BLAIRE TOSO: Hi. Thank you so much. Welcome, everyone. This is session two of "Creating Career Pathways and Using the Updated Adult Education to Workforce Dashboard Tool." We're delighted if you are rejoining us because we're going to be digging deeper into the work that we did on the 15th when session one ran. If not, and you're brand new, we will be doing a quick recap in the beginning and then diving right down into the work. So welcome, everyone. New or returning, we're delighted to have you. Next slide, please. 

So a big thank you. Our program year is closing out today. This is our last webinar of the '21-'22 program year. And so we'll start planning and delivering more in the Fall, but we just wanted to say thank you from the full CAEP team, who is all here on the webinar with you. 

And I'd like to give a particular shout out to Alexandria Wright, who will be doing the presentation today, and she'll introduce herself as she gets started. But a big thank you to all of you who have joined us prior to this or-- and supporting this year's professional development out of the WestEd AEP team. Next slide, please. 

So, and I'd like to also turn it over to some of the people who we would take a special moment to thank in supporting this work because they have both informed, guided, participated, and really carried the load with us for this year. And that's Mayra Diaz and Lindsay Williams from the Chancellor's Office. Mayra. 

MAYRA DIAZ: Thank you, Blaire. Good afternoon. I hope you're all enjoying the summer weather and gearing up for the holiday weekend. I would like to welcome and thank you for participating in today's webinar presentation. As Blaire mentioned, my name is Mayra Diaz, and I'm the CAEP Program Lead with the Chancellor's Office. And my colleague, Lindsay Williams, and I work collaboratively to support the statewide adult education program at the Chancellor's Office. So we are excited that you can join us this afternoon to learn from today's wonderful presenters, and I will turn it back over to them. Thank you. 

BLAIRE TOSO: So this is our agenda. And just because it's the last one, and just because it's summer and steamy outside, we are still going to dive in deep and give you lots of content and things to mull over over the next few weeks. So this is it. We're going to explore the steps to building the career pathways and career systems with equity and a review of the California Adult Education dashboard details. And so that will be that quick review. 

And then Lexi's really going to apply that knowledge by walking us through three different case studies of how we might want to apply and think about us to think about building career pathways with an eye to equity. Next slide, please. 

And really, our objectives are understanding and applying those different steps and the considerations for building career pathways and career systems with equity and really considering all the data that's available to you to build career pathways within your program or within your consortia that are built on data and really serve your students' needs. And then also, then understanding and applying that through these three different examples. Next slide. 

All right, at this point, I'm going to hand it over to Lexi, and she's going to take you through the content of this. Lexi. 

ALEXANDRIA WRIGHT: Great. Thank you so much, Blaire. I appreciate everybody being here today. And as Blaire said, we do have a bunch of content. But don't let that scare you. This is really about interactive engagement in so far as how we're going to use this dashboard. Please feel free to unmute as we start moving through the exercises. You'll see I started with a pretty easy one like health care that we can all relate to and then move into the more complex ones. So with that, I'm going to share my deck with you. All right. 

OK, So we'll start with a quick review of-- oops, my apologies. I'm going to stop sharing really fast. I had it on the wrong slide. Let's get that ready for you guys again. There we go. OK. My apologies. All right. Let's do this again. 

All right, pathway planning. So again, a quick review of what we did last time with those of you who were here with us last time. We had a couple of steps and a couple of ideas to keep in mind when we talk about building or enhancing career pathways with equity. What kind of information do we need, as you've recognized by now WestEd and our little our little team here in post-secondary and workforce development, really focuses on the application of data and data-informed practice to address multiple issues and multiple objectives when it comes to adult education? 

So what we're really trying to answer is, given your local context wherever you are, which career pathways and which enhancement strategies to accelerate movement along those career pathways offer the best opportunities to address the identified equity gaps for improved employment outcomes in your school? So we always want to look at local economic and labor-market information, right? That provides us information on high-demand jobs that lead to a living wage. 

And notice, in a lot of what we do here in all of our dashboards, we're including your local living wage so that you can best understand what's going on. So it's not just those what's the largest quantity of jobs out there and available for those who don't have a bachelor's degree, but more so what are the specialized skills jobs that are paying the most for those without a bachelor's or associate degrees, meaning which one of those jobs pay livable wages, right? 

Which industries are hiring? And what are those career paths that are going to result in economic mobility in their local economy? We know that really irrespective of somebody's degree or award or major, unless it's an industry credential or specialized skill, that they end up working any job in their local community. So we need to best understand what's going on in our local economy. 

Then we always have our real-time labor-market information. That's our job-posting information that talks a lot about skills. And as we get into this dashboard, you'll hear why we're so concerned with skills. It is absolutely one of the categories that we classify adult education in in so far as those skills-builders courses. And it also tells us about the frequency of job postings per occupation. So it gives us a real nice feel about demand. 

And then finally, we always want to be mindful of all of our credentials from adult education to community college and university-- those stackable lattice programs that need to be in short duration. They need to have labor market value within and of themselves. I'm going to talk a little bit more about this once we get into the dashboard. 

And they should be part of a structured pathway that's non repetitive, meaning, if you're partnering with your local community college, if your adult school is hosted by your local community college, that students aren't repeating this class work and these competencies in, say, credit bearing when they've already taken it in non-credit. OK? 

So we have some steps kind of laid out for steps to pathway planning. And you'll notice in your chat box, Ayana's going to be placing in there some of these links for you guys to peruse just as I'm moving through them. So our first three steps, really, when it comes to pathway planning-- number one is our CAEP fact sheet. You've seen other webinars about this CAEP fact sheet. It's got a variety of sociodemographic and socioeconomic as well as institutional transition data in there for you. You'll see a little picture there in the right-hand side of this slide. 

So first of all, we want to identify our target populations. Then we want to identify our pathway program. And we start by understanding our target sectors. What's going on in our local economy, and what are those skills that are intertwined and high demand in that target sector? And then we can start to move to the actual job titles and better understand our occupational clusters and, furthermore, those valuable industry credentials that create greater earning potential in value for the student in the labor market. 

So again, Ayana is probably placing both of those links in there, and we'll try to repeat those as we go through the lecture in case somebody missed them. So once we identify our target population, then we identify our pathway program. Then we need to start looking at strategies for accelerated learning. And a lot of these are going to sound familiar to you, especially IET, right? 

So I already mentioned stacked and latticed credentials that lead to high-quality jobs and align with that movement up a pathway where people can actually move up and up and up the career ladder. Competency-based education, such as pre-apprenticeship courses. Some of you may already be running those or skills-builder courses, as I mentioned earlier. It's a particular classification of courses that we have. IET or IELCE program-- excellent, excellent model for accelerated learning. 

And then we also have some things like improved and personalized student-support services. For example, if you're serving American-Indian communities, your family is very engaged in the entire educational process and the learning process. And it actually improves student outcomes when you engage that family in initial orientation and advising-- so stuff like that. And then another one I thought I'd throw it in there-- online and distance learning, of course, for that rapid kind of feedback. 

After these first three steps, then we move on to the last two. Oh, and you know this. I'm sure everybody on this call knows your workforce system partners, but I thought I'd put in here a couple more that maybe are kind of beyond your scope right now or something that you might be interested in. 

Not just your workforce development board, but make sure that we're partnering with that AJCC because that's the entity that's actually placing students-- labor unions, industry associations, and economic development collaboratives are an excellent way to kill multiple birds with the same stone. You get all your employers in the room. You can ask them the questions. You can validate those industry credentials that you're looking to incorporate or those skills that you're looking to incorporate into ABE programming. 

