ALEXANDRIA M. WRIGHT: Is that Blaire?

Lisa Le Fevre: That will be me. Thank you, Mandilee.

ALEXANDRIA M. WRIGHT: Sorry, Lisa.

Lisa Le Fevre: No worries.

ALEXANDRIA M. WRIGHT: Sorry.

Lisa Le Fevre: Well, thank you, everybody. Welcome to today's presentation, Adult Education-- A Gateway to College and Living Wage Employment. Again, we really are grateful for you joining us on this Monday for 2.5 hour webinar, and over your lunch break. Please don't worry, we will be taking a break, and we will also be engaging in good conversation. To begin, Let's start with some introductions to our team. So next slide, please.

All right. As our team introduces ourselves, please also take a moment to introduce yourself in the chat with your name, your role, and your organization. I'll begin, I'm Lisa Le Fevre. I'm a senior program associate at WestEd. And we'll get more into what we do at WestEd in the next slide. But right now, I'd like to turn it over to our presenters to say a quick hello. Blaire.

Blaire Willson Toso: Hi. Thanks for joining us. I'm Blaire Willson Toso. Many of you on this purchase I recognize. The names in this group who's joined us today, so many of you are familiar. I have a long background in adult education, English as a second language, and immigrant integration. Have done a lot of work on career pathways. Started out as an ESL teacher and have wound myself up the career pathway since that's what we're talking about today. And now do consulting work. I've worked at WestEd previously. And now, I'm hopping in and out of projects as needed. So I'll hand it over to Alexandria.

ALEXANDRIA M. WRIGHT: Hello, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. I am Alex Wright with WestEd Center for Economic Mobility, and looking forward to a great session here. Last year Blaire and I toured the State of California giving this session in person to multiple, multiple consortia. So I certainly hope you get the most out of it. I myself am not as the expert as Dr. Blaire Willson Toso is in an adult Ed.

However, I have been working with adult education my entire career. I am a regional economist, a labor economist. I spent a dozen years running economic and workforce development divisions at community colleges, and I oversaw adult Ed for that. And so I had the great honor and privilege of working with some fantastic adult education directors. And particularly around the time where we were really starting to engage in adult education, IET and IELCE training. During that bridge as we were coming out of I-BEST and getting IET it, so it was really a match made in heaven.

I absolutely adore adult education, adult education directors, and faculty, and administrators. And I really, really do appreciate being able to work with them with their expertise, and being able to harness all of those things that you need in order to be at that value in the labor market to those adult learners as they move through these programs, and getting them that integrated education and training. So thank you so much for having us. I'll hand it back to Dr. Le Fevre.

Lisa Le Fevre: Great. Thank you. And last but not least, we also have another member on our team joining us today, Suzanne, who's been instrumental in helping us with all the data collection analysis, and especially appreciate her expertise. We'd also like to take this moment to recognize the CAEP team from the Chancellor's Office, Mayra Diaz, and Cora Rainey, and the CDE team Dr. Caroline Zecher, Diana Batista, Neil Kelly, who support this work to ensure quality adult education. And I can take a moment and say, Cora, would you like to say a quick hello? Either team, Diana, or Cora, or both.

Cora Rainey: Sure. I'll start. Hey everyone. Thank you so much for attending today's session. My name is Cora Rainey. And I am the program manager for the adult Ed program at the Chancellor's Office. And I'm going to hand it over to my colleague, Sanjay, to introduce himself.

Sanjay Mehta: Good morning, everybody. Glad you're here. Sanjay Mehta. I'm the adult Ed program analyst at the Chancellor's Office, and I'm so glad to be here with you all. I'm going to now hand it over to CDE, Diana Batista.

Diana Batista: Good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to be here. I'm excited to hear about this program, what a great opportunity? I'm one of the program consultants at CDE. And Neil Kelly, unfortunately, is not with us today, but I'll be sharing my notes with him. Thank you everyone.

Lisa Le Fevre: Thank you, Diana. And we also have to say a big thank you to the skytap CAEP team who've helped to make today's event possible. They are flawless in their support and organizing and taking care of all the big and small details of ensuring the presentation runs smoothly. Finally, on the next slide, we're going to go over a little bit more about WestEd. WestEd, is an education research, technical assistance, and development agency.

