach: Yeah, I took it. So the definitions should be the overall transition post-secondary is transition to CTE any institution. So adult ed or community college. And then-- or to transition to non developmental credit college courses. The way-- so theoretically, they are the same. Like the transition to post-secondary is that higher bucket. There are a few small definitional differences in the way that they are captured. I'll go ahead and put the MDD in the chat. It's really--

Audience: That'd be great.

Jessica Keach: Yeah. It's in the weeds. It has to do with some of the TOPSpro flags. But--

Audience: Kind of what I thought, OK.

Jessica Keach: Yeah, yeah.

Audience: No need to spend a ton of time on that. I was just like-- one of the things I noticed is like, well, 16 and 4 don't equal 24, so where are those other-- what-- is it a whole different category or is it just focused on these categories that maybe we're not capturing with this frame?

Jessica Keach: Yeah.

Audience: Yeah. Throw me the link. I think I'm already in it, but if it sends me to the right spot in there, I'd be super grateful, because it's--

Jessica Keach: Perfect. Yeah. And so something that I noticed when I was looking at this data, Lexi, is that overall, transition to post-secondary is about 24%. But then when you look at Asian students, it's lower. It's about 18%. You look at white students, it's much higher, about 34%. So I saw some differences there. It's kind of what stood out to me first.

Alexandria Wright: Thank you. Excellent. And again, this is inquiry. There's no wrong answer. There's no wrong observation. We can look at our Black and African American populations and we see there that we have a 17% transfer rate to CTE. And a 28% transition rate to post-secondary in general. We see our Latinx, Hispanic and Latino population, at about a 14% transition over to CTE, and 24% transition into post-secondary in general.

But we want to make sure we are not over-representing a category either. We want to make sure that not everybody's getting funneled into CTE programs just because they are of a certain race or gender or ethnicity. What I found that was interesting is our data on transfer to non-developmental courses. We are seeing that the white population exceeds all others.

And so that's something interesting that has everything to do with our adult education. So why do we not have such a high transition rate to non development courses for our other racial and ethnic categories? All right. So let's go ahead and go to the next slide here.

And this is one of the ones I really dig on, because I'm a demand analyst. I'm a demand economist. So I'm always looking for, where are students coming from? What is happening? What's going on out there? Where do we find them? And so this is a really nice one. This is looking at the micro-region for the area.

And I actually-- I use this a lot with community colleges to encourage them to communicate and to create more leveraged resources and access coming from the schools that are listed here. Because again, a major, major elements strategy for obtaining greater equity is ensuring that our connectivity between adult schools and community colleges is much more refined, much more accessible, a smooth path, so to speak, a yellow brick road, so to speak. It's not even necessarily which road do you take at a crossroads, it's the path is laid out and you have multiple options in here, just follow the yellow brick road.

So this one is looking at who's graduating the most in the micro-region? So you can see kind of the rates there per school district. One of the ones that I found is interesting sometimes, if you sniff around in here, you'll see adult education programs at the local correctional facilities. That's something that community colleges might not be engaged with by any means.

So again, this is an interesting thing to know what your partners are doing, what you're doing, who's actually preparing the most and transitioning the most to post-secondary. This can give you a really nice example of that. So I think that's the last slide we have in here for this. If you want to just go ahead and go to the next one, Ayanna, just to make sure. Oh, I had one more in here.

And this is a nice little preview. So I'm giving you guys a little preview to the June sessions that will be coming up. I believe they're June 14 and 28. Maybe we repeat that at the end. But this is your career education to workforce regional map. So this is what we're going to be talking about in June, myself and the other data analyst, Allie Buella. She created a great, great dashboard here. What we did is we took the information from that dashboard and we created this nice little table.

Because this is one last tool that you can use to help identify the pathways that you want to focus on. Because clearly, adult schools don't have a ton of resources, you can't help these students major in everything, but you can choose. You can choose a couple a handful of different pathways that are really going to contribute, again, to their economic mobility in the region within they live-- within which they live.

You see here we have the sectors on the left. We have all the adult education offerings that we know of that we're able to filter out for secondary research. This is just coming from online catalogs, et cetera. Then we have our non-credit offerings. That could be a community college or adult school/community college. And then we have our credit offerings over at community colleges.

Some of you, in fact, may have received an inquiry a couple of months ago asking for you to verify what your current offerings were. And the reason why we're asking you that is for this dashboard. So again, in addition to looking at largest sectors, most frequently posted skills, those largest and highest paying occupations that require a credential, some college or a credential, then taking those four data points, putting them in to a little table like this, looking at it.

Again, we've already done the work for you, the West Ed-- my West Ed colleagues, and we have this Regional Education-to-Workforce Dashboard that we're going to be talking about. We're going to have to hold two sessions in the month of June for you guys to walk through this. And we can talk a little bit more about LMI, we can talk a little bit more about equity gap analysis and pull in a couple more data points, intersectional data points there. And we can talk a little bit more contextualized about IET and IELCE programs if you are interested in.

So that does conclude my section of this presentation for today. I'm just going to recap again. We have four primary steps in what we're doing to create our pathways. We have to identify our target population that we're looking at. Just because showed you a lot of nice statistics from the AEP profile. In June sessions I might pull up some community data for you and show you population against unemployment and poverty rates, which is also a nice visual to see and a nice in-depth analysis when you're really looking at target populations.

You're going to identify that target population. You're going to identify why your target pathways based on your industry sectors and your transferable skills. You're going to contextualize that learning to that, that adult basic skills learning to that and IET learning to that. Then you're going to choose your strategies. And I already skipped ahead. Are you using contextualized ABE? Are you going to implement IET or IELCE? Are you going to go for a non-credit offering? Are you going to make an IET pre-apprenticeship? You've got to figure out that strategy.

Are you going to use industry credentials or are you just going to contextualize your education or you're learning that you have? And then finally, we have our workforce system partners. And we can't forget about our workforce. And also pathway system partners. Not just our Title IB, not just our workforce boards and our One Stops, our departments of rehabilitation, but also those CBOs. That's where we get these students. Those community-based organizations, goodwill industries, et cetera.