Your community-based organizations can help you connect with your target populations. And then, of course, entrepreneurial assistance-- that's that complementary, supplementary skill set that most everybody in the United States needs in the modern era at some point or another. Probably at least 80% of your students are going to be somewhat in the gig economy. 

And then finally, this one-- adult educators have always been aware of systems changes. But this is now finally at the forefront of all education and workforce development. And this is where we're talking about really tangible pathway-systems changes-- changes to program designs, like we talked about earlier-- those accelerated learning strategies. Policy changes, new workforce system and employer partnerships, new approaches to employer engagement. 

We have a CTE fact sheet. I'm not sure if we were able to address that in any of our webinars, but I'm sure we'll be having another one coming up. Jessica Keach on this great adult ed team is the grounding for those awesome CTE fact sheets. And we're looking at developing one just for adult education. New ways of supporting students and new methods of instructional delivery. 

All right, so let's get into this dashboard and get into some of the exercises here. So we wanted to provide-- oh, I'm going to pause really fast and just make sure I don't have any other questions. All right, good. Everybody's just introducing themselves. Excellent. So we want to remind everyone that this dashboard is built off of your information, OK? So the first time the dashboard was built was using secondary information. 

So basically, we were scouring. We were conducting an environmental scan. You heard Ally Bollel at the last session talk about her methodology for that. So we were looking for any types of classes that were already listed online. Then, this last Spring, we actually conducted a primary data-gathering exercise where many of you-- we went through your consortium directors, and we asked for many of the adult schools-- most all of you guys-- to give us an update. What's going on in your programming? What do you have? Can you please help classify it for us? 

So we classified all adult education programming into three different types. We have our workforce prep. So that's your generic work readiness, right? It crosses all industry sectors and all occupational clusters. So work readiness, digital literacy, OSHA-- stuff like that. Then we have our occupational skills-builder courses. These are ones that start to get the student more specialized, starts to increase their value in the labor market, and puts them on that career trajectory. But it's not so isolated. It's not super-duper highly specialized that the student has to stay in that their whole life. So I'm talking about things like SolidWorks and computer-aided drafting that can be used across manufacturing. It can be used in construction sites. So a specialized skill but not hyper-specialized industry sectors. Welding is another one of those, right? Welding can be used across multiple industry sectors. 

And then finally, we have our very hyper-specialized occupational credential programming. These are your programs that are really closely correlated or directly correlated to occupational opportunities, such as medical assistants, CNA-- usually all those health care-- those health care credentials because those are immediately and directly tied to occupations. So keep that in mind. As you are building out your classwork, as you're thinking about entry-- maybe you need to update your programming in our dashboard-- keep in mind these three different categories. 

So this is an example of the worksheet that you would have received. If you haven't received it, don't worry. I'm going to talk about that in the next slide, how you can get updated information in there. So you can see here some examples. Tier 3 is that super-specialized, hyper-specialized occupational training. You have your CNA, your med assistant, et cetera. Home health aide's another one-- caregiving and home health aide. 

And then you see your tier 2, right, which are just the occupational skills builder, not that generic work readiness, that workforce prep, right? So these are three categories. This is something, again, that if you need to update your coursework in the dashboard-- so you have a nice comprehensive dashboard to do some analysis with-- you're going to be filling something like this out. 

And then finally, again, as we get into the dashboard, and you start moving around in it and pressing all those buttons, you might notice that your programming is not up to date. While we were funded to update this during the CAEP project, we are going to do our best to maintain an updated dashboard. Please do email either Dr. Toso at btoso@wested.org or Ally over at abollel@wested.org. 

And if you can, just let them know, hey, not all our program is in there. If you want to go ahead and list some stuff out, these are the elements that we're going to need. What's your school? What's the program title? Is there an affiliated industry credential? Is it an IET IEL/CE designation? Is it a pre-apprenticeship? And what's the SOC associated with that program or industry sector? Your standard occupational classification. And then which type of career program is it, of course, right? Is it that generic workforce prep? Is it an occupational skills builder? Or is it hyper-specialized occupational credential program? OK? 

All right, and with that, let's get into one more thing. So we're going to use a couple of tools we're not just going to use the dashboard. We're actually going to use an open-source tool that we've created here at WestEd, again, our little post-secondary and workforce-development team. It's called Opportunity Maps. And I believe Ayana is going to stick a link right into the chat box where you can access this. 

I'm going to go through it too. So if you click on the link and you're like, oh, my gosh, where do I go? Just hold on one second. I'm going to be there shortly. But essentially, these Opportunity Maps are a tool to help administrators and faculty better understand career trajectories and emerging occupations and skills demands, right? It's a really complex time that we're in right now. There's emerging occupations. There's emerging skills. There's the demand for interdisciplinary skills, even though there's also concurrently in demand for hyper specialization. 

So it's really an interesting time in our economy that really isn't like any other decade we've experienced. Last century, we pretty much knew the jobs in construction and manufacturing and health care. Again, now things have started to emerge. Some of you may have heard about a new health care occupation. 

One would think that health care is pretty static because it's so highly regulated, but the state of California has actually put out money-- and you guys may have participated in it, especially those of you who are hosted by community colleges-- called a navigator. It's kind of like a social systems navigator. So somebody who's specialty trained that can be trained in adult education to help patients navigate the health care system. So something like that. 

So anyway, so these are a particular map. This is a cool little design, right? You're not going to see the same designs when we go to work on these in the rest of this webinar series because this is a brand new design that came out. We put together the original Opportunity Maps to include community colleges into university programming and jobs. As you can see here, it's very explicit. We're talking about skills on the left-- foundational skills and technical skills. 

Then we're talking here about adult ed. Then we get into our community college certificates and associates, and then, finally, into the bachelor's programs. And you can see the correlating jobs as well as wages beneath, right? So these are the jobs that require a certain educational attainment with their correlating wages. The maps that we're going to be looking at today do not include adult education. Unfortunately, we were just not funded to do that. 

However, if, by the end of this webinar, you go, oh, my gosh, we need these maps-- again, they're also helpful for students. They can help inform students about their pathways, but they can also help, again, internally with the development and inquisition into career pathways-- always reach out to us. We would be happy to produce these for you. And we can discuss more details later. 

All right, so let's get into health care. OK, exercise 1. I chose health care because, again, it's the most common of all industry credentials that we see in adult education. We typically see something like a CNA or a home health aide or caregiver, if you're not in the state of California, right? So I put together-- again, here's the bit.ly link. If you scroll in your chat, you're probably going to see that again. 

And I put together a few steps for us to follow. So I'm going to go through the steps, and then I'm going to switch screens. And we're going to go over to the dashboard, and we're going to follow the steps in the dashboard. And we're kind of going to go back and forth, right? And you can see here, right on the right-hand side, I put, hey, a big hint. If you take a look at your Opportunity Map first, it's easier for you to understand how to verify the occupations that you're going to be targeting. 

So basically, your brain is going to see that Opportunity Map and some occupations-- per skill level, per award credential level. And then when you go into use the dashboard, you're going to register some familiarity. So you're going to become more and more familiar with what's going on in that sector. 

So the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to query by sector and regions, you're going to choose the industry, and then you're going to choose the region. And then you're going to query by entry level education. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to click on Post-Secondary Non-Degree Award, and we're going to click on High School Diploma because that's most reflective of the educational attainment that one's going to achieve at adult schools. 

Another quick note-- if you begin with the two entry level education categories that align with the adult ed awards, but then you toggle to an associate degree or bachelor's, the dashboard will start to populate more jobs. And it will become clearer and clearer how to build out those pathways. OK? 