WestEd offers a multitude of projects and content. The economic mobility, post-secondary and workforce system team which we are part of, focuses on providing technical assistance and professional development, and engaging a broad intersection of the field to work that supports economic stability, individual, family, and community well-being. That said, let's get started. I'd like to hand it over to Blaire, who will review the agenda and move us into the content of our interactive webinar today. Blaire.

Blaire Willson Toso: Thank you. There's the agenda up on the screen. I will not be reading through it, just take a look at it. I do want to say that we'll be moving through the content quickly. As Alexandria noted that we have done this a series last year and we've really refined the content, and it was five hours. And we really have taken a lot of the-- we've just kept the meat of the presentation, but it's going to be a lot of information, and we're going to cover the why we're doing this work, the data, data sources that one can use to build career pathways for relevant sectors in your area.

We'd really like to engage you and hope that you will engage with us by asking questions, sharing your knowledge, and your experience in this area. We have a lot of experience, but we also know that everyone comes here with their own experience, especially as you've been building your own pathways and exploring your data and consortium goals. So we're informal in our presentation. Feel free to come off mute, raise your hand, put a question in the chat.

And lastly, I'll just say because of the fast pace, we are offering follow up coaching and TA. So please feel free to reach out to us to request time to revisit or help you identify, analyze, and develop programming that is related to sector-based career pathways and programming after we're done with this presentation. Next slide, please. As you can see by the goals on the slide, our intention is really to learn more about how to build data-informed career pathways and programming that supports adult learners prepare for good jobs, and jobs that include jobs that are living wage.

And sometimes that intention starts from a place where you may not have a living wage job, but the pathway helps us to grow our programming, so that the learner can eventually meet that criteria of a good job. Next slide, please. So we have a lot of documents that we will be referring to, and that you want to access throughout this presentation, and then also have available to you after this presentation.

We just put the link to the folder in the chat. So if you want to take a moment to please access the folder and let us know if you are able to access that. All right. Let's go to the next slide. Just pop it in the chat if people are having a problem. So we like to start out with centering ourselves, why are we doing pathways and why are we looking at it as a gateway to college? Well, we really are thinking about building an educational ladder that validates students work experience as a central part of their educational journey.

And achieve that better, the good jobs, which include stable work schedules, increased pay, those better jobs, job security, and benefits, rates of employment, and stronger employment retention. On the screen, you can see that there's an increased opportunity for a living wage jobs as one gains education. The relevance of particularly the post-secondary non-degree award, which we think is important to be sure to include as you think about a pathway. But it's important to remember that the pathway is not a single program, rather it's a building of other experiences, trainings, and educational opportunities.

So that a student who may choose not to go beyond one educational experience can stop out. However, it also by building that pathway, builds the offering and the culture of a pathway for learners who want to continue. Or if you are transparent and continue that thinking and embed it in your programming, that the student who does maybe leave for a job, can then return later on in their lives and understand the process. Next slide, please.

So the Urban Institute defined a career pathway as a schematic or a mapped series of manageable education and training steps towards industry aligned skills, credentials, and career advancement. That's really important, it's that manageable education, the training steps, and the industry aligned skills and credentials for career advancement. Here some of the key characteristics of a career pathway are, that they're purposeful, progressive. You can see the entry and exit points. And when you're doing that, you're thinking about stackable and what's the timing of those.

The career pathway is meant to meet adults at all levels. So whether you start at a bridge program, or you are moving along up into apprenticeships, or IETs, those integrated education and training programs, or other aspects of programming that go along the line, you want to think about the whole trajectory. We think about career pathway systems as partnerships. You're not in it alone nor should you be in it alone. And I was delighted to see that there's a good mix of people, consortium directors and instructors on the webinar, and it's really important that we all think about this as a partnership as well as our stakeholders.

Your career pathway systems include support services, which you are all very fully aware of. And then the piece that I really like to highlight are those very clear transition points, and then the information that always goes into supporting people. Many of you already have career navigators, and those have been found to be key to supporting good transitions. And we really think about it as a many to many principle.

