Tag: Job

  • ‘The pace is relentless’: How college leaders are adapting to an increasingly hectic job

    ‘The pace is relentless’: How college leaders are adapting to an increasingly hectic job

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    WASHINGTON — Leading a higher education institution is often associated with big picture ideas and high-level thinking. But jobs ranging from dean to president require hands-on management of a complex portfolio of tasks, and that portfolio has only grown in recent years.

    “Leadership right now is not just demanding. It is cognitively and emotionally dense,” Francine Conway, chancellor of Rutgers University–New Brunswick, said Thursday at the American Association of Colleges and Universities′ annual conference in Washington, D.C. “The pace is relentless.”

    During a standing-room-only panel, Conway and other senior college officials offered attendees practical solutions to solving some of the most prosaic day-to-day challenges that can slow leaders — and their institutions — down.

    ‘You will drive everyone good at their jobs away by micromanaging’

    In most cases, one of the key benefits of a leadership position is having a support team. Conway said she actively seeks to empower her office mates to take on decision-making responsibilities, in part to keep her work high level.

    “I say to my team, ‘If you can make a decision that does not substantively change the institution or alter our mission, you can go ahead and make that decision,’” she said.

    But for some leaders, it can be hard to delegate appropriately, said Jennifer Malat, dean of the University of New Mexico’s arts and sciences college.

    “A lot of us get into leadership roles because we were super overachievers who have a mindset that we must do everything ourselves,” Malat said. But you can’t succeed as a leader that way, both because there physically aren’t enough hours in the day and because “you will drive everyone good at their jobs away by micromanaging,” she added. 

    Mardell Wilson, provost at Creighton University, a private nonprofit in Nebraska, echoed that sentiment. 

    “You really aren’t as important as you think,” she laughed. While it’s easier to be confident in one’s own work, “you have to give someone else an opportunity.”

    For Carmenita Higginbotham, delegating is especially essential. She helps lead two dramatically different Virginia Commonwealth University campuses in her roles as dean of the public institution’s main art school and as the special assistant to the provost for its arts school in Qatar.

    “I don’t delegate tasks, I delegate outcomes and give them the bigger picture,” Higginbotham said, listing increases in student retention and post-graduate employment as examples.

    Once leaders establish which outcomes are important, she advises them to let their teams work on them without seeking constant updates. 

    Instead, they should emphasize they are available for questions or broader conversations about the project, she said. 

    “Sometimes, if people are trying to impress you, they won’t come to you,” Higginbotham said, adding that’s an instinct she fights as well. Encouraging openness from team members can avoid issues down the line, she added. 

    Avoiding a Tetris calendar

    College leaders are constantly fighting the most universal of constraints — time. While a full calendar can signal progress to some, panelists told attendees that the cognitive load of constant meetings often results in the sense that their job is getting in the way of their work.

    Leadership right now is not just demanding. It is cognitively and emotionally dense.

    Francine Conway

    Chancellor of Rutgers University–New Brunswick

    The wide-ranging responsibilities of college leaders can also result in rapid tonal shifts throughout the day. Conway gave the example of conducting standard employee check-ins after handling a missing student case. 

    To address the high potential for emotional whiplash, she creates 15-minute buffers between meetings on her calendar. And Conway said she is OK rescheduling meetings on days when she “needs more time to think and process” in order “to show up more fully.”

    “If you don’t design your time, it will be designed for you,” she said. 

    That operating procedure runs counter to the stereotypical calendar of some college leaders, with back-to-back hourlong meetings.

    “Not every meeting has to be an hour,” Conway said. “Or even 30 minutes.”

    When Wilson first joined Creighton in 2020, employees constantly had scheduled meetings, she said.

    Now, her office goes nearly meeting free in July, and she encourages her employees to do the same with their reports.

    Academic offices are usually in a scheduling frenzy at the height of summer, with people taking vacations or attending higher ed conferences out of town, Wilson said. Making July a low-touch month allows leaders to reset for the coming academic year and reduces burnout.

    “But it’s not just rest for you. You’re role modeling for your team, which is also really important,” she said.

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  • As Job Market Tightens, More Californians Are Heading Back to College – The 74

    As Job Market Tightens, More Californians Are Heading Back to College – The 74

    “When the economy is doing well, our enrollments are down, and when the economy is in a tough stretch or in a recession, we see our enrollments go up,” said Chris Ferguson, an executive vice chancellor with the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, which oversees all of the state’s 116 community colleges. 

    Ferguson said the state has yet to release authoritative data on fall enrollment, but early data shows upward trends. In interviews with CalMatters, some college presidents said they’re seeing over 10% more students compared to last fall. But they say the state hasn’t provided enough funding to keep up with their growth. 

