BLAIRE TOSO: Welcome to our webinar. If any of you attended the kickoff to the dashboard last week, you'll know a little bit about this and the way that we're talking about building career pathways using adult education, career technical education courses, and skill builders in order to build pathways from your educational opportunities into relevant occupations using labor market information. 

Next slide, please. And Mandali did a lovely job introducing the CAEP AEP team, and that's me, Jessica Keach, and Ayanna Smith, but really it's our fellow colleagues Alexandria Wright and Allie Bollela who are going to be leading this, and I'll say a little bit more about that. 

Next slide, please. But first I'd like to turn it over to the Chancellor's Office, to Mayra, to offer a welcome. 

MAYRA DIAZ: Thank you, Blaire. And good afternoon, everyone. Just want to say welcome and thank you all for participating in today's webinar presentation. My name is Mayra Diaz, and I am the CAEP Program Lead with the Chancellor's Office. My colleague Lindsay Williams and I work collaboratively to support the statewide adult education program. 

And we're excited that you can join us to learn from today's presenters. So stay tuned and welcome. Thank you. 

BLAIRE TOSO: Thank you. It's always a delight to have you on and Lindsay on, Mayra. We really appreciate the support and the thinking that you have brought to our work this year. It's really great. 

One of the things I forgot to mention is that this is the first in a two-part series of the webinars. It's what we're calling our Extended PD. So today we'll introduce part of the material, and then, on the 24th, there'll be a second follow-up that will continue to dig a little bit deeper into the topic that we're addressing today, which is informing career pathways with educational and live market data. 

And with that, I'll turn it over to our presenters today, Allie Bollela and Alexandria Wright, both Labor Market and Educational Data Specialists, as well as content in adult education and career pathways. I'm going to turn it over to Allie. Thank you so much for being here and putting this work together for us. 

ALLIE BOLLELA: Awesome. Thank you for the great introduction, Blaire. We can go the next slide. Oh, we have the agenda and objectives to get through, Blaire, still. All right. 

BLAIRE TOSO: Sorry. I saw your lovely faces, and just I'm excited about getting it over to you all. But so to run quickly through the agenda, Allie is going to review the California Adult Education Career Education Dashboard, which she introduced last week. This is really something that she has built from the ground up, based on a lot of research and a lot of data. And she'll talk a little bit about that data as well as, if you missed the opportunity to update your data, she'll give you some information on that. 

They'll also be talking about exploring the steps to building career pathways and career systems with equity. A pathway is always part of a system, and we'd like to draw your attention to that. And then they're going to walk us through an exercise, an activity, about how this actually looks in practice, to build-- and they're going to use a particular career pathway which exemplifies how the data is being used to inform this type of career pathway. 

Next slide, please. And really the objectives just are to understand the data curation process for this dashboard because it's very important to understand that the data-- how it's being updated, and why it's relevant, and how you might want to use that, and how you can participate in helping keep this dashboard relevant. 

Also understanding the steps to building the career pathways using the data, and particularly with an eye to equity so that you're ensuring both opportunities for your students but also additional opportunities that might support non-traditional or marginalized students that are able to move into those pathways. And then, lastly, to actually use the dashboard in your work for pathway development. 

Next slide. Now I turn it over to Allie. Thank you. 

ALLIE BOLLELA: All right. Thanks, Blaire. So I'm going to run through a little bit about the work we've been doing with the adult education data and building this dashboard. It's a little bit of a refresher from the last webinar we did, but I'll just do a quick overview of that. So next slide. So we started this project back in 2019, and we did a huge scan of all the adult ed courses, through websites and brochures and catalogs. And we scraped all that data and put it into a data set so we could have a full catalog of all the courses offered in adult education. And that really allowed us to think about these three broad types of adult education courses. 

We first have the workforce preparation courses, which are really workforce readiness, OSHA, ServSafe Safe, general skills necessary for success in the workforce. 

We then found there were a huge number of occupational skills builders, as we call them, which are offerings that advanced skills related to an industry, but by themselves would not necessarily allow a student to apply to a specific occupation, but sometimes they're associated with a particular industry. 

And then the last one is the occupational credential programs, which are really more rigorous, slightly longer-term program courses that are of sufficient duration and intensity and provide skills for an individual to enter into or advance in a very specific occupation or industry. And we found that all these courses work together in important ways in adult education, and one is not more important than the other, but it's important for us to understand how they fit under this umbrella because it helps us think about how they relate to the labor market and how they relate to jobs for students. 

Next slide. So we started this work in San Diego, where we actually started to organize and classify regional CT courses in order to try and build a career pathway system and, one day, a career navigation platform across the SDIC region/super-region. 

And we started this work very simply, just establishing common definitions for the courses and terms, organizing courses and programs into their different levels, whether they fit into skills builders or occupational training programs, and coding courses and programs, so coding them to particular SOC codes, or Standard Occupational Codes, and thinking about how those courses related to the labor market either in a very broad way, so in a particular occupational area, or to a very specific occupation that could help students. 

And then we worked with San Diego to establish processes and data structure for aggregating and updating course and program data. So we created a template for them that is now their course repository. And hopefully, one day, we'll be able to transition that into a more advanced data system that would have a student-facing side. And that's rarely the final step of this process of this work, is implementing an adult learner career exploration portal that captures the regional AE career pathways and system. 

So this work is still ongoing in San Diego, but it's an interesting project that allowed us to think about the data collection in a technical assistance environment. So we really worked with San Diego and did train-the-trainer sessions to think about how courses are communicated to students. Are these course descriptions meaningful to students? And why would one adult school have a slightly different course description or even course features than another adult school that's only 30 minutes away? 

And are there important differences there in terms of recognizing that different students are being served? Or is there a way that we can better align those programs to serve students better? 

Next slide. So this is the template we created for San Diego to collect courses. And for some of you, it may be familiar because we used a modified version-- slightly shorter version-- of this to collect data, this spring, of new adult ed courses. And it's pretty simple. It has a course title, the unique course ID for that school, the level that the course is at-- so either the skills builder or occupational training or workforce preparation-- and then we have the occupational codes associated with them. 

And you can see, in the occupational skills builder, these courses are aligned to the two-digit level of the Standard Occupational Codes, which means they're really aligned to a broad occupational area, whereas you can see the occupational training programs are aligned to a six-digit code, which is a very specific occupation. 

So next slide. So the new data collection process we have is we're using this modified template from San Diego because it was really successful in helping us not only organize data but also think about how this data is communicated effectively to students and think about what future data systems we could have, both internally and student facing, for career exploration. 

So we would like to continue these. Definitely give us feedback if it's not working well for you. And we ask you all for some new data for spring 2022. And in our dashboard now, we have original data from 2019 for schools that weren't updated. But if you did and your school sent us updated information, we will only have the updated spring 2022 courses for your school in the dashboard. And if you have not done that yet, you are welcome to email us. Send us questions or any feedback to me or Blaire. Our information are in these slides. 