It's not just one thing, and Alexandra will talk about this later. The way we think about a career pathway, while it's a trajectory here, a single arrow, we're really thinking more about subways and you'll see that as we talk about our career pathways map is where do you branch in and out to other jobs and opportunities, maybe not even in the sector that you've planned for, but how do you support that? Next slide, please. So we have in order to help inform and develop career pathways and programming that aligns to local labor market, needs, and opportunities, we came up with an opportunity map idea, so that we can create transparent and informative maps for ourselves as we develop programs, but also one that can reach out to the adult learners.

So these maps are made to create a one page look at a pathway through a sector. And that should include a variety of opportunities, and we have organized them by educational levels. So and if you look closely, I know sometimes it's hard to see. And Holly, put the link to the opportunity map, so if you want to take a closer look at it. But you can see that it includes details such as median wages. So an adult learner, thinking about a job, can be fully apprised as to what they might be able to expect as they plan their future.

It includes foundational, and technical, and transferable skills. The transferable skills are right down there at the bottom. If I had my druthers, they'd be much bigger, but it's an awful lot of information to put on there. But those are equally as important while you're talking about adult learners because we know they may choose to move from one area of study to another, or in one area sector to another, or job to another. So keeping an eye on those transferable skills are also really important.

The reason why we highlight foundational, technical, and transferable skills is so that we can build those skills, which can be translated to other job families. And then also target them say, if you're doing a bridge class or a preparation course, that you also include, take a look at those skills, and include them in those prep courses or the bridging courses. All right. Next slide, please.

So one of the ways that we have found that people have been able to explore and understand a career pathway map is to create your own and think about your own career pathway. So we're going to move into an activity where you spend a few minutes reflecting on and charting your own career pathway. Next slide. So here's an example of it. This is one that one of us created, and it talked about-- and you filled in-- you took the little sticky notes, and filled them in, and pasted them onto this map.

And you can see where they were tracing what they were doing. What did they do? Where did they go to high school? What kind of training did they have? What about their volunteer experiences? And then how they threaded through their career pathway. So you'll notice that not all the boxes are filled out, our pathways are individual and they don't always fit into neat boxes. So if you want to just take this and jot it down as you look at this slide, or you can access the personal career pathway map through the link that Holly, posted in the chat. Go to the next slide, please.

So here are the directions. You just want to take a few minutes, chart your career pathway, include your on and off ramps related to your journey, branches into or from other sectors or educational pathways. And then any employment or unrelated employment opportunities such as volunteer opportunities related to your pathway. So we'll give you about three to five minutes to go ahead and think about it and plot it out.

Thank you. Can we go ahead and forward through? I appreciate you backing up to the blank map that people could use as an example. All right. And let's move forward one more slide. All right. I'd like to-- if people would come off, somebody volunteer to come off and talk a little bit about what you did for your career pathway, and then, how your career pathway fit onto that template. OK. I'm an ESL teacher. So I can call on people, and I'm hoping somebody would volunteer instead.

Molly: Hi, this is Molly.

Blaire Willson Toso: Oh, thank you, Molly. Yey, you won the first prize.

Molly: Oh, well, I appreciate all the help that I get from the folks on this call, so I will do this. I was the first in my family to finish university, and thought really that I was going to get through in four years. I really enjoyed doing all the different kinds of activities. I always worked. I had a couple of jobs in college. And then thought that I would work in the business world sales, and in hotels.

And I worked there for a little while and realized that it's not fun if it has to be work. So the fun stuff that I like to doing related to social outreach and all that kind of stuff, when it came to sales wasn't very fun. And I'd been told for a long time that I'd be a good teacher, so I decided to go that route. And that actually ended up being where I was for many, many years in a variety of jobs roles. So I started as a-- there's no way that I was going to be working with very little people. What I wanted to do was, work with teenagers, high school kids.