And then steps 3 and 4-- we're going to go down to the bottom of the dashboard, and we're going to actually query by award type. Right so we're going to look at the adult ed educational offerings that come up once we query by sector and region and that third one of educational attainment level. So we, basically, have three things we're querying in the first two steps. 

And now we're going to look at what the dashboard spit out in terms of local educational programming. We want to ensure that we're identifying opportunities to either build new pathways, leveraging existing pathways, and, certainly, to reduce duplication efforts if we see a lot of that similar programming going on in proximity to one's adult school. 

And then finally, we're going to query by closest college and award type. You can choose your closest college if you feel like it, if that's super important to you, and you think that your students are definitely going to go to a certain college. That's great. If not, you can leave it open, and it'll keep all the colleges in your macro region listed on there. 

But then you also want to choose award type. So you want to choose Certificate of Achievement, No Award, Noncredit Program, right? And again, that will help you to start understand what the available opportunities and options are to build out that latticed pathway program. And then finally, we want to look at the community college programs by occupational cluster because we can start to identify those stackable career pathways again. 

And like here, Healthcare Practitioners and Technicians, Healthcare Support Occupations-- this will help students understand the actual job titles. And you'll see more differentiation when we get into the other exercises in the pathways. And then we have one final step here. And this is where we bring in the Opportunity Map, so this is what those Opportunity Maps will look like once we get into this tool. 

But we want to make sure that we're sequencing the learning from ABE, HSE, GED into stackable career education courses that offer generalizable work readiness, occupational skills building, or industry credentials that pay livable wages-- so as long as there's an opportunity to move up that ladder, OK? 

All right, I'm going to check the chat box. Please raise your hand if you have any questions right now. All right, cool. Thank you, Blaire, for putting in some complimentary notes there and supplementary information. And thank you, Ayana, for posting that again. I'm going to stop sharing, and we're going to get into the dashboard right now. 

Oh, AEB stands for Adult Basic Education. So a lot of what we lecture on is once you understand your local economy, you can start to contextualize the reading, comprehension, the writing, and the mathematics that is included in adult basic education to your local economy. So for example-- and this is where the skills come in. 

This is where all of the research on what are the high-demand skills in that industry sector or occupational cluster because we can start to better understand, hey, so if we have a ton of manufacturing around us, we could actually include an exercise in our activities for reading and writing that includes standard operating procedures that helps interpretation because that's one thing I know all employers are looking for-- can the person follow SOPs? So that's why we talk about understanding one's local economic context and being able to meld that into exercises in AEB. OK. 

So with that, let me get into our dashboard now. And I was on the fact sheets. Give me one moment. There we go. OK. All right, so here we are in our dashboard. And this is how it's going to pop up for everyone. So again, this is open sourced. We're going to try to update this on an annual basis. If you notice stuff is missing, please, please do email us this summer. This is a great time for us to get that information in there. 

So remember step 1 was the sector title, right? So the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to choose our sector. So the way this works out-- if you only wanted to choose one sector, you just-- to every box is going to be checked, and you just want to check the Only. So let's come down here, and let's look for health care practitioners. So I'm going to check only there. 

But I want more than just health care practitioners. Why? Because I know that, in the health care system that is constantly expanding in every single one of our counties, that there's actually more than just technology-based occupations. There's actually a lot of back office and administrative staff. So I'm going to want to check both health care practitioners and technologists, as well as health care support occupations. And I'm going to leave it at that 

And then I'm going to practice this for the San Diego region. So I'm going to come down here, and I'm going to click only for San Diego, OK? So as we can see, this board is updating. And so it's giving us-- let's see here-- everything queried under the sector title and the region. But I have yet to choose my entry level education. So we can start to see what's going on here. So let me look over here. And I want to uncheck some of this stuff. 

So I want to make sure that I'm unchecking graduate degrees. I want a post-secondary non-degree award. I want my high-school diploma or equivalent. I want to uncheck my doctoral box. I want to uncheck my bachelors. And I'm going to uncheck associate for now because I'm just interested in those occupations and the wages for programs that I know I can offer at my adult school. 

So here we'll see, in the San Diego region, based off of the MIT living-wage calculator, we have $23 is our living wage for the macro region, which I believe it's San Diego and Imperial counties. Now, because San Diego includes Imperial County, I would strongly encourage those of you who are located, who, if you know-- and we also have a quick guide to-- by the way, we have a quick guide to understanding where your macro region is and where your school is located. I think maybe Ayana or Blaire can probably put that link in the chat box as we continue with this lecture. 

So if you're confused-- you're like, what's a macro region? I don't know where my school is. We have a nice cross-reference sheet that you can identify where your macro region is. And again, for those of you who are located in a macro region in a specific area that's more rural than the larger regions-- for example, San Diego, Imperial Valley-- the cost of living is much higher in San Diego County than it is in imperial-- so you will, when we put a little link right here, go into the living wage calculator and look specifically at Imperial Valley because it's a little lower than 23 bucks. 

So that might be something contextual that you want. We always put the higher wage in there in each macro region. We try to average it out. We don't really want to average it out. I take that back. But we wanted to take what would be the most common. So again, if you're in a rural area for that macro region, always go to the living wage calculator yourself. 

OK, so I have my entry-level education. I have my sector, and I have my region. So now I can start looking down, and I can see, oh, look at all of these different occupations. And if I click this little arrow over, it's going to be giving me another page of occupations. And look at, we start to get into medical transcriptionist, right? Medical equipment preparers. And again, those are those cross-sectoral occupations that come out of the skills builder courses or even some of the less specialized occupational courses-- the occupational skills builder versus the occupational credential program. 

So as we go through this, we can see all these skills. And again, active learning, decision making, coordination, critical thinking-- these are all those exercises that we can include in just our adult basic education activities and exercises. And we can certainly start to contextualize them in health care. Shoot, filling out a admittance form for a hospital is in and of itself a reading comprehension exercise, right? 

So anything that you can get to contextualize that ABE program to start building it into one of those occupational skills builders is really interesting. And then we come down here. So let's go down, and let's remember our fourth and fifth-- third and fourth steps-- I'm sorry. So I already did our third step, which was the educational-- the entry-level education. But I want to come down here, and I start to see, OK, these are the health care support occupation trainings and the health care practitioner and technologist trainings. 

And I start to see them all listed by the school name. Sometimes, the hours of instruction wasn't available. Sometimes, it was. And you can see here we have 75 different entries. So you can kind of scroll through all of these entries to see what's going on. We have a variety of different programs that are popping up here that all deal with this sector. 

Now let's come over here to our community college awards. So the last thing that we can do is we can query by college and award type. So I'm in San Diego. These are all the community colleges that are serving the San Diego-Imperial Valley macro region. I'm just going to leave it at that for right now. But I'm going to come over here to award type, and I'm going to unclick some stuff. I'm going to unclick Transfer Degree. 

I'm going to unclick-- I'm going to unclick all of these, except for certificate of achievement and no award or non-credit program because I'm curious to see what's going on with just these kind of short-term industry credential programs that are, hopefully-- well, short-term programs, non-credit programs, that are, hopefully, tied to an industry credential so they retain value in and of themselves and, again, add value for the student in the labor market. 

And so I can start to see here, there's a lot of certificates of achievement. There's 79 different entries here. And if I keep going down the list, I'll probably keep popping up more and more sorts of achievement. We start to get into other colleges. So we start to see what all the offerings are. So I'm going to come back up here just to show us. I'm going to click a couple of other things. Say that I said, OK, now that I understand what the immediate and direct opportunities are for transitioning from adult school into a non-degree award that has value, I want to know what the next step in that career pathway will be. 