And really what we're looking for in the most important variables to think about for the course data is school, the program title or course title, whether it has an industry credential, whether it's IET or not, any of the pre-apprenticeship designation, and then really, most importantly, is the Standard Occupational Code associated with that. And if you have any questions about that data collection, definitely feel free to reach out at any time. 

Next slide. So I will pass it off to Alexandria now. 

ALEXANDRIA WRIGHT: Great. Thank you, Allie. And I know it's been mentioned in the chat box, but do please feel free to put any questions or comments in the chat as we continue to move through this presentation here. Let's see here. We can go ahead and go to the next slide. 

OK, so we're going to take a step back here for a second. Understanding that the dashboard is a tool which we are using to create these career pathways, we wanted to look at what are the elements engaged in building or enhancing career pathways with equity. 

And so first, of course, we're all accustomed to the labor market Information. There's a myriad of things that are in our heads when we go to put together pathways. It's been around for a bit, but there's no exact methodology. It's just all these different components that we always use when we're looking at adult students and we're looking at adult education. 

So I gave you a nice little summary here of really why we're even looking at labor market information. It's providing us data on high-demand jobs in the region that lead to a living wage, first and foremost. It's telling us about the industry sectors that are hiring. So that gives us an idea of who to speak to, who to invite to our advisory board meetings, what industry associations we should be associated with and communicating with in order to validate the credentials that we're putting forward in adult schools. 

And then, finally, these together build the career pathways that are going to result in economic mobility in the local economy. We know very well, through research and looking at census data over the past 20 years, that, inevitably, irrespective of what students major in, they get jobs in their local economy. And so this is the modern era where interdisciplinary skills are a must. The reading comprehension, writing, mathematics, along with all of those other transferable skills, that's really what we're looking at when it comes to employment and movement along that career ladder in whatever pathway the student decides. 

A lot of us look at real-time labor market information. We may not know that that's what it's called, but that's when we look at things like the EMSI job posting analytics. Some of you who are associated with community colleges may have EMSI subscriptions in your institutional research, in which case you are either receiving reports from them or perhaps through the Centers of Excellence. 

That's telling you about the job demand, the jobs posting. It's gathering all of the different job postings that are out there on all these different digital sites now and it's assessing what's going on with the skills demand, the competencies, and the frequency of the job posting per occupation. That tells us about demand. Because we want to ensure that we're providing programming that is certainly in demand and then, further, will increase the value of our students in the labor market. And that's where industry credentials come into play. 

And then, finally, we always want to look at adult education, community college, university lattice programs for pathways. Our credentials-- we talk a lot about IET and IELCE. Those are really excellent, excellent examples of the most innovative, really, type of programming in the modern era. The basic skills plus the technical competencies is the whole package for our students. 

But we've got to remember they need to be short and duration. They need to have labor market value in and of themselves when we offer short-term credentials through IET or IELCE. We want to make sure that we're adding to the students' earning power. 

And it should be part of a structured pathway for those adult schools that are hosted by community colleges. We want to make sure that, as a student leaves an IET program coming out of adult education, that they're not required to repeat this in either a noncredit or a credit-bearing format. We want to make sure that there's constant movement up that ladder when it comes to the skills building. 

So essentially, given your local economic context, we're trying to decide which career pathways and which enhancement strategies, such as the IET, IELCE industry credentials, are going to accelerate movement along those career pathways and offer the best opportunities to address the identified equity gaps for improved employment outcomes. 

I'm going to-- I should have had control over this. So I'm going to pause for one moment. Just technical assistance-- how do I move this slide forward? Oh, thank you. 

Oh, you know what? Go ahead. Sorry about that. Let me get to our PowerPoint. Sorry. Thank you guys. I'm going to be toggling back and forth. 

Here you go. Sorry about that. Let's get back into what we were talking about. All right. There we go. 

OK, so we put together some actual steps for using the tool, the tools that you have heard of throughout this entire California Adult Education Project process as well as this new dashboard in pathway planning. So we start with identifying target populations. We've had a lot of discussion about that over the past year. 

And we know that the 2021 CAEP fact sheets are an excellent, excellent tool to use for this. We can go over to the transitions. You have a little picture here on the Transitions tab to start understanding what's happening by race, by ethnicity, by gender, by age, with regard to our transitions, which is ultimately that goal-- to improve the economic mobility, to add security to the students, to their lives. 

When we survey adult education students, priority reasons why they're engaged in adult education comes from, I want to get a new job. I want to move up in my job. I need security. I need financial security. So we're always very attentive to identifying those target populations and how we can improve their outcomes. 

Now we get into to some more building and this new tool that we have that has been introduced to you, the California Adult Ed Career Education Dashboard. We want to go from identifying our target population-- so step number one-- to step number two, identifying our pathway programs. So we're starting to look at target sectors and skills, and then we want to look at our occupational clusters in our industry credentials. 

Those are all data points, microeconomic data points, that can seem to get muddled sometimes when we're doing our analysis, when we're trying to understand the best pathway programs. And so I kind of separated them for you guys here to start with what's going on in your industry sectors. What are the largest sectors? Then, furthermore, what are the skills that are in demand by those sectors? 

And then, from there, once we understand the skills and the sectors, we can start to look at the occupational clusters. What are the job titles? And then, furthermore, what are the industry credentials that align with those job titles? 

Here you have a little link here, the bit.ly link, to the California Adult Ed Career Education Dashboard. And when you guys receive it-- once this PowerPoint is reviewed for 508 compliance, this will be a live link, so you'll be able to access it through here. And then once we move through identifying the pathway program, we want to understand those strategies for accelerated learning. 

So this is not our grandmas' and our grandpas' adult education program from 1988 or even 1994. We're in the modern era. We're looking at a great deal of literature, evidence-based practice, as to how students, adult students in particular, in the modern era accelerate through these latest career pathways. 

So stacked and latticed credentials that lead to high-quality jobs and aligned with the career pathway into a community college or university, that's one of those accelerated learning strategies. And these are also well-rounded in the Department of Labor and in the Department of Education. For those of you who are always engaged, as most of us are, in resource development and federal funding, these are all, again, evidenced-based accelerated learning strategies that are relevant, well-founded, and accepted through Department of Labor, recognizable through Department of Labor. 

So when you do your three-year planning process and you're working with your workforce development board, and you're in your consortium, and you submit that plan-- perhaps you have an opportunity to present to your workforce development board-- talk about these accelerated learning strategies. Because remember, that audience wants to hear it. It's full of employers and your community college partners. 

Another accelerated learning strategy is competency-based education. So Allie spoke earlier about categorizing career education classes in adult education by three different categories-- workforce prep, skills building, and then that intense, kind of occupational, really aligned credential program. 