I didn't think I was smart enough to work for a college, a community college, but ultimately, I'd like to be able to do that. So anyway, I did start in the high school area. And where I ended up was over 20 years in kindergarten and preschool, those kinds of things. The place I never thought I would be. But just through different life choices and things that were happening with family, that's where I was. Then I also transitioned into administration and leadership because I like being with people and working together.

But I thought, there's no way I would be a school principal or work at a middle school, and that's what I did, both of those. And after doing those, I realized, yep, there's a reason I didn't want to do those, I was right. So I went to teach in the classroom, again. And then realized that I wanted to stretch in a different kind of way, and was successful in being hired for Shasta College. So it's been a little here, a little there. But the common theme, I think, is working with other people, and encouraging, and trying to solve problems that help lift other people up. Is that kind of what you're looking for?

Blaire Willson Toso: Yeah. That was perfect. We have all of our own journeys. And the way people talk about their personal pathway map is it's always different. So thank you so much for sharing. Yes. Diane, I agree. Lots of applause for Molly coming off. And it's interesting that you found your theme. Even though you may not have fit onto a direct pathway when you ended up in places that you did not anticipate, it's interesting how it takes that turn right for us along the pathway.

Molly: So I think part of that note you're describing, helps me see it in others as well. And give a little bit of grace for what an encouragement for them, and what that can be. And I know that everybody goes through hard times, but I truly believe we're here to help each other, and we really have a lot more going for us when we work together. So I love the work I'm doing now, and it wouldn't be the same if I had started doing this 25 years ago. I had a lot of other experiences that helped.

Blaire Willson Toso: Yeah. Thank you, Molly. I think you point out one of the real key pieces of this pathway map activity, is when we map our own pathways, it gives us grace about other people because we so often think about those linear pathways, so many of ours are not linear. And it helps us to also then think about and inform how we might craft a pathway system for the adult learners in our programs and across our consortia. So thank you. You said that beautifully.

And I was just curious, does anybody else want to talk about, how you might be able to use this career pathway to inform your work? And it could be with the adult learner as in that last question, or with planning in your consortium, or just within your program, or talking with partners. OK, I see Shannon.

Shannon: Hi. I was just thinking about my personal pathway. And I think one way it may inform us or help inform us to help students is, the motivation behind maybe a pathway that we're choosing. So for instance, I did the typical, I went to high school, completed high school. But throughout my high school career, I did like a workforce experience. Once I turned, I think, I was 15 or 16, and I worked with a bookkeeper. So I thought I was going in the direction of business.

When I got to community college I was like, oh, heck no, I do not want to do business. So at that time, you could get the general education AA. So I was doing that. But during that I married my high school sweetheart. But he was getting a full ride scholarship for basketball to Sac State and he's a little ahead of me. So my whole motivation during that time was, do anything I could to make sure I could follow him wherever he decided to go. So relating that back to our adult Ed students, they all have lives outside of school and career too.

So I think working with them to find out those interesting-- those things about their lives. So do they have children? OK, sure you want to be a nurse, here's the career pathway to that. But how are you going to help or raise your kids in the meantime as well, or get them to school, or things like that? So in our area, we're very rural and isolated. I'd be working with the students on figuring out daycare options or what that looks like within their own personal stories.

So anyways, that's kind of where my mind went because again, then even when we went off to Sac State, he got picked up by a professional basketball team in Europe. So I was trying to finish my degree at Sac State to make sure I could follow him to Germany, which I did. And then I ended up doing an online program so I could stay out there with him for my master's program. And then when I got back, I worked at our community college as an EOPS advisor.

And that kind of landed me-- actually, even before the EOPS advisor, I worked at Human Services, which was a whole different area in our community that I had no clue about. So I did not realize how much poverty was in our rural area, and that opened my eyes. And then I was the EOPS advisor, and then that's when I came into adult Ed too. So it was definitely all these stepping stones of different things that I never thought I really was going to be involved in, but each one really helped me to get to where I am today. But it was with the ulterior motive of my life circumstances.

Blaire Willson Toso: And Shannon, that's not unusual. Thank you so much for sharing. I mean, you just gave us another beautiful example about how our career pathways shift. And I go back to those transferable skills, and you also talked a lot about needing to build those lifelong learning, independent learning skills as for our adult learners as well, as they transition and move back and forth. So thank you so much. If anybody else would like to have something else to say, if you would pop it in the chat, that would be great.