So I'm going to go ahead and check here AA degree or AS degree-- or AS for transfer. I do believe nursing science and health science is usually under AS, OK? And I'm just curious about that. You can always-- let's go ahead and separate them. Let's just do associates of science right now and see what pops up. Go ahead, Blaire. 

BLAIRE TOSO: Quickly, there's just a question from Janae. I think she was asking about how, with the work experience and checking them. And she wanted to know, should she leave the work experience search as both none and less than five years? 

ALEXANDRIA WRIGHT: That's a great question. And let's go back up and talk about that. So here, you can see a couple of different things now started popping up the associates. But let's go back up to that work experience. There's a reason why I left it blank. And that's because it's really based on your school. So we all know that work-based learning is the hot, hot, hot topic, right? So many of your programs, particularly if it's an IET program, you're going to want that work-based learning in there. 

So work-based learning can include anything from a paid internship to job shadowing to a plant tour, right? Just exposure. When we talk about building career pathways with equity, those are some of the things to keep in mind-- that students being able to articulate their actual skills, students being exposed to new careers and opportunities, those start to fill the gaps that are left by inadequate social capital when it comes to equity-- those equity conversations, right? 

So if you know that you are dedicated to work-based learning, and you have the capacity in your adult school, let's go ahead and uncheck the none, and let's just check less than five years. All right, so there we go. There's no jobs that require work experience. So if you're curious-- you're going, oh, well should I apply for more WIOA funds? Do we need more capacity? Do I need to get monies from elsewhere because I'm going to have to include some internships or job shadowing or plant tours or whatever it is? This is a great way to best understand that. 

Now, when we lift this up, let's see to associate degrees. Let's see if anything pops up. So nothing really changed here. So most everything is built in at this point. So if we change this, and we go only no work experience, that's when everything comes back up. So I hope that answered your question in a roundabout way. It's, basically, a way for you to explore what capacity is going to be needed for the career pathways that you want to focus on-- so to tell you whether or not that work experience is required. OK, excellent. 

OK, so with that, we kind of queried through everything. So I'm going to go back over to my Opportunity Map. So I'm going to-- actually, I take that back. Let's go over to our Opportunity Map. So right here, Ayana going to put into our chat box the link to our little team site here at WestEd. And it should take you directly to this page, Designing Metamajors to Reduce Equity Gaps. You're going to scroll down here. It gives you a lot of information on how to use these things. But we'll just start using them. 

And you're going to go all the way down to Explain the Relationship Between Education and Jobs. This, again, is the tool here. Because we're focusing on San Diego Imperial, I'm going to click on that. And again, this is open source. And I'm going to see all of the meta majors for San Diego Imperial macro region. We have a lot of metas and macros now in our vernacular, don't we? 

And I'm going to come down over here to Help. And if you click on that, it's going to pull this up for you. Now, remember, it doesn't have adult educators in there. However, if you would like these maps contextualized to your school, just contact us. Please contact Dr. Toso. You can probably do it for a small amount of funding. This happened to come from another project, so we thought this would be a helpful supplementary tool for you guys. 

So, again, here, we can see all the high-impact skills. We can see the technical skills. We can see exactly what's going to happen once that student gets that certificate and which jobs they'll be headed to. We know darn well that in adult school, you can train for CNAs and home health aides slash caregivers. And those will lead to occupations. They're not quite living-wage occupations, but they do start students on the pathway, right? 

So I want to give us something a little more detail because we kind of know health care. Health care is highly regulated. Industry credentials-- there's really no such thing because any program you implement in health care has got to have those regulatory requirements. What I really wanted to make sure that we learned from this, though, is that remember, you can have a health care pathway that doesn't end up as a CNA and a nurse. 

You can have a health care pathway that shoots a student through into medical assisting and then further into administrative and back office stacks-- medical recordkeeping, right? You can offer that at adult schools. You can offer transcription at adult schools. And then that can move them on into a pathway into a bachelor's for health care administration, then, ultimately, if they wanted, into that master's in public health. So just want to make sure that we do have-- keep that in mind that we have multiple. 

It's technicians, but it's also that administrative kind of understanding and critical thought and knowledge-- knowledge of your Microsoft Office Specialist. So that's Microsoft Office Specialist industry credential is something that you could offer through an IET program that would be an occupational skills builder course that can cross over several sectors, including health care. 

So I'm going to stop for just a moment. I'm going to read-- Nancy had a good chat in here. What are the barriers to inclusion that the SOCRC has been experienced, particularly in health care, is the cost of participation. Absolutely. For example, vaccination. Absolutely. Any suggestions? Yes. Let's see. Health is not-- oh, the LA Health one. We'll have to look into that, Mr Bishop. Sorry about that-- or Ms. Bishop. I'm sorry. CJ-- whichever one you are, we'll have to look into the health care one for Los Angeles territory. 

Insofar as helping, I've actually, myself-- so I didn't give quite a full background of myself. I've run adult education programs and developed IT programs for community college hostings adult schools. And what we've done for the health care stuff is we actually were able to buddy up with Contract Ed because we were always conglomerated into same thing. So economic and workforce development divisions typically do host adult schools and buddy up to them. 

They were able to give us a little funding for the uniforms and the vaccinations, and then, I will also mention, through your consortium. This is something that you can posit for your consortium. All of the funding that comes out-- you know how we get a little extra every year, right? And everybody, depending on what your process is at your consortium level, perhaps you can put in for a little extra funding to subsidize the cost of that. To your point, students absolutely shouldn't be paying for this, right? That's part of filling that equity gap, right, Nancy? 

So finding the money to subsidize the cost of the uniforms and the vaccinations is absolutely critical. The California Community College Chancellor's Office also offers grants that can be used in coordination with pre-apprenticeships going down into adult schools. So don't forget, you guys all have a community college sitting on your consortium that could also potentially help subsidize these costs. I'm going to hand it over to Blaire for another comment here. 

BLAIRE TOSO: Yeah, thanks. It's a great question, and we're always sort of plugging away at finding places to actually support some of those costs that aren't necessarily considered when we talk about education-- all of those surrounding costs. But we have found that programs partner with employers even if they aren't necessarily guaranteeing a job, but they know that there are openings, and they are willing to invest in educational programs-- that they have been very helpful. Also, finding community partners that have an eye to the particular industry that you're looking at. 

So for example, manufacturing-- some of the associations will help out with those costs. Or there will be sort of collaborations among organizations that don't necessarily include adult education. For some reason, we aren't always at the table. But then beginning to explore those collaborations that are really looking at intentionally building pathways and opening up opportunities and creating talent pipelines, that they can also be really excellent partners because they have more funding that doesn't have as many constraints as you were talking about. 

So Nancy, as you said, yes, I think that there are always these constraints around funding. Although I'd check in on your Title II, your AFLA funds, because sometimes, those can be expended in different ways separately from CAEP. But that would also be something that you all might want to have a conversation with your leadership, Mayra, to sort of put you forward. Also, CDE has Carol and Zachary. They also have a different look at how CAEP funds should be expended. So maybe also talking with your leadership and explaining how these things impact your enrollment in the success of learners. 

ALEXANDRIA WRIGHT: Thank you, Blaire. And that's such a great conversation to have because what is that reflective of? Step 5 of Pathway Planning. This is exactly the conversation about identifying tangible pathway system changes to address equity gaps. So Blaire mentioned a couple there. Another one could be in partnership with your workforce development board and AGCC. 