So the competency-based education and assessments, such as pre-apprenticeships and skills builders, that's, again, a really well-founded accelerated learning strategy that can be immediately applied in adult education through an IET program, and doesn't necessarily have to be associated with an industry credential. 

Then, of course, we have our IET and IELCE. As you guys can probably tell, I'm a big fan of these programs. So I've overseen adult education programs at community colleges, oh gosh, for about a seven-year period. And during that time, IET was coming up. It was coming out of the IBEST model. And so when I found this, I was actually designing pre-apprenticeship programs for manufacturing that engaged reading comprehension, writing, and mathematics in a contextual format for the manufacturing employers that were in the local region. It was a rural area-- a semi-rural area, I should say. 

But what we did is we took the opportunity for basic skills improvement and basic skills learning and we contextualized it. So for the mathematics portion, we actually used examples coming from the manufacturing sector, such as geometric dimensions and tolerancing, the way particular things are measured in the manufacturing sector, decimals, et cetera. So it was very applied and contextualized. That was definitely that competency-based, but also moving into the IET. 

For the reading comprehension and writing section, we actually used lean manufacturing as the context. So the students were reading about lean manufacturing. They were learning about the elimination of waste and the history of this kind of concept of efficiency while also improving their reading comprehension and their writing skills. 

They were moving through things like standard operating procedures. The number one thing that manufacturers always, always need is somebody who can understand SOPs. So that was the applied exercise in the classroom. So again, different types of contextualization that can get into the classroom, into the basic skills learning, that includes competency-based and skills building. 

Then, of course, we have our student support services, which is a big, big emphasis right now coming out of the federal government. So improved comprehensive and personalized student support services and career guidance. This is something that, again, all of you saw in that three-year planning process. You have to integrate with the workforce system itself. And again, it's because it's one of those well-established, well-researched strategies that helps move those students along the pathways. 

And then, finally, a last one that I put in here on online and distance learning and advanced training technologies, things like, oh, gosh, 3D modeling to provide exposure to students for those jobs and careers that they may have never even known about. We know that when it comes to historically marginalized populations, that one of the major inhibitants, one of the major barriers, is a lack of exposure. 

So for example, I'm working with a program that is engaging their library system and was able to apply for federal funding and some state ARPA funds, actually, that gave them the money to provide some kind of 3D interactive tours of manufacturing plants to give-- and different types of manufacturing. I'm not talking about the dirty old industrial kind of warehouse look. I'm talking about the modern type of industrial manufacturing. 

Medical device manufacturing-- you guys have a lot of that in the southern area, Riverside area in particular. You have consumer packaged food products, all sorts of-- there's six different types of major subsectors in manufacturing. So getting that exposure out there is something really interesting for students. 

So once we identify our target population and we identify our pathway program, and then we hit up our identified strategies for accelerated learning, then we move into identifying our pathway system partners. And these really do go beyond the traditional workforce development board. 

We want to ensure that adult educators are connected not just with their workforce development board but with their one-stop. The workforce development board is legally the oversight for those one-stops, but isn't the one-stop actually where the students get their services? Those are where the co-enrollment comes into play, where you can have a good contact at that AJCC so that you can co-enroll a student for supportive services that perhaps your adult school can't afford, those wraparound services like transportation and child care and all that good stuff. 

Of course, we're always engaging our labor unions, but I also throw in here a couple of more ideas. Again, industry associations, I got to tell you, such a great way to get employer feedback and employer engagement and connectivity for that job placement for your students. And it's multiple birds with the same stone. You get with that association, all of a sudden, you have a forum of about a dozen employers or more and you're able to get that feedback, and again, most importantly, the connectivity to the skills and the competencies the students should be learning and the connectivity to employment. 

We have economic development collaboratives. These are really important right now because these are the ones that are engaged in all the state ARPA funding. So if you're looking for an extra 100 grand, an extra 100 grand over a couple of years, an extra 50 grand just for another technology for students, this is putting you at that table when you're engaged with your economic development collaboratives. 

And then, of course, your community-based organizations-- these are the ones that have the connectivity to your target populations and the industry sectors. And let's not forget that a large, large part of our audience in adult schools of our students are coming from the gig economy. So ensuring that we're connected with entrepreneurial systems, federally-funded entrepreneurial assistance at that, which is fully subsidized, such as small business development centers, SCORE, which is the Senior Core of Retired Executives, and women's business centers are always great, great, great complements to student learning in the classroom. 

And then, finally, step number five, identifying tangible pathway systems changes to address these equity gaps. So we talk a lot about the things we can do, but we want to ensure that what we're doing is truly addressing equity gaps that are systemic, that are built in and have been built in for generations. 

I gave you a little quote right here, again, coming from federal resources. "Sustainable systems change alters a significant number of key drivers." So that can be policy, that can be incentives, that can be rules such that want the system that once perpetuated the problem is now shifting and it's perpetuating the solution. 

And this has implications on the way projects are designed and implemented and who is engaged in the project design. I wanted to add that one. That's a real important piece. Traditionally, in education, we have faculty and then we might have a dean or an administrator. This sustainable system changes, this is getting your counselors engaged, getting your career councilors, your career coaches, engaged, getting institutional research engaged. 

I gave you some examples here. Ensuring that there's work-based learning, so if you have that partnership with your industry association, that better provides you with an opportunity to get that work-based learning into the classroom. It could something as simple as a guest speaker. It could be job shadowing. It could be an actual internship or it could be an actual pre-apprenticeship. It could be anything. 

It could be policy changes on how funding is structured in your actual institution. If you're a multi-college district and you're hosting an adult school or adult education school at a particular campus, is that campus being funded equally with the other campuses? Or is it being funded according to traditional funding formulas based on student headcount? 

If it's student headcount, then we're going to create a positive feedback loop. And all that's going to happen is the colleges, the campuses that have the greatest enrollment are going to keep getting more and more money, and the colleges that are smaller that are maybe hosting those adult schools will get less and less money. So those are the major, major shifts there. 

New workforce system partnerships, approaches to employer engagement I've already mentioned, and of course, supporting students, a new method of instructional design and delivery. And I just wanted to be clear here, so with these five steps that I've given you for pathway planning, we wanted to make sure that we were clear about this, that career pathway programs offer a clear sequence of education and coursework and/or training credentials aligned with employer-validated work readiness standards and competencies and they're integrated into academic and occupational skills trainings. 

So those are career pathways. A career pathway system is that cohesive combination of partnerships and resources-- funding, policy, data, and shared accountability-- that support the development, quality scaling and dynamic sustainability of career pathways and programs for youth and adults. 

So again, just wanted to make sure that we had a little bit of understanding, in the background, of how we're going to use this really cool tool right now. So let's move on to the Career Education Dashboard. And I'm going to be toggling back and forth from steps in the PowerPoint to the dashboard. So I'm going to go through the steps first and then I'm going to go through the dashboard. 