I really enjoy hearing about people's experiences because they also inform the work we do, and helps us to relate to the adult learners. And I would just say that when you share this kind of story with an adult learner, it also helps them to feel as though they have a place in the career pathway. And that they don't necessarily need to know it all, or get it all straight right away, or that they can change their minds, that they also get to see that someone who they admire, or who they see as a mentor, or as their teacher that they've also made shifts in their lives. So it's a very humanizing activity as well.

And so thank you. I'm going to go ahead and let's move on to the next step. So now that we're thinking about the students, now that we're thinking about pathways, we're going to take a look at who we serve and can serve. And that's really the first step as you all are probably well familiar with in understanding and designing a career pathway. So for this example, we are going to be using the North for North region as our exemplar for this webinar.

So you may see data that doesn't reflect or is representative of what you will collect and analyze for your career pathway programming or it might not align to your local workforce needs, and your target learner population, but please take it as the exemplar and then you would want to tailor what we're going to talk about throughout the rest of this webinar for your local context. Next slide, please.

So who are your current students? Importantly, you want to learn who your students are, and determine who you are serving, and identify if there are any other additional opportunities. Some of the key demographic features you want to look at, as you know are race, ethnicity, and age. Other data points could be, who's transitioning barriers, obtaining workforce goals, and immigrant integration goals.

And you could also survey people, your students, and think about their student goals in order to inform all of your career planning pathway discussions. You all keep your data to understand your participants. Some of those resources you can use are launch boards, adult education pipeline data. For example, here there's also CAEP fact sheets, there's CASE's reports. You can use a wide body of data to inform them of what you want them to do. What you want to do is use that data so you're not presuming you know what's going on.

If anybody has any additional resources that they use to inform learning about their students and identifying your target demographic, then please go ahead and pop those in the chat. And yes, thank you. I see some great things the unexperienced life events. Life events are huge for our adult learners. And then yes, Thank you. Thanks Molly for posting and return to Shannon. Appreciate it. Next slide, please.

So and then you want to look at your community and the possibilities for students who you see potential in a career pathway for an in-demand job and living wage or good job. So for example on this slide, we're looking at data from lightcast. So as opposed to pulling just your student data, you're now broadening out. And as many of you already do, you're looking at the demographic data of your communities. And we pull from Lightcast, we've used the American Community Survey and Census data.

And then you want to look at intersections of this. We want to look at intersections such as race and ethnicity, alongside age. What does this look like together? Are you finding different groups that you may or may not be serving that there's opportunity through this? Next slide, please.

And on this slide, we're looking at the intersection of educational attainment and race and ethnicity for another perspective of how we might want to engage in adult education career pathway programming. Where do you want to start? Who do you want to start with? What kind of educational level do you want to think about? Do you need that bridge program? Do you need to push down into your basics, or ESL, or do we want to look at that those who have just about on the edge of a high school diploma, or do they need brush up skills? Where are they coming to us from?

And so are there other pieces that you all have other data points that you've used to inform programming besides educational attainment, race, ethnicity? Yes. Molly says, talking with the students, listening to the community agencies that are providing support. Your partnerships, we go right back to that, that is perfect.

In fact, my next talking point was about reaching out and talking to members of your communities to ensure that the programs are appropriate for your community as well. It's great. We can look at all the data we want and think that we've identified an opportunity, but without engaging stakeholders and the students, you won't necessarily know that your great ideas are actually going to come to fruition. And I have worked with programs that have put together these great training programs, and they have not been able to run them.

And ultimately, because they have not been able to enroll a group of adult learners who were either maybe because they weren't interested, or there were cultural constraints around the occupation, or there weren't enough people who actually met the needed entrance level, so they had to go back and build a bridge program that could help them move into that. So you need to also pay attention to what you need to build to ensure success. Do you need to run a specialized vocabulary programs? I've seen people do boot camps, so they can move people in, or other services.