But another one for those schools, again-- and I know San Diego is full of them-- a lot of them, actually, throughout the state of California-- for those adult education programs that are located within your community college that are being hosted by a community college, a systems change to address equity would be to have that adult ed program be able to leverage any dollars and revenue coming out of contract education, right? 

Because, again, economic and workforce development encompass contract ed, non-credit, and adult education. That's really, technically, what's housed in economic and workforce development. That is a substantial system change to address an equity gap, to provide that kind of funding. So it's a perfect example of that. OK, great. I'm going to move on then here. All right. 

So let's look at construction, manufacturing, and engineering pathways. I know this is three big sectors, and people might be going, what do you mean you're going to look at all three of these? But again, in the modern era, we have to look at skills and intersectoral skills in order to build value in the student and the labor market. 

So versus what we did in health care, I'm going to do something slightly different here. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to look at my Opportunity Map. So for those of you-- whatever schools you're in, you have that little link to your Opportunity Maps. We pulled up-- I pulled up here-- again, we're looking at San Diego Imperial area. I looked at engineering, construction, transportation, and manufacturing. The reason why they're, again, cobbled together is because they're very, very similar foundational skill set. 

It takes a while to get hyper specialized. So we see our common skills here-- communications. You're always going to see communications, and you're always going to see Microsoft Excel. I've been doing this research across the country. Microsoft Office Specialist exams, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Excel-- these are cross-sectoral in demand. You may not think about it, but the reality is manufacturing plants are using Excel for inventory-- their ERP and MRP systems, the resource management systems. They're always using something that's kind of Excel based. So making sure that students have that digital literacy and that they can articulate that is helping to fill that equity gap. 

So we have our certificates here. We have our middle skills jobs in the areas that match up those certificate skills with the approximate median wage. We did look at-- I take that back. Median wages for the associate degree jobs and the bachelor degree-- jobs we did look at the bottom, I believe, quintile of wages. So it's kind of a starting salary, if that makes sense. Instead of looking at the median or the average, we looked at what that bottom quintile is going to be paying. And that's probably a good approximation for that entry-level starting salary. 

So we can see here we have a lot of different stuff-- avionics tech, industrial engineering tech, civil engineering tech, electrical engineering tech, architectural drafters-- all that good stuff for associate-degree jobs. And look at here-- CNC machine-- CNC programmer, right? And this also-- I know because I've been working in this field for so many darn years and doing industry credentials for so many years that it's not just the CNC programmer. 

It's the CNC operator that also pays livable wages that you can get straight out of adult school. I've seen adult schools offer solid works, actually, as an IET or career education program as well, which gets you right into some of these really good, good-paying middle-skills jobs. 

So I'm going to go through this stuff again, and then we're going to go through the dashboard. Step number one-- query by sector then region. So we're going to for our sector, and then we're going to look for our region. Step number two-- we're going to look for our entry-level education. So we already looked at our Opportunity Map, so we're familiar with the occupations that we're going to see. We're going to query our two entry-level education categories and then maybe toggle to best understand what's going to go on after they complete these. 

Then we're going to look at our adults ed regional program offerings, make sure that we're filling a gap-- we're not duplicating anything-- and make sure that we're leveraging something. And then step four-- oh, sorry, here. That should be a four. We're going to query by closest college and award type. Again, you can choose your college, or you can just choose the award type. And that, again, we'll help us understand how to build those stackables. We're going to look at the community college programs by occupational cluster, right? 

And so this is where I was talking about, when we start to speak to students-- because let's be honest, right? We're educators. We're not in economic development. We're not industry professionals. So this may be kind of foreign. Our specialty is reading, writing, and arithmetic. We're being asked in the modern era to become far more contextualized. So again, that's the purpose of this tool, the purpose of the dashboard, the purpose of the opportunity maps, is to help you as the educator really develop a speciality in helping to contextualize your curriculum and adult literacy to your local economic context. 

That further creates better outcomes and transitions for your students. So here we see architecture and engineering occupation, installation, maintenance, and repair occupations, production occupations, and then construction and extraction occupations. So those are all separate little clusters that our students may not even be aware of. And then finally, we want to make sure that our sequencing in ABE, HSE, GED or those IET ICLE programs are moving into stackable career education courses. 

So stop sharing, and we're going go back over to that dashboard. OK. And let's come back over here to our-- oops. Let's go right over to that dashboard. OK, there we are. OK, so let's start again. So I just looked at health care. Let's start this again. And at this point, you guys, feel free to chat or just unmute yourself. We can search anything you want. Mess around with it. This is your chance to ask questions. 

So let's come back up here. We were looking at manufacturing, construction, and engineering. And again, one of the reasons why some of you may go, ugh, we always have our economic developers and our workforce boards focus on this manufacturing stuff. And really, the team assemblers that are the entry-level jobs, they just don't pay livable wages, gosh darn it. Well, the reason why they're focusing on this-- and you are absolutely correct. In most instances, team assemblers do not pay a living wage, especially if you're an urban area. 

If you're in more of a rural area, maybe you're going to get closer to it and add in the benefits. Remember, the federal government is defining our high-quality jobs as livable wage as well as full benefits with a career trajectory. But the reason why your local community typically focuses on it-- your workforce board, your economic development collaborative-- is because construction and manufacturing and engineering, they create a lot more worth than services and a lot more value. 

And in this country, in this capitalist society that we live in at the national level, we are gauging our economic health by our economic growth. And economic growth is, in turn, indicated by that lovely indicator that I'm sure all of you guys know about-- our Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. And what is GDP? GDP is the final value of all outputs, right? New output-- not used vehicles, not resales-- any new outputs. So it makes sense that manufacturing, construction-- that value is a lot greater than the service sector-- than educational services, health care services. So that's why you always get that emphasis on manufacturing in your local community. 

Additionally, though, I will say this-- that when you start looking into jobs in that area, you will see that there is a quick movement up. If you combine production- and construction-oriented training-- industry credentials at the adult education level-- with management and communications and leadership skills, that person is going to move quickly right up that ladder. So I'm going to click a couple of things here. 

So again, sector titles-- these are by our NAICS-- North American Industry Classification System. So I'm going to click quite a few things here. I'm actually going to do architecture and engineering. I'm going to do construction and extraction. I'm going to come down here, and I'm going to choose some other stuff. I'm going to choose installation, maintenance, and repair. And let's see if there's anything else. Oh, and I'm going to, of course, choose my production occupations, right? 

Now this is interesting. We all know that, especially since pandemic closures, transportation and warehousing has become super high demand, and they pair fairly decent wages. We're not quite sure about movement up the ladder yet, but there are a lot of job openings for first-line supervisors. 

But let's do this first. Let's keep transportation and material moving unchecked. Even though they probably have common skills, which we can see by that opportunity map-- remember, the opportunity map that we saw for San Diego Imperial listed construction, manufacturing, engineering, and transportation. So those common skills and those technical skills, those were all common throughout all of them. The frequency with which those skills are being posted in job postings is really, really high. 

So let's take a look right now. We see civil engineers-- oh, because we haven't queried anything yet. So let's come over here. We have four sectors then. We're going to stay with our San Diego region. Let's come over here to our entry-level education. We're going to uncheck bachelor's degree. We're going to uncheck associate's degree. And we're going to keep some college, post-secondary, non-degree award, no formal education, and a high school diploma in there, just to see-- just to check it out, right? 