I'm going to pause right here and take a look at the chat, real fast. Allie, if you could, please, go ahead and put the bit.ly link to the dashboard into the chat box at this point. And that way people can kind of follow along. All right. Thank you. 

I noticed there's some good comments about enrollment. And yes, state advocacy is absolutely imperative to making sure that that becomes a smoother process. And yeah, the data systems, they really don't talk to one another. It is 2022, so let's hope that, by 2030, we're not talking about these same situations. All right, great. Thank you, Allie. I appreciate that. 

So for those of you who want, you can go ahead and click on that link, but I'm going to walk you through some steps right now, and then we're going to go over to the dashboard. I'm going to walk through the steps in the dashboard with you. So the first thing you're going to do is you're going to query by your sector and by your region, sector meaning what industry sector are you looking at, region meaning what is your macro region that you sit within. 

In the last session, we provided a nice layout of schools by macro region. So I do believe, in the chat, already, somebody placed in there the link to the previous sessions. In the session that was just held on June 9, I believe, there's a slide in there that shows you the relationship between where your adult school is located and what macro region it's in. So select your industry sector and select your region. 

Then, number two, we're going to query by entry level education to best analyze our high-quality career pathways and projected growth. High-quality meaning the job is living wage and the job has benefits. 

Now, I suggest-- and I'm going to show you this-- that you begin with three entry-level education categories that align with your awards, so Postsecondary nondegree award, No formal education credential, or High school diploma or equivalent. What we're going to show is that when you toggle with Some college, no degree, you're going to get slightly different occupations, which is kind of interesting. It helps you build your pathways. 

In this California Adult Education Project, there has been the development of what we call opportunity maps through WestEd. We put here, on this slide, a little link to opportunity maps. And we're going to take a look at one of those towards the end of the presentation here. So just keep that in mind. Opportunity maps for your macro region can help verify the occupations that you should be targeting. And again, we're going to get to that after we go through the dashboard. 

All right, so step one, query by sector region. Step two, query by entry-level education. Step three, we're going to go down, we're going to scroll down, and we're going to look at the two graphs that occur right underneath the sector tables, sector charts. And we're going to look at the adult ed regional program offerings first. And we're going to look at those offerings to identify opportunities to build new pathways. 

So where is there a gap? We're going to look at opportunities to leverage existing pathways. OK, so somebody started doing this, but maybe there's another step or a slight differentiation that we can offer that perhaps is maybe more specialized to a particular industry sector. 

For example, again, when it comes to-- I always use manufacturing because it's all over the place and it's so differentiated. In the variety of manufacturing, perhaps you have a program that's particularly associated with, like I said, consumer packaged food products or value-added agriculture. That would be competencies that's very different from custom steel manufacturing or medical device manufacturing. 

And then, finally, we're going to ensure that we're reducing duplication efforts. So if we have-- pardon me-- an idea for a program, we want to ensure-- and we can do this through the dashboard-- that it's not going to be duplicative. Because we want to leverage one another's resources. We don't want to duplicate what we're doing in our consortium. 

And then, finally, step four, we're going to look at community college programs by occupational cluster to identify stackable career pathways. So you'll see here, in this example, we're looking at arts and humanities pathways. These are our major occupational clusters. This is going to help us build those pathways into community college and then into university. 

And again, I'm going to stop sharing right here. And we're going to go to the dashboard and while I'm doing that, I'm going to-- OK, good, no more chats. All right, let's get over to our dashboard. Here we go. 

All right, the exciting stuff, everyone. OK, so this is what the dashboard is going to look like when you walk into it. So Allie provided you a nice overview of this in the last session on June 9. Let's actually apply it. Let's see what we're doing right now. So let's first go to sector title. 

So we're going to go-- because we're looking at arts and humanities, that doesn't align with an industry sector. That's always been the issue with education. We'd like to call things differently than economic terms, but we know that in arts and humanities, that there's a few different industry sectors that those majors and those competencies and those skills relate to. 

So I'm going to uncheck some of this. I'm going to keep Arts, Design, and Entertainment. I'm going to keep Community and Social Service Occupations, and I'm going to keep Educational, Instruction, and Library Occupations. I'm going to unclick everything else. As you can see here, the way the dashboard is designed, you can choose a single industry sector by just pressing only or you have to manually go through and uncheck. 

Now, I did this on purpose because I wanted you guys to see, you don't have to just check one industry sector. Again, when we're talking about liberal arts, arts and humanities pathways, there's several sectors and occupational clusters that roll through that pathway program. 

So now that we have our sector title, I'm going to explore the Bay Area. So I'm going to come over here, I'm going to click Bay Area Only. And that's going to pop up quite a few different data points for me. So it's going to pop up our annual openings, it's going to pop up-- pardon me, my screen is just doing something weird. All right, there we go. It's going to pop up our annual openings, it's going to pop up our median wage, and it's going to pop up our projected increase in jobs over the next five years. So that's what we rolled with all of these dashboards. 

You'll see this also in the CAEP fact sheets when you look at the LMI. So once we look at that, we can look over here and we see that, in our macro region we put up here your living wage. 

This is based on the MIT Living Wage Calculator. And so that calculator, this is for one person supporting themselves. So if you know that most of your students are single parents or have one or two kids, you can easily go over here to this link and you can pull up the living wage for your county for single parent with one child, single parent with two child, two parents with one child, whatever you want to do. But this is for one person supporting themselves. 

So you're going to see here a variety of occupations here-- postsecondary teachers, teachers assistants, tutors. You're going to keep going down, you're going to see social and human service assistance. And then you're going to see some library technicians. And notice, down here, we have these little carets. We're going to keep moving over. And we get more and more occupations-- graphic designers, public relations specialists, librarians, child, family, and school social workers, marriage and family therapists, community and social service specialists. There's 83 full occupations that pop up when we look at these three sectors in this region. 

I'm not going to go through all of them, but you're seeing where this takes you. Now, over on the right, we're going to see all of those skills, those skills that are highly demanded by the employers in these three sectors. And these skills Allie described to you in the last session, these skills are actually coming from Department of Labor O*NET. So this is a curation of the variety of skills and competencies listed in job postings. This is very direct, and it reflects immediate and current need of employers. 

So that was steps 1 and 2. OK, so steps 1 and 2, everybody still with me? All right, good, OK. 

So I'm going to share my screen again. I'm going to go back, really fast, to the PowerPoint. So we just looked at the query by sector and region and query by entry-level education. I'm going to go back. And I want to show you guys one more thing here. 

I'm going to come up here. And because I left it, I'm going to have to re-put this in here. OK, so I'm going to put in-- I'm going to uncheck that. No formal education. Oh, I don't think I did this to begin with. There we go, bachelors and associates. 

So we have our three entry-level educations that we suggest that you, in adult education, use. And so this is getting us a slightly more narrow list. Yeah, I didn't do this up front. I just did your sector title and I did your region. 