Yes, thank you. Student technology service. Digital literacy is huge these days. As you all know, it appears on almost every job that you need, as well as in our classrooms along with that. All right. Next slide, please. Now, Alexandria is going to help us look more deeply at the process for career planning. So I'm going to turn it over to Alexandria.

ALEXANDRIA M. WRIGHT: Thank you so much, Blaire. All right. So let's get into a little bit of pathway planning here. And the actual kind of fundamentals of when it comes to planning out these educational and career pathways for our students, starting in adult education. So we can go over to the next slide. All right. So here's three fundamental elements when it comes to pathway planning. What data do we need to identify a pathway beyond the target employment opportunit?

We always have the immediate things. The things about economics is it's a social science. So we all live and breathe daily within our economics and our communities. But what this is about is diving a little deeper beyond what we see at surface value. So local, economic, and labor market information provides us with that data that we need to understand on high demand jobs in our region that lead to a living wage in those industry sectors that are hiring.

One of the most important, I'd say, benefits that comes out of adult education is the contextualized reading, writing, and arithmetic that can occur during an IET or an IELCE program. I've been delivering training in rural America and in Indian country my entire career. And I can tell you right now, without contextualized reading, writing, and arithmetic most rural folks are not going to be as successful as they otherwise would be.

So that's why we talk about labor market information, and not just the jobs but the actual industry sectors that are really-- that are showing a lot of growth, that are dominating our local economies, that have those career pathways that lead to living wage jobs. Real time information is that information which comes from job postings. That's why we call it real time, it's a fancy word for, what's going on right now in job postings? So you can see the actual advertisement, you can see the skills, and the competencies that people are looking for.

You can understand the frequency with which job postings are being posted online. So that's going to indicate for us. There's lots of variables engaged here, so we have to be careful not to be too assumptive, but it's definitely going to indicate some sort of demand. And finally, when it comes to creating these credentials, this entire workshop is really, again, adult education as that gateway to living employment. In order to truly harness that, we need to have industry credentials that are engaged in the education and training.

And so when we talk about building out these programs like IET and IELCE with plus T within adult education, we want to make sure that the credentials that we're offering have value in and of itself. That it's not tied to some other thing that they need to have because that just creates a barrier for those learners. So we want to make sure something like let's see, something like CNA.

Our certified nursing assistant, that credential has value within and of itself. Just like a community health worker credential has value within and of itself or a home health aide, versus something that may need to be contiguous to some other type of training. Perhaps some sort of computer training where you get your entry level, but you really need that intermediate credential in order to attain that living wage.

These credentials should be in short duration, and they should be part of a pathway that's not repetitive. So basically, for those of you who are working particularly closely with your community colleges or at an adult school that's hosted by a community college, we want to make sure that whatever is being provided through that IET or IELCE+T in the classroom is not going to be repeated.

Now, remember, if you have a relationship and you're being hosted by your community college, your ITE or IELCE+T could conceivably be a non-credit format or a credit format, it depends on where the culture is. At your institution, and where the Innovation is. I've seen it both ways. I'm working with colleges that have both IET, and non-credit, and in credit. Either way, we want to make sure that once those students complete and they start to transition, they move into their job, and they start to transition into higher education, that this credential isn't going to be repeated. They're not going to have to take this over again.

Repetition is a wonderful part right of learning, but it also is not imperative when it comes to attaining that living wage job and moving into that pathway. We want to build upon the skills and the competencies, not simply repeat what's already happening. So this has to do with partnerships and making sure that your pathway, whatever pathway you're building out in your adult school, is aligned with your community college partners and your university partners.

OK. We can go to the next slide. All right. So let's get into some labor market data here. Go ahead and go to the next slide. All of the data that you're going to see here, we took a look at what you were-- thank you, Blaire, and your workforce development partners thank you. Let us not forget our Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act partners. So it's not just our community colleges, but we also want to ensure that our pathways are built out of what's called the eligible training provider list.

I'm not going to distract us with that right now, but we can circle back around and we can talk a little bit more about when we get into the activities about building these pathways and ensuring that there is alignment with our partners, both our educational partners and our workforce partners. So the labor market data that you're seeing here, we took a little gander at who was attending today, and we wanted to ensure that this was really specialized to you.