    California is not in a recession, but some economic indicators are grim. Unemployment is rising, and it’s getting harder to find a job. The cost of consumer goods, such as toilet paper and cosmetics, is going up, and economists say tariffs and President Donald Trump’s increased deportations could lead to further economic declines in the state. 

    “Typically when the economy gets a little crazy, like it is right now, people need to upskill or find new work,” and workers look to colleges for help, said Nicole Albo-Lopez, deputy chancellor for the Los Angeles Community College District. In the Los Angeles district, students between the ages of 35 and 54 are coming back to school in droves — up 28% compared to last year, she said. 

    Other factors may also be bringing students back to school. The COVID-19 pandemic created a sudden and historic drop in college enrollment, and some schools say the influx of students this year is just a return to pre-pandemic levels. A large portion of recent enrollment growth comes from high school students taking college courses, which has exploded in popularity in the past few years. 

    But most college officials agree that uncertainty about the economy is at least one of the driving forces for new students this semester. 

    At the Los Rios Community College District, which represents four campuses in the Sacramento metro area, enrollment is up by more than 5% compared to last fall. Part of that is due to “the gap between Wall Street and Main Street,” said Mario Rodriguez, an executive vice chancellor for the system: The stock market has performed well in the past few years, even as job seekers see fewer opportunities and families struggle with inflation. Enrollments in career technical classes are up 10% this semester at the district, the equivalent of almost 4,000 new students. 

    These job-ready programs, such as medical assisting, welding, and automotive, have always been popular, and some cap enrollment. School officials say waitlists are growing.

    Quitting a job, starting school

    Carla Gruhn, 29, has worked as a medical assistant in San Jose for 10 years. At one point she was making roughly $50,000 a year, but it wasn’t enough.

    “In the last year, eggs started becoming super expensive,” she said. “That’s when I started paying more attention to gas and groceries.” Together with her husband, she started planning ways to scale back — fewer coffee runs, less travel with their truck, cheaper gifts this Christmas. But they needed a long-term solution, too.

    In July, she quit her job and enrolled in a two-year radiologic technology program at Foothill College, in the south Bay Area, which will teach her how to read X-rays, CT scans, and MRIs. Her salary will double, maybe even triple, once she graduates with the new credential. 

    The pay raise could be “life-changing,” she said. At the moment, Gruhn said her family is small, just her husband and her dog, so their costs are lower, but they know it’s going to get more expensive, since they want to buy a house and have kids. “We’re trying to plan for the future too.”

    At Foothill College, enrollment is up, especially in science and technology classes, said Simon Pennington, the school’s associate vice president of community relations. Many of these students are looking to fulfill prerequisites to enter careers in the health care sector, he added. Health care is one of the largest and fastest-growing job sectors in the state, according to a recent report from the Public Policy Institute of California. 

    In Merced, hours away from major urban centers like the Bay Area, Sacramento, or Los Angeles, students are clamoring for classes in electronics, where the fall waitlist numbers have nearly doubled compared to three years ago. Demand is also up for classes in criminal justice and mechanized agriculture, according to James Leonard, a spokesperson for the school. 

    “When the economy goes bad, enrollment skyrockets,” said Dee Sigismond, Merced College’s vice president of instruction, though she wasn’t certain that a recession would have the same impact it did 15 years ago. Staring during the pandemic, Merced College, like most community colleges, now offers many of its classes online, which can make it easier for students to juggle school with a full- or part-time job. She added that Merced is also experimenting with new, more flexible kinds of instruction, such as competency-based education, which allows students to pass a class by showing they already have the requisite skills.

    Colleges call for more funding

    California’s community colleges receive most of their funding based on the number of students they serve. When enrollment declined during the pandemic, colleges were set to lose funding, but the governor and the Legislature granted the community college system a special exemption, delaying many funding cuts. 

    Now that enrollment is ticking up, many colleges say they have the opposite problem — they aren’t getting enough money to serve the influx of new students. That’s largely because the state’s funding formula is based on the college’s average enrollment over the past three years, so sudden changes this year are slow to have an effect. Rodriguez said his Sacramento area district is serving about 5,000 more students than the system is funded to support, representing about $20 million in lost revenue. 

    This summer, the state agreed to send more money to California’s community colleges to account for recent enrollment growth, but Ferguson said it isn’t enough to fully fund all the new students. 

    Last month, presidents and chancellors from 10 different community colleges or community college districts, including representatives from Los Angeles and Sacramento, sent a letter to the governor, asking him to change state policy and allow colleges to get more funding in next year’s budget. Though he did not sign the letter, Ferguson said the state chancellor’s office is asking the governor for similar changes. 

    In 2008, colleges had to cut back on services or classes, even as new students poured in because the state didn’t provide proportionate funding for each new enrollment. 

    Next year, California is expected to face an $18 billion budget deficit, according to a November analysis by the Legislative Analyst’