We can see here we have about 19,000-- almost-- just under 20,000 annual openings, a median wage of 23 bucks. And we can see the change, right? So these are all the data points you're going to see. So this is a projected change between 2020 and 2025. So we can see that there's some growth going on. Heating, HVAC-- that's a great one for adults ed, leading into a pathway into a community college program and perhaps a partnership with a union, right? Your steelworkers union. 

You see here really good wages. You have a median wage at $29. You have a 6% projected growth. And you have about 288 annual openings a year in this. We see drywall and ceiling installers here too. We see operating engineers and other construction equipment operators. You can start to see the myriad of sub-occupational clusters within this sector. So essentially, your students, by providing educational programming, that covers the foundational skills. 

So for example, you could do NCCR. I've done that in adult education before. That's the National-- oh, gosh-- National Construction-- Center for Construction Education and Research. It's a nationally-recognized industry credentials. Many unions accept that, recognize that-- so your general laborers union, your construction union workers. So if you did something like that, that doesn't still mean that the student's just stuck in going and being a construction day laborer, right? 

They have all of these other potential pathways. They can move-- after completing NCCR basic training, they can move into maybe electrical technician training at their community college because those foundational skills are the same. They can move into installation, maintenance, and repair jobs. Industrial machine mechanics is still another very similar stuff, right? Diesel mechanics. So again here, we see all of our skills and we see this myriad of job opportunities for our students. 

So let's come up here. I'm just curious. Let's actually add-- I wanted to add transportation of material moving. Let's see if that adds any other jobs in this region. And sure enough, there you go-- packaging and filling operators. So low wage-- low average wage, less of a growth. But we're seeing some stuff. So again, it gives you an idea of what's happening. So let's move down here to steps 4 and 5-- I'm sorry, steps 3 and 4. 

So I'm going to leave it at all the adult schools. You can see production, occupations, construction, installation, architecture, transportation, and material moving. You can see what's going on with about 29 programs in production. It looks like-- let's see here-- we have-- let's look at a couple of these here. We have a lot of plumbing, pipe welding, which is fine, autobody refinishing, painter apprenticeships, textile, manufacturing, electronic test technician. That's huge right now. 

Don't forget everything having to do with automobiles in the 21st century is electronics. So if you do an automotive program, that's actually a pathway into electronic production, right? Electronic instrumentation, technician instrumentation. There's all sorts of intersectional skills going on in the 21st century that are really, really cool for students. 

And then if we move over here to community college awards, we had over here checked our associate degree. So let's go ahead and uncheck those degrees because, again, we want to see where our pathway is going to start for these students. And we see here we have automotive technology. We have surveying. That's a great one that can go across. So understanding surveying, you can start to understand land usage. So those skill sets that are going into that could conceivably lead into a government job as well. 

Wastewater treatment operations. Gosh, we are in a time, right, where water and wastewater operators are absolutely necessary. And a lot of the skills that you're learning in there, for example, overlap with things like photovoltaic system design, maintenance, and installation. I used to run an adult ed program over in Arizona, and we did four different levels of water and wastewater operator training. They're typically regulated by your state. 

So all you have to look at is your State Department of Environmental Quality, and they'll tell you, basically, the books and the tests that the people are going to have to take. They offer great wages. And if you have a community that's really interested in renewable energy, and there's going to be some investment in it, if you also do-- I've also done a photovoltaic system design, installation, and maintenance, again, through adult education. You can go through NABCEP. That's the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners. 

I've had wastewater operators go through the operator exam and then come over and take the photovoltaic because now they're interdisciplinary, right? And now they understand even more. A lot of water and wastewater systems are being energized through photovoltaics and solar panels. So again, you see that interdisciplinary nature of the different sectors and subsectors that we might not have noticed last century. 

OK. All right. Nothing chatty here. And we'll go down here. We don't have any skills builder courses that are popping up probably because this is kind of a specialized area. Same with health care. So we'll check out in our next exercise what's going on over there. Any other questions about looking at engineering, construction, and manufacturing through the dashboard and using the opportunity maps as a supplementary tool to help us understand what's going on here? 

I'll pause for a second. I see there's 240 jobs listed here. Just out of curiosity, I'm going to keep going, and I'm going to see if I can get to-- yup, here we go-- your CNC tool operators, your machine setters. These are all pretty, pretty decent wages. Here you go-- solar photovoltaic installers. That's a hot, hot thing, right? Residential law in the state of California now requires any new construction to have solar panels on it. 

So if you are thinking about an entry-level construction program, again, I would encourage you to use NCCER because it's a nationally recognized credential. And then from there, maybe piggyback on an ABCET-- North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners. If you're interested in that, I can put the links in the chat after we get to our next exercise. Structural metal fabricators and fitters-- those are all your weldings. That's custom steel manufacturing. 

Don't forget. Here in California, particularly in Southern California, we have tons of defense industry. We got lots of Naval bases. They're always looking for welders in structural metal fabricators. If it's not through the defense industry, it could be a contractor through the defense industry. So lots of small- and medium-sized businesses that are looking-- just one-, two-man operations-- typically, under 50-man operations-- definitely under 30. They're always looking for structural metal fabricators in those welding courses. And if you do do welding, I'm sure you guys all know, make sure it is associated with the AWS industry credential. 

I wanted to keep moving right here. We get the surveying and mapping technicians again. Remember when I mentioned SolidWorks and auto computerated drafting-- AutoCAD, right? It's not just for designing a steel product widget that's going to go into a CNC machine. It can also be used as mapping for photovoltaic system design. It could also be used as mapping for land development. It could also be used for all these other things. 

So SolidWorks is a really, really interesting-- computer to drafting in SolidWorks is an interesting industry credential because you don't necessarily have to end up in like, oh, I'm making a widget. People use these for aftermarket auto parts all the time-- clutches. I know I used to work with an employer that did apprenticeships with us through adult-- moving from adult ed into the community college that hired interns-- paid interns coming out of our SolidWorks exams and our AutoCAD exams. 

So this is all very, very feasible for adult schools. And again, funding is always an issue. Capacity's always an issue. But when you go into designing these pathways, I strongly encourage you to look at something like construction, manufacturing, and engineering because this is where the livable-wage jobs are. 

There's absolutely industry credentials that you can apply at the adult education level, like I mentioned before, and create pathways up into those community college programs, where you have a lot more-- they're going to get a little bit of repetition but not much. And they're going to keep moving and building those skills right up that ladder, creating better economic mobility. 

OK, so let's go into our last exercise here. OK all right we just have clarification on CAEP funds. And again, that's perfectly fine. I encourage you to work with your community college on systems changes to work with that contract ed funds, which are unrestricted funds. That's a great, great way to change the system, to address those equity gaps, OK? And I know Blaire is also putting in a lot of other ideas for you guys. We understand. Funding and capacity building is the hardest thing here. 

So I'm going to go back over to the PowerPoint. Let's get into our last exercise here. So we went through our construction, manufacturing, and engineering pathways. Let's do from current slide. And again, please reach out to us if you're interested in those opportunity maps and contextualizing them. OK, one more exercise here that I chose very particularly-- so we went through health care. Number one in demand, right? People are getting old. People need the health care. It just is what it is. It's a constantly growing sector. 

But not everybody is into health care. So I put in there, manufacturing, engineering, and construction, which you can also include transportation and warehousing. Super-duper high-moving, high-demand, livable-wage jobs, continuing for economic growth, contribute to economic mobility. But this last one-- business operations and management pathways. This is not necessarily a sector, right? This is what we would call a ubiquitous occupational cluster. 