So everything that you're seeing here is from the Shasta Tehama Trinity consortium, with the exception of I think a couple of data points where we pulled for North for North. But for the most part, these are your three counties that you're looking at. So the first thing we want to start at when we're talking about building these pathways, these pathways to living wage employment, is we want to see what's going on in our industry sectors. The numbers that you see here are the quantity of people employed as of 2022 in the three counties, in these sectors.

And of course, you'll see health care is top of the list. It usually is in our more rural communities, health care and social assistance along with government. You're always going to see that retail trade and food and accommodation which is lovely, but I'm going to put that over here to the side because retail trade and food and accommodation while you could eventually get to that point of living wage, it doesn't start there, and it's more of an entrepreneurial pathway.

And again, that's a specialty we can talk about in a little bit. We want to stick with those industry sectors that are really established where we know that we have a continuum into living wage career opportunities, into good jobs is really what we mean. How many here-- I'm going to stop for a second. How many here have known and are familiar with the definition of good jobs? The federal definition of good jobs? Give me a thumbs up if you know what that federal definition is of a good job. I'm not seeing any thumbs.

All right. And feel free to put it in the chat if you do. So let's talk about what a good job is. A good job is not just a living wage, it's health care benefits, and full benefits. That is our federal definition of a good job, it's coming through everything. So again, when you look at your top industry sectors, what we're really trying to understand here are, where should we target our efforts, where are those career pathways that lead to good jobs. And furthermore, how are we going to contextualize our basic skills in order to prepare people for success in these career pathways? So let's go ahead and go to the next slide.

All right. So now we're looking at our top skills. OK, and again, I put these slides together for a reason. They're next to one another, they're in proximity to one another for a reason. You can see here what we're looking for is specialized skills.

We understand the transferable skills that Dr. Toso spoke about earlier, and how those really need to be at the top of the list. But we have to understand it's not just the skills that are transferable, we really want to contextualize those skills. Again, the reading comprehension right and the mathematics vary from health care, to manufacturing, to transportation and logistics, so to agriculture, to construction.

So we want to be aware of what's going on with our skills. So what you're seeing here in terms of skills is, over the past year, from January 1, 2023 to December 31, 2023, we looked at online job postings, so here's your real time data. And those numbers that you see in there is the frequency with which that skill was posted in the Shasta, Tehama, Trinity counties, in that entire economic region.

Of course, communication is number one, customer service, of course, right up there. And then you get into those kind of more technical specialized skills like nursing, basic life support, your driver's license. But then we circle back around and we see these generalizable kind of skills, the management, the operations, the sales, the leadership, the planning.

Planning is a lot of that critical thinking and those are the types of exercises that can be included when you're in those adult education job training programs. Be it a pre-apprenticeship model, a pre-apprenticeship model that also offers an IET or an IELCE+T, or is it a pre-apprenticeship model that simply prepares someone to go into a credit bearing pathway or a non credit bearing pathway?

Either way we want to make sure that we're contextualizing that those very fundamental basic skills to the local industry sectors. Hey, let's face it, in the modern era, 21st century pedagogy and andragogy says, people want learning to be personalized, productive. They want it to be something that they can actually apply that applied learning, much less abstract than we used to be in the olden days. All right. Let's go to the next slide.

All right. So we're going to walk through three slides. And this is what we're going to do as an exercise together when we get into our California Adult Education career pathway dashboard. I know that's a mouthful, but trust me you're going to love it. You're in it, and it's very, very user friendly. So we start with the largest occupations. These ones that we're looking at require an associate's degree, so it looks like we filtered all of this according to associate's degree.

Typically what we do and what we're going to be able to do in the dashboard is we're going to be able to filter to some college, some college or industry credential, and that's really where we start with. But let's take a look at what's going on with our general area here for largest occupations. What you can see here is a five-year projection for the Shasta, Tehama, Trinity area. You're seeing these are the largest quantity of jobs in the region.