All right, so now let's get into our narrowing those occupations. What you did see, though, was what I wanted to show you, which is if you change your entry-level occupation, you can start to see the career pathways. 

So an entry-level occupation with postsecondary nondegree, no formal education or high school diploma, in these three sectors, in the Bay Area, we're going to see everything from floral designers, to craft artists, sound engineering techs, court reporters, artisans, choreographers and related workers. 

Let's see here. Let me go back to the original page. And then here you get your community health workers, your library techs, median communication workers. We see here our annual openings with this education level, our average salary, and the expected change. 

Now, if you toggle and you click Some college, no degree, you get slight differences in that pathway. So again, if you do Some college, no degree or if you come down over here and we click on Bachelor's, we're going to, again, start to see that pathway of occupations that you can talk to students about if they're interested in an arts and humanities pathway. 

OK, so I'm going to come back here, and I'm going to take off Bachelor's and I'm going to take off Some college-- oh, I'm not going take off Some college-- I'm going to take off-- I'm going to take off Some college, no degree. OK, and we're going to leave it with the three basics. 

So we have our three basics. Now we're going to scroll down to our adult education map here and our community college awards. So this is a curation of all adult education training programs in the Bay Area that are coded out that have awards that were submitted by the Adult School according to a particular top code in this field. 

And we can see here that-- for those of you who are in the Bay Area, you might recognize some of these-- we see that we have some-- these are probably noncredit classes. Because let me make sure-- I did uncheck Postsecondary nondegree, I did take off Some college. 

These might be some noncredit awards given the hours of instructions. Community health worker/health navigator-- this is a big one that comes in, usually, through the health areas. But because we did arts and humanities, occupationally, the skills that somebody gains for the health care worker actually transcribe-- they're basically social service workers. I'm familiar with that having designed one of those programs at the last institute I was with as well. 

So we can come through here and we can see more. We see some instructional assistance, advanced interactive design for web, et cetera. We saw 2D animation, we see web design essentials, we see some more colleges that are probably hosting these adult schools. We have court interpreter-- that's always a great one-- coming out of adult education. 

So now we know what's occurring in our area. And if our idea was to create an arts and humanities pathway that had skills and competencies related to what we see up here, and perhaps we were integrating a Microsoft Office or Adobe credential, we could look down here and see if somebody already has it. And if they already have it, OK, maybe we can piggyback off of it. Maybe it's not acceptable to the people in our area or maybe we decide that we don't want to do it. We want to do something slightly different in Adobe or Microsoft. 

And then we come over here to our community college awards. We see, here, exactly the slide I showed you, educational, instruction, and library occupations we see arts, design, and entertainment, and we see community and social services. These now tell us what our occupational cluster is. So I'm going to come up here and I'm going to do award type. 

BLAIRE TOSO: Lexi, can I interrupt you real quickly? 

ALEXANDRIA WRIGHT: Of course. 

BLAIRE TOSO: Sorry. Apologies. Miley posted that she wants to know why there's no adult education job training. Can you show her where that shows? It looks-- there are job training offerings, they just appear small so you don't necessarily see them. But if you could point those out, that would be great. 

ALEXANDRIA WRIGHT: Sure. So that was actually what we were just looking at. And Miley, go ahead and unmute yourself if you'd like. Why is there no adult job training? So Miley, please feel free to unmute yourself. 

This is what this section is in the adult ed job training. So it's pulling up. It's queried by the entry-level education and the region and the sectors. So we have three different drilldowns that's then pulling up all of these adult ed job training. 

So it just looks small here, but there's actually-- you have 28 and then you have seven-- you have 28 different job trainings in art, design, entertainment, and media occupations. We have seven different adult ed job trainings in educational instruction and library occupations. And it looks like we have one in community and social service. Like I said, I'm pretty sure that was the health navigator one. So that's probably coded to that. 

Miley, does that answer your question? 

AUDIENCE: Yeah, I think I was just trying to understand how there's no, like, adult school names listed the way the community colleges have names, the schools listed. That's what I was trying to understand. 

ALEXANDRIA WRIGHT: Oh, OK, do you see the school name here on the left though? 

AUDIENCE: Yes. Those are all the colleges, right? 

ALEXANDRIA WRIGHT: Those are colleges, but more than likely, those colleges are hosting the adult school. 

AUDIENCE: Oh, got it. OK. 

ALEXANDRIA WRIGHT: Yeah, yeah. So here in California, we have a-- well, across the nation-- it can either be hosted by a community college or it can be hosted by an individual adult school. So that's why, in the Bay Area, more than likely, it's simply that the community colleges are hosting the adult education schools. 

AUDIENCE: OK. Thank you. 

ALEXANDRIA WRIGHT: Yeah. And as you can see, Castro Valley Unified School District, CVUSD, that's probably-- there you go, right there-- an adult school through K-12. 

AUDIENCE: OK. Thank you. 

ALEXANDRIA WRIGHT: The 28th, I believe, is our next session, or the 29th-- I think we moved one of those dates. No, no, no, I think it's the 28th. I'm actually going to go through a couple more examples of pathway building and we're going to look at different regions. So stay tuned. We'll be going through that. 

AUDIENCE: OK. Thank you. 

ALEXANDRIA WRIGHT: Yeah, no problem. OK, so then we come over here, and I'm going to go to Award Type, and I'm going to unclick all of my associate degree programs. And I just want to stick to Certificate of Achievement, No Award, or Noncredit programs. Let's just start with there, just out of curiosity, and see what's going on. And we still get a good number of educational, instruction, and library occupations over here, record count for all sorts of certificates that are being offered. Let me move this over here so you guys can see some examples. Teacher's aide, social work and Human Services paraprofessional, academic composition skills, Spanish language for heritage speakers. So we're getting a variety of different certificate programs just by querying that award type. 

It looks like we have a little over 1,400 records for arts and design and we have a little over 300 records for community and social service. So again, this is where you can start to work with those students in helping them understand the occupational cluster that they might be interested. They know they like arts and humanities. That's their thing. They're not into math and science. They can do it, but they're not super excited about it. They want to do something in arts and humanities here's when you can start to talk to them about their purpose, what they want to do. 

And you can get those median wages right up here. So you can talk to them about how much they're going to earn, where that pathway is going to take them, and what their opportunities are going to be. OK? OK, excellent. 

OK, and then as we move down, we have one more section of the dashboard, which is the skills builder courses. So again, here, this is simply-- up here is where we were getting our formal records for primary programs that are being offered in the sector. We have our continuum into community college. And then down here is where it's going to show all of those skills builders programs, so not necessarily those occupational credentialed programs, which is the third level. It's the second level of the skills building. 

So we can see here-- I'll just show you, briefly-- oh, I don't want to take your time, so I'm going to leave it at that. [LAUGHS] 

All right, so again, I'm going to stop sharing this for a moment so I can see everybody's smiling face here. OK. And thank you, Kelly. I appreciate seeing your smiling face in the digital world. I need to know-- even if you're putting food in your mouth right now, that's totally cool. I just want to make sure this is resonating with everybody. So any questions before I move on? Does that make sense how to use the dashboard, those four major steps? Good. Thank you, CJ. Thumbs up. Give me a thumbs up. If you guys are getting it. Does it make sense? 

You query by sector by region. All right, cool. Then you're going to query by entry-level education. You're going to start with the three adult school ones-- the postsecondary nondegree, the no formal, and the high school. Excellent. Thanks for the thumbs up. And then you can always toggle between the some college and the associate degrees to better understand the actual trajectory of that pathway in those occupations. 

And then steps 3 and 4, we're going to scroll down, we're going to look at those adult ed programs in the region, we're going to make sure that we're not duplicating, we're going to make sure that we're filling a gap, and we're going to make sure that we're leveraging anything that's existing, and then we're going to slide right over to those-- and we're going look at the skills builders too, that bottom little chart-- and then we're going to slide right over to the community college programs and we're going to make sure that we start to understand those occupational clusters and those programs that the students can transition into. OK, cool. Thank you, Rachel. I see the yes in there. All right. 

OK, with that, I will continue the lecture. Just a couple of more things that we're going to show you here. So get back into our PowerPoint. 

So now that we've gone through our pathway steps-- so we had the five steps for building a pathway. So I'm just going to go back really fast, identify our target pop, identify our pathway program. That's where we're going to use this dashboard tool. We're going to use the fact sheets to identify the target pops. We're going to use the dashboard to identify our pathway programs. 

Then, internally, we're going to look for accelerated learning strategies. We're going to identify our pathway system partners, and then we're going to identify our tangible systems changes to address those equity gaps. When we go back in to identifying our pathways, we're going to use this cool tool, query by-- walk through steps 1 through 4. And now step 5-- step 5, well, how on earth do we actually talk to students about this stuff? 

So we here at WestEd have developed what we call opportunity maps. And Ms. Bollela was deeply engaged with this. Earlier, you saw a little link and a little hint. You're going to see-- this is an example of our newly formatted opportunity that include adult education. Our previous iteration of these opportunity maps do not include adult education offerings. We hadn't curated all of those offerings yet. 

So it starts with community college, but it has the same information. So we're going to go deeper into that at the next session. I don't want to take up too much of your time right now, but we're going to talk about this idea of creating that transparency for the career pathways. So we're going to sequence the learning from ABE/HSC/GED into stackable career education courses that offer generalizable work readiness, so the work prep, occupational skills building, or industry credentials. 

Those are the three-- I just call them slightly different names, but those are the three majors the way Allie classified them in this dashboard. And as you can see this is an example of how you can visualize this for students. Visually, we, as humans, we dig on the visualization. 

So we see here, for the Bay region-- this is contextualized, so much of the same data. A lot of what we do here at WestEd is we go out of our way to take data points and reconfigure them for different uses for you guys as educators. So although this may be very similar information from the dashboard, for a student, and even for an administrator, it might be easier to understand the transitions along the career pathways by looking at a visual like this instead of looking at the dashboard. 

So you're going to see some duplicative information here. So we're just taking that info from the dashboard and putting it into a nice visual for students and administrators to work through when you're doing your career coaching-- and counselors. 

So we see our foundational skills here-- communication, basic math, Microsoft Office and Excel, research and presentation-giving and teamwork. Then we see, here, our technical skills-- animations, graphic design, language. Isn't that ringing a bell from what we just saw in the dashboard? So very, very similar. 

Mind you, this is not exhaustive, this little visual here. We just plucked some examples. So that there is something right that a student could look at to better understand pathways. 

So some of the foundational skills and technical skills might be missing from what you saw in the dashboard. Again, you can contextualize this to your needs. And then let's not forget, at the bottom here, we always include those transferable skills, the digital literacy right and the data literacy, bilingualism, numeracy, that basic math, and the interpersonal communication. 

I have looked at job postings nationwide, consistently, for the past year. And the skills that remain the same in rural and urban areas, irrespective of the industry sector, when you're building pathways is written and verbal communication, Microsoft Office, that MOS specialist certificate, basic Excel, and basic math. Those are the majors that you're always going to see. 

Contextualizing those skills to your local industry sectors increases the value of your students in the marketplace. When they walk in to get the entry-level team assembler job in the manufacturing plant and can actually speak to lean manufacturing and articulate the skills they have learned-- which may just be simple. Maybe it's just about lean manufacturing. Maybe it's just a little GD and T. But it's showing that employer that this person understands the sector and is motivated to be an efficient employee in that sector. 

So then, over here, we have our adult education units. We have our entry-level jobs. So the way you walk through this map is you have your adult ed, high school equivalency, ESL, workforce prep. And then you come down here and you see these lovely entry-level jobs. There are a couple that you guys will recall from the dashboard. So that's floral designers, craft artists-- again, not exhausted, just a sample. Gives you an understanding of what you're looking at for entry-level wages. And I do believe these are the bottom 10 percentile of wages when you start looking at all wages across those sectors and those fields. 

Then we get to adult ed noncredit job training programs. We have some medical interpreter stuff, we have associate teachers we have English-Spanish court interpreters-- remember, we just looked at that one-- professional interpreter. We come down here to the middle skills jobs, and we see that we're looking at a little over $31,000, $31,500, actually, for interpreters and translators in the area. Teaching assistants, we're looking at a little under 28 grand, and photographers, about 25. 

So from there, we move right over to the certificates. Now, these are community college certificates. You see the listing here-- acting, art, graphic design, et cetera. And it moves us right into those associate degree jobs-- sound engineer, graphic designer, audiovisual tech, with the comparable median wage in that sector. 

OK, so we're no longer at entry-level wages. Now we've moved up to median wages. And then we move up to the actual awards. Beyond industry credentials and certificates, here's our actual associate degrees and our bachelor's degrees in these fields. Both of these funnel right into "bachelor degree and beyond" jobs. So now we see our secondary school teachers at 50 grand, industrial designers at 47, interpreters at 43, graphic designers at 37. 

So this is really the final step with our pathway design. We want to make sure that we're translating all this research that we've done and all this lovely work in designing these career pathways and ensuring that our career pathway system is addressing barriers for our students. And then we have to translate it. We have to make it a visual. We have to make sure that our students are understanding what's happening. 

And then let's move on. So these opportunity maps, as I mentioned, are something that we've been working on in WestEd. Again, in the next and last session, professional development session that we will be hosting this year on June 28th, we will be diving a little more into our dashboard in a couple of different regions and industry sectors slash fields of study like this arts and humanities, meta-major pathways, et cetera. And I'm going to be showing you-- I'm going to go to our actual website and I'm going to show you these opportunity maps so that you can better apply those opportunity maps. 

But here, again, we just wanted to close out with a discussion on how are we ensuring equity and career pathway programs and systems. So just to be a little reiterative to some earlier concepts that I mentioned, we want to make sure that our pathway programs demonstrate an ROI for students so that our ROI is going to improve persistence, completion, and transition rates. And that's why you'll always hear me, my big push is those industry credentials in IET and IECL programs, either a nationally-recognized industry credential or a locally-derived industry credential. 

We have an example here, in the last region that I was working, where we actually created an IELCE program for agriculture supervisors. So we had a forum of commercial and small farms that all needed supervisor training. It started as a contract education, which as most of you in adult ed who are sitting in community colleges know, you're probably sitting in economic and workforce development, which also hosts contract training. So it started as a contract training. 

As I walked in the door, I quickly understood that, hey, wait a minute, this is an adult ed program actually. We are simply contextualizing basic skills learning to ag supervisory training, but we're including basic math through measurements and percentages of fertilizer and pesticides. We're using reading comprehension on the regular and doing some writing for SOPs. 

And to top it all off, at the end of that first session where we just trialed it as a contract ed-- or, I'm sorry, trialed it, originally, as just an adult ed program with some skills-building competencies, everybody in the program wanted English-language learning. These were all English-language learners. 

So what happened the next year? We transitioned it to an IELCE program and we added a second layer. So now we had a supervisor academy 1, we had a supervisor Academy 2. They were both integrating English-language learning as well as skills-building in agriculture. 

So that is an ROI. We want to make sure that there's an ROI for our students. Again, this is going to lead to improved outcomes for them, better persistence, completion, and transition rates. Additionally, that work-based learning, if you can get your students on site on a plant tour, if you can get guest speakers in, if you can partner up with maybe some of these more advanced digital 3D modeling-- that's actually kind of open source now-- the more work-based learning that you can add to your programming, that's going to increase the connectivity to employment. 

You want to make sure that when your students walk in to get a job, that that employer knows your adult school. There's no better connectivity that you can give that student to upward mobility than ensuring that you have a solid relationship and a meaningful relationship with that employer base so that when those students walk in the door for interviews, that employer goes, I know that adult school, and I know what they're teaching, and I know this program, and I bet you've learned a lot in that program, and I like you. 

And furthermore, this map in particular, we want to make sure students are exposed. I mentioned this earlier. One of the biggest barriers for students of historically marginalized communities-- those are our American Indian and Native Alaskan communities, our Hispanic and Latino communities, our Black and African-American communities, our Asian Pacific Islander communities-- the biggest barrier for these communities, in addition to persistent poverty, is the lack of exposure. 

Students simply-- even adult students simply go in there and build skills in areas that they know. A map like this can help them understand and become exposed to this entire career trajectory that will allow them movement along that career ladder, that will promote economic mobility, that will start to remove those barriers of the lack of exposure. 

And so now that adult learner knows, I want to do that. That actually gives me purpose. I can earn a good living. I can support my family, and that's a meaningful job for me. They may not have known it unless you tell them. It all starts with you. You guys know that. It really does start with you. 

Another interesting model that, in changing, I just wanted to add one more note on systems changes, is career family advising. Depending on the culture of your students, family advising may be exceedingly beneficial. I was just working with a tribal college that has instituted career family orientations because Native culture is-- extremely, first of all, you're in rural areas. It's hard to get to school and you have other familial obligations. 

And so engaging the family in that orientation really added to the persistence of students. It improved student outcomes because the family was there supporting the student, making sure they got to school every day. It wasn't a matter of grandma's saying, no, that's not important. I need you to help me do this. They see the importance of it. So instituting that family advising, depending on what works for your students and their culture, is also a really interesting approach. 

All right. And I'm going to stop there. I'm going to look at the chat here. I see Allie's putting in some information regarding the dashboard if you do have updated information. 

So I'm going to take this opportunity to go back. That was the last slide for all of our stuff. And I'm going to go back to this slide right here because I know that this is where the questions are going to go. 

Remember, per Allie's comment in the chat box, schools may not be showing up if we don't have updated information or if we were unable to find your information through secondary data sources. That means web searches. So if your school is not showing up, please, please do email Allie. And, if possible, Allie actually already has a spreadsheet that she'll send you and it's going to ask you for all this information. So it's not just a matter of getting your school in there, it's a matter of actually itemizing each one of these little check marks so that we can get a comprehensive accounting of all of your information into this dashboard. 

I know it's kind of a pain. I know everybody has other work to do. But think about it this way once you do it once, then you're accustomed to it and you're not going to have to do it again. You're going to have this wonderful resource. 

And thank you, Blaire. Blaire just popped in there that the Excel sheets are typically populated with data that we've already gathered from the secondary data source. So sometimes you just need to review and update. But again, please do email Allie. She'll send back out to you the spreadsheet. 

And just know that you're going to need this information when you fill in that spreadsheet. And like I said, it'll be a little cumbersome at first, but I promise you it's going to pay off in the end. The ROI is really going to come back around for you in the end because you're going to be included in this dashboard. It's going to help you with your programmatic design for decades to come, for sure. 

And we're thinking, maybe, probably once every year or two, doing an update. We were talking about annual updates. These are going to be the people that you're going to be talking to for annual updates for these dashboards. So if you do come up with something new, even if it's midterm, just go ahead and send us an email and we'll make sure to update the dashboard for you. OK? 

So with that, I'm going to stop sharing and see if we have any other questions. And I welcome both Allie and Blaire to pop back in if you'd like. 

Any questions? Any comments? Is this helpful? Was this worth your time? Would you have rather been watching the January 6 committee during lunch? I don't know. Was this worth your time? 

BLAIRE TOSO: Well, I'll ask a little bit of a different question. I'm curious if anybody else has developed pathways using this kind of data, and if they want to share their experience of having done that, or if they can foresee using this data to identify gaps in educational programming, finding employment sectors that are seeing a lot of growth, but not-- and you don't have any educational programs in that area. I see CJ. Thank you. 

AUDIENCE: There we go. Yeah, so I help with our kind of talent ed grant. So I'm at a community college. So we used a lot of MZ public labor market information, doing a lot more geospatial-informed mapping just because it's a little bit more segmented. I completely understand why this is formatted at a state level. But those have been very helpful ways for us to not only get a better idea of where we should be going but helped us with better conversations with employers in the region. 

So this is definitely-- I think the tool's amazing. Mid-conversation, when you guys were posting, I already messaged my talent ed person, saying, check this out. We'll follow up shortly afterwards. So this is a great tool. 

ALEXANDRIA WRIGHT: Excellent. Thanks for the feedback. Right on. Anybody else? Kelly, yeah. 

AUDIENCE: OK, I'm asking a question on behalf of others. So just to be clear, I probably should know this, but for San Diego Community College District and the regional repository, is that where this information is populated from? 

ALLIE BOLLELA: Yes. 

AUDIENCE: So if we have some missing data in our repository, which that's a summer project for us, so there are certain aspects of that data that is not in our repository yet. So that would be missing data from this. 

ALLIE BOLLELA: Yes. That's correct. We got it from the repository, but we can update it after your summer project is done. 

AUDIENCE: OK. Thank you. 

ALEXANDRIA WRIGHT: Excellent. And just as a reminder, we have a couple more webinars coming up this month. And the last one on June 28, we're going to go ahead and use this dashboard again, but we're going to dive into those opportunity maps as a nice supplement to your pathway planning. 

So we'll be going through the same steps of the pathway planning, we'll be going through the dashboard, but we're going to actually do two different pathways in two different regions so that we can kind of check it out, play around a little more with it, you can see it. 

And again, I do encourage you to attend if you're interested in these types of tools for pathway planning because those opportunity maps are actually a really, really good resource to start with. Because once you see it, it'll make more sense. Once you see it in the opportunity map, when you go into the dashboard, now you know what occupations-- oh, wait, that's familiar. Oh, yeah, that program, that's familiar. 

So it really helps you for those-- and again, we are here as educators. So most of you are not dealing in the hubbub of your microeconomics in your county by any means. So these types of occupations-- and jeez, it's such a complex area right now. There's all these emerging titles and names. So looking at that opportunity map can really help you guys, when you go into the dashboard, to go, ah, these are the occupations. This is the career pathway planning. For sure. 

AUDIENCE: I have one other kind of-- 

ALEXANDRIA WRIGHT: Please, Kelly, yeah. 

AUDIENCE: I think it's a little bit outside of this aspect of it, because this is all adult ed focused. But one of the target populations in our region for our adult ed programming with our partner is incoming young adult learners that have completed from the comprehensive high school system. 

And we've had these conversations with our member agency which I don't see anybody here, right now, from San Diego Unified. But like all high schools across the state, they have their own career technical education, CCTE programming. And so the transition for those graduates as young adult learners, especially from the high schools that we know have low college-going rates, that's one of our target populations to try to bring them into our programming. 

And I don't have an answer. I'm trying to figure out what the question is. But that's another aspect of adult learners that I think maybe some people have made some movement in that area. We still have some questions of, if there are students that already went through the whole high school CTE or CCTE pathway-- let's just say they went through a whole entire pathway in culinary-- they likely wouldn't probably want to start from the beginning of a CTE pathway on the noncredit side. 

But there is some correlation here, right? I mean, there is some correlation in terms of, if you're honing it down to that young adult learner population post high school graduation and how we're helping them do their career pathways into the noncredit CTE side. So I'm kind of putting it out there. I don't know exactly what the answer to the question is, but I just wanted to put that out there. 

BLAIRE TOSO: I do think that the opportunity maps are a great tool for something like that, because if you do them for more than one meta-major, then you can have a discussion of, OK, this is where you finished, that you can enter into that map at any point along the pathway, and having a conversation about what that looks like and then aligning the different sectors to different majors or the different jobs, which was cool about what Lexi did up front, when she was choosing the different industry areas, that they can map onto or transfer or be relevant to other studies. 

And you just need to figure out, when you're talking about those maps, where the skills match up, where the transferable skills can enter in. So looking at those and weaving them together and seeing where the transfer points and the alignment are. Even if it's a totally different pathway that we would think of or a different job, you can see how they show up in different arenas. And the visual is helpful when you're working with even young adult learners because it allows them to identify that pathway, the entry points, where they're entering-- because if you look at the map and you think you're just starting at the beginning, it's sort of like an, ugh, I've already done a bunch of education. 

It's where can I start on that pathway? What does it get me? Where have I already gone? And why might I want to make the progression? Which is one of the reasons we add the level of education, the number of credits, as well as, then, in the occupations, sort of an idea of what your salary is going to be, what you're going to make a year, because those all inform conversations that can then flourish into other arenas. 

ALEXANDRIA WRIGHT: I would add too, just to tail off of what Blaire said-- perfect, perfect explanation of broadening that-- culinary students, so we, as educators, always stick-- we go, oh, technical skills. OK, I need to know how to cut. I need temperature. I need to a little bit of chemistry. 

People who are going to move up the ranks in culinary are going to be managers. They're absolutely going to need Microsoft Office specialist skills. They're going to need to use Excel sheets for their inventory. They might even be using apps for their inventory like farm workers are now and supervisors. It's all on smartphones. 

So you used culinary as an example. That might mean that you have a large propensity of students, which makes sense. You know, you're young. You're like, oh, I'm going to go do culinary. If that's the student that isn't getting captured by the college system or university system and is just kind of out there, the not-in-school youth, WIOA not-in-school youth, 16 to 24, one of the things you could do is do a contextualized Microsoft Office skilled class, CTE class for culinary. 

Hey, we're going to make sure that how to communicate digitally, you know how to use Excel sheets, and we're going to do it contextualized to the food service sector. So think about it that way. That's again why, when Blaire mentioned those initial three sectors that I looked at, we have to broaden our minds. 

And it's not necessarily-- this is not what educators are trained to do. Nobody requires you to take a class in labor economics. I, myself, am a labor economist, so that's why I happen to know this kind of stuff. But it certainly is something that you can tap on these other skills and skills-building without being repetitive of the high school classes. 

Looks like we're going to be able to graciously give you back 10 minutes of your day. And Blaire, I'm going to hand it to you to close out. 

BLAIRE TOSO: Thank you. I don't have much more to say except any last questions, comments? If not, think about them and show up on the 28th. It'll be really interesting to dig into this further. Feel free to bring any tools or questions or data that you want to poke at as well. And Allie and Lexi are great off-the-cuff problem-solvers. So they'll also be able to help sort that out if you have questions regarding that. 

But otherwise, enjoy the rest of your day. I know that there are summits going on and things like that. So you're probably PDing/TAing as much as you want these days, but we really appreciate you coming and participating in this. And if you think of anything afterwards, our email are there. And so please feel free to contact and reach out. 

HOLLY CLARK: Yes. And CAEP TAP would like to thank our presenters today, Alexandria Wright and Allie Bollela. And thank you to the CAEP AP team, Blaire, Jessica, and Ayanna. We appreciate you. And of course, to the Chancellor's Office, Mayra and Lindsay, thank you so much for joining us. This was very informational. 

We hope to see you all on the 28th. I did drop all of the registration links and, of course, the evaluation link again. Please give us your feedback. That does help form our events going forward. Would anyone on the presentation team, Chancellor's Office, or anyone else like to close out and have anything else to say? 

MAYRA DIAZ: Thank you, everyone. And we hope to see you joining us at the next presentation that we have scheduled. So thank you all for joining today. 

HOLLY CLARK: Yes, thank you. OK, you guys. Enjoy the rest of your day and we'll see you at the next one. Bye bye.