So I mentioned earlier-- and for those of you who have been in other webinars in this series-- in this CAEP series-- you've probably heard me mention that Microsoft Office Specialist-- MOS-- it's an industry credential through Microsoft Office. When you look at the skills that are in demand across these business occupations-- remember, there's no business industry sector, but there's a business-- a ubiquitous business administration occupational cluster. You're absolutely going to need that Microsoft Office Specialist. 

I would encourage you to include it as an occupational skills builder course because, again, just because you take that course doesn't mean you have to go into administration. You can go into construction or production or manufacturing. You're still going to need to use Microsoft Office for the most part. So you can see here a lot of the high-impact skills. It's always going to be verbal and written communication. And please, please don't forget, again, when it comes to building equity, ensuring that your students can articulate the skills they have is a big step forward in filling that gap left by the lack of social capital that student has. 

And I'm not just talking about mock interviews. I'm talking about actual exercises that force the students to articulate the skills they've learned. I used to work with welding instructors, and they do a 350-word essay. What was your favorite project? What were your skills you learned? Helping those students get down on paper and articulate on paper the skills they learned, so they were more comfortable articulating that. Not all of us have the luxury and the privilege of parents that spoke to us a lot, that had us read. 

My big line is always, readers are leaders, right? Because the more you read, the more you understand how to speak and how to articulate. Not everybody has that privilege. So we need to make sure that we're including it in the classroom because it's a huge equity gap. So interpersonal communications. Then we come down here to the hard skills, right? These kind of start to get a little specialized. Obviously, merchandising and selling techniques is for retail-- maybe even wholesale trade. 

But then you get your financial statements accounts payable. Why? Because a lot of these majors go into accounting or bookkeeping. So as you can see here, accounting administrative assistants-- these are all the certificates that you can build up. So they could start in adult education with the Microsoft Office Specialist exam through an IET program or a Career Education program. And this could be the start of the pathway into multiple areas, including a business degree. 

You see down here, once again, we have our average starting salary at that bottom quintile for administrative supervisors, customer service reps, retail supervisors. And again, let's not forget, when you look at your local economy, and you're starting to understand which is-- I strongly encourage you to use the CAEP fact sheets as well because it has some of the similar information that the dashboard has. And if we have a little bit of time here, I might just pop over to that dashboard. I have it open. 

But when you start to understand the largest sectors in your local economy, once again, you can start contextualizing your reading, writing, and arithmetic to those sectors-- so in other words, business admin, or administrative skills, as you move through say a Microsoft Office Specialist exam in your adult ed program. And you can contextualize it to say, I don't know, some small businesses. Maybe that person ends up being an administrator in a small manufacturing plant. Maybe they end up being an administrator for a small construction firm-- a subcontractor or a prime contractor. 

So there's lots of different ways that you can start to contextualize those business skills. And then finally, we get up here to bachelor's degree. What's going on in the San Diego area? These are the majors, and these are the potential occupations and median salary for things like an operations. I got to tell you, wherever you look in this country, when you look up high-demand skills, most-frequently-posted skills, you're going to get written and verbal communication. 

You're going to get basic math. You're going to get Microsoft Office. You're going to get Microsoft Excel. You're going to get management and operations and leadership. So operations is really, really interesting too-- project management and operations. Both really, really interesting pathway-building skills, as well. 

I'm going to pause here just for a moment and double check. OK, we're good on chat box there. So let's keep going. And again, once again, you're just going to see the same steps but differently contextualized. We start by sector and region. Then we're going to do our entry-level education and maybe toggle to associate degrees. Then we're going to look at the adult ed regional programming offerings, make sure that we're adding to it. We're not duplicating or we're leveraging things. And then we're going to query my closest college and award type. 

We're going to start with our certificates of achievements. No awards and non-credit. And then start to toggle into the associate degree so we can understand how to build those pathways. And then finally, we're going to look at the community college programs in that step 4 by occupational cluster. Again, helping our students. There's management occupations. There's office administrative support. There's business and finance for those of them who are more inclined to bookkeeping. 

And then community and social services, right? Let's not forget that. So I'm going to pop over to my map again. OK. So let's get into our dashboard one more time. OK, so I'm going to come up here. I'm going to change my sector title. I'm going to uncheck my architecture and engineering. I'm going to check community and social services because I'm looking at-- now I'm looking at a ubiquitous occupational cluster, not a specific sector. So I'm actually going to uncheck my construction and extraction. I'm going to uncheck installation. I'm going to uncheck production and uncheck transportation. 

But I am going to go back, and I'm going to go-- I'm going to check business and financial. I'm going to check community and social services. I'm going to go ahead, and for those of you who are within the last session, we actually looked at a gen ed major of arts and humanities. And you saw me check educational instruction. So I'm going to go ahead-- so that's something in library occupations that you can potentially check. I'm going to leave that blank for now. 

But I'm going to keep going down here. Legal occupations I'm going to check-- paralegals, administrative assistants for paralegals. I'm going to check office and administrative support. And I'm going to check sales and related occupations. Now, I'm going to say this with a caveat. I'm going to check sales and related occupations, but we all know darn well that retail occupations do not pay a living wage. 

So if it turns out there's not much information in sales and related occupations, I'm going to de-check that. So I'm going to start by checking it, but I may go back in and uncheck it. So let's see here. Yep, sure enough, there we are. Telemarketers at 14 bucks an hour. Door-to-door sales vendors at 13. Those are all less than our macro-region living wage. So I'm going to come back here, and I'm going to uncheck-- oops, not my work experience-- oh, sorry. I need to uncheck my entry level and education. 

We're going to keep some college. Post-secondary non-degree. No formal education and high school. So we're going to keep those. We're going to keep it at no work experience. But I'm going to come back up here to this sector, and I'm going to uncheck sales and related occupations because I'm not too terribly interested in that. And we'll go all the way back to the beginning. 

All right. And here we start to see office clerks, customer service reps, administrative assistants, bookkeeping, which is always a great entry-level wage, right? Production planning and expediting clerks. So this right here-- shipping and receiving and inventory clerks. That's warehousing and transportation, which is really interesting. So again, use this dashboard to start to familiarize yourself with the actual industry sectors. Let's come back over here. Let's go ahead and check transportation of material moving and see if that pulls up any additional jobs for us. 

We still have the stockers. Labors freight and handlers. All right, so it just pulled up that very entry-level one probably because we have the whole no formal educational credential unchecked. So let's uncheck that and, just out of curiosity, see what happens. All right, so it starts to get rid of-- so see what I'm doing? By process of elimination, I'm starting to get rid of all those really low-level, entry-level skills. 

Remember, adult education-- you're not necessarily the bottom rung when it comes to the job market. [CAT MEOWS] Please pardon a little rescue kitty in my background. So remember, you're not necessarily the general entry-level job. Yeah, that might be HSE GED, but you want to focus on those IET, those IELC programs that really start to add those occupational skills building and the specialized skills. We want to get out of the entry-level jobs. 

People who are going to your adult school clearly don't want to stay working for Mickey D's or Jack in the Box. They want to move up and on with their career. So this is the kind of stuff that we want to look at. We want to go back and forth. We want to play around with our educational level. We want to play around with our sector titles. 

So as we come down here, let's look at-- I'm going to leave all the adult schools the same, and I'm going to come over here-- certificate no award and non-credit. All right. It's all set to what I want. I can see all the skills. And once again, you're seeing that reflection of the skills over and over and over again that we've already seen but just contextualized. And here in the adult schools, we see we have about 93 programs for office administrative support, 26 for business and financial operations, 17 for community and social service, and 4 for transportation and material moving. 

So again, you can start to build these kind of lattice pathways. What if you had a Microsoft Office Specialist exam, and you buddied it up with a lattice credential with transportation and material moving? It starts to become a pathway. So we see over here our community college awards. Looks like we have a ton over in administrative support-- 712. And again, we don't have to keep necessarily everything unchecked, right? 

We're looking for industry credentials. They add the most value. So we know that industry credentials are likely included in non-credit programming and things with no award, and sometimes, even our certificate program. So that's why I have those checked there. 

But we can absolutely-- once we've looked at this, we see our bookkeeping. That would be a great one to funnel students right into. I'm sure you guys already do. Look at this one. Grossmont has retail management. Very interesting. It gets you into those management positions. So then we come up here, and say we wanted to now take a look at that next step up. How are we building that pathway on that opportunity, that career pathway roadmap? 

I'm going to check AA Degree and AA Transfer Degree. All right. And we start to see more of a sociology tilt. Notice I chose AA instead of AS. So it's popping up things that come into sociology and social work, right? So if that's one of the directions-- we have a nice entrepreneurship certificate here too-- so if that's one of the directions, that's a pathway for your students. But then if we come over here, and we unclick our AAs, and we go to the AS degrees, let's see what that pops up for us. Might be a little different. 

All right. Sure enough, we've now moved away from sociology, and we're moving into a pathway for accounting, financial services, paralegal studies, environmental science studies, general business, and real estate. So again, see how the generic work readiness builds into the occupational skills builders that you guys are offering at the adult schools, which can start to further build into the specialized skills development through those credential attainment that are those programs that are associated with an industry credential. 

And then they start to branch out. So right here, in the second level that we classified-- the occupational skills builder-- at that point, that student has several different options, right? You take your Microsoft Office. You take maybe-- what else do we have over here-- workplace professional. Let's see. Some business software, Microsoft Windows, stuff like that, right? You have that in the occupational skills builders. 

Then maybe you do an IET for something that includes the Microsoft Office. And then you have two pathways. You either go into financial services, or you go into sociology. So now we're exposing the students, which is also a critical equity gap. It's a critical gap in social capital these students don't have. It's well, well established that one of the biggest equity gaps we have is that lack of social capital to exposure. 

And we can all relate to that, right? You don't know what you don't know. So if you were raised by parents who have only exposed you to a couple of jobs, or it's just the average everyday life of a person that you go, oh, a doctor, lawyer, fireman, policeman, right? Remember all of those-- the antiquated four occupations that we used to think about? That's a critical equity gap that we must, must fill. 

So this type of pathway planning and this exercise, this investigation, using this dashboard with the supplementary opportunity maps, really starts to fill in all those gaps and create multiple pathways for students so that they understand, A, they're not getting shoved just into a vocational career because they happen to end up starting in an adult school. That there's a pathway right up to graduate school, should you choose. 

But there's also very valid industry credentials that are latticed that are going to give you interdisciplinary knowledge and nationally recognized knowledge by employers. That's the thing about those industry credentials. It's nationally recognized, employer validated, and employer recognized. The only other option is getting out there and shaking the hands with all the employers and ensuring they know your school and that they know the programs and the competencies in your programs, which is much more energy consumptive, much more time intensive than just using a national industry-recognized credential. 

Now, I'm going to pause really fast here in the chat. Entrepreneurship can also be a good opportunity for a-- oh, absolutely. I am a huge advocate. In fact, Blaire and I are working on, as we speak, trying to find the funding and the time to really investigate and develop a good adult education IET in entrepreneurship, something that is nationally recognized, something that is advocated for by the federal government, maybe even by the US Small Business Administration, because, again, 80% of your students are absolutely going to end up in the gig economy, and these are essential skills for economic mobility. OK. OK. Yup, yup, yup, and Blaire already cover that. 

So with that, I'm going to pop over to the CAEP fact sheet just because we have one or two more minutes. Can everybody see this CAEP fact sheet? Just give me a thumbs up if you can. I just want to make share my screen sharing is still working. All right, thumbs up. Great, thank you, guys. I want to make sure that we remember, when we come over to here, this is how we start. Remember step one for pathway planning with equity? What's our target population? This is where we come over here, and we look at our community. 

We look at what's going on with our foreign born, our limited English, especially our near or less-than poverty level. We come over here, and we start to look at who we're serving by school and versus what's going on in the population. My most favorite one is the adult ed transitions. Can't tell you how lucky you guys are in California to have this information. I've been working with schools in Texas and North Carolina and Colorado. Nobody has this information, and it's so valuable, especially when we're looking for planning with equity. 

And then we come over here to our labor market information that I wanted to remind you. So remember here. We were looking at 10 largest industry sectors. So if I choose San Diego-- whoops-- if I just choose San Diego alone-- let me uncheck that. I'm going to check San Diego Imperial. I'm going to come down here. That's my macro region. And lo and behold, there's my 10 largest industry sectors. Now, we didn't put that in the dashboard because you have it in the CAEP fact sheet. 

So again, this is how you use both tools. And then you combine it with that opportunity map, and it starts to give you a really nice understanding of how to contextualize, again, that ABE program, where to go with your IET IELC program, and how to build out those pathways. And it also gives us our fastest growing occupations here as well as that five year change that we offered to you. 

OK, and I'm going to stop with that. It's been a lot of information. Any questions? Is there something more that we could offer that would be helpful outside of supplementary funding sources, for all of those good-- that equipment that's needed for a lot of these careers. Will more webinars be offered? Well, unfortunately, Rhonda, I believe this is our last workshop under the CAEP program. 

Though WestEd and our little center here, our Center for Economic Mobility, will likely be producing some additional webinars coming up, probably late summer or early fall, that will continue this discussion on adult education and building pathways with equity. But for this exact sponsorship through the Chancellor's Office, I believe this is the last one. And I'll hand it to Blaire. 

BLAIRE TOSO: Yes, thank you. Although we certainly take suggestions because the work will be continuing. And SCOE TAP and Mayra Diaz and Lindsay will be helping to drive and inform this work as well. And I know that they are really looking at the field for suggestions towards this. I would like to say, thank you so much for participating. And really appreciate that you all would be interested enough to join us for more webinars. 

We think it is a super cool tool. And as Lexi pointed out, there are several of these tools that are really essential for the work. And I'd like to give a shout out for the Chancellor's Office because they are actually the ones who fund the work for you all to do this. And I do a lot of national work. And California has these great tools that go beyond what many, many other states have as resources. So we hope to continue this work and that you'll join us in the future. 

And send me an email or anyone who's on the PowerPoint any ideas or thoughts that you would like to see or have brought forward as professional development and technical assistance opportunities. And other than that, we are very, very grateful. This has been an amazing year. People have participated in the webinars in a three-year planning. And really, we know that that's a full year. 

And so appreciate the time that you all have taken to both look at our tools, use our tools, and provide feedback, not just on this dashboard, but on the CAEP fact sheets, on the AEP dashboard. We do take that feedback and inform our work in the present as we can and then also moving forward. So thank you, and we really appreciate it. And have a great summer. And be on the lookout for our offerings coming up late summer and early fall. 

MAYRA DIAZ: Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Great job. 

BLAIRE TOSO: SCOE TAP, did you want to say anything to close out? 

MANDILEE GONZALES: Sure, I'll go ahead and close out. Thank you, everybody, for joining us and attending. Again, thank you to our facilitators, the WestEd team, and the Chancellor's Office for being present. We popped in the evaluation link multiple times. So please just take a few minutes. It really does help inform how we move forward with all of our professional development offerings. So with that, we'll go ahead and close out. Thank you all for being with us. 

SPEAKER: Have a great day, everyone.