You see here the five-year projection, where they're expected to increase. And then you see here the ones faded are a little bit of a decline. So everything that's faded is showing-- oh, I'm sorry. Everything that's faded is actually showing a wage that's less than a living wage. So what we did is we looked at living wages just for Shasta County, we looked at this through the MIT living wage calculator. We're going to have a link for you in just a little bit. And there is a link on your dashboard that you're going to be using.

And what we try to pay attention to are two filters, living wage for one person, no child. And so that's the bottom dashed line here, that thicker dashed line. And so it's 2,193 in Shasta County for a living wage out of the MIT living wage calculator. So this is inclusive of everything from the cost of rent, and food, and energy, to the cost of Civic Participation. That's why it's really-- the MIT living wage calculator is really interesting and they've also recently updated it for inflation.

We had that terrible inflation last year in 2023, so it's important for us to keep track of that. The upper dotted line, which is a longer dash, that is for a living wage for a family of four with one working parent. And so again, you can see here projections across here for a lot of these jobs that do end up with living wages. Let's go to the next slide. Here let's look at the highest paying occupations that require an associate's degree.

Again, you can see here it's the same. We're looking at five year projections, 2023 to 2028 growth. We're looking at living wages in the lower dashed line, and in the upper dashed line. And along the blue line, you're seeing those median hourly earnings by job. So again, we start to build upon it, and we're starting to build upon not just what are the largest jobs.

A lot of times we always go to the largest jobs and we have to remember, that in any economy, the largest jobs are going to be entry level jobs, some of which may be low skilled jobs even though you could conceivably have a credential that provides a little more value for the worker and the labor market, gives them a little more understanding and proficiency, makes them a little more efficient when they walk in the door.

OK, but that said, almost every job, be it manufacturing team assembler, health care home health aide or CNA, construction general laborer, those are all going to be slightly lower than living wage, particularly, in the state of California, let's just be honest here. So we want to make sure that we're building in a pathway. And again, connecting it to the next step with our educational partners or our workforce system partners. We have two options there.

And again, we can dive into that a little bit. What I mean by that is connecting directly to that credit bearing pathway or connecting over here to a pathway that is listed through the eligible training provider lists, which will likely be, non-credit or credit pathways, but they provide the subsidy over here versus directly into education. All right. Let's go to the next slide. And this last one you're going to see is just bachelor's occupation. So this is the aspiration.

There's as Dr. Toso showed earlier, the best way to design pathways that begin in adult education are multiple on ramps and multiple off ramps. Because there's just so much the opportunity cost to go to school is just so much higher in the modern era. That opportunity cost the time taken away from maybe working your second job, so you can put food on your table for your family because the cost of rent is so high. So there's multiple reasons why we want off ramps that are easy on ramps, and easy off ramps, and they can come right back and this would be the aspirational. This is how we start building this out.

So all right. Let's go to the next slide. We have a couple more slides in this labor market area looking at this, so this is an interesting one. In adult education, you can provide an integrated education and training or an IELCE plus T program that is fairly generic, business administration. So administrative assistance, or billing and posting clerks.

Billing and posting clerks are something that can be really heavily in demand in various industry sectors. And what we're looking at here is one of my favorites in terms of being able to understand the context of our economy. So what we're seeing here is that, in the Shasta, Tehama, Trinity counties in 2023, billing and posting clerks were almost 60% of those occupations were in health care in that region.

So that tells us something. That if we wanted to start a credential program for billing and posting, you're kind of entry level credential there. Again, I want to say inventory, but it's more like accounting, and bookkeeping, and posting, and time keeping, all of which are really, really fundamental jobs, but essential jobs. In our sectors, almost 60% of those jobs are sitting in health care. A little over 8% are sitting in professional, scientific, and technical services.

So what those are, what that means is your professional architecture firms, your professional engineering firms, your professional biotech firms. Typically, independently-owned or private sector. 7.7% of these jobs are sitting over in government. And then finally 4.7% of these jobs sit in a sector that's very oddly combined, administrative support, and waste management, and remediation services. Please forgive us, the US Department of Commerce created these sectors decades and decades ago, and they have yet to update them at all. Otherwise, this should certainly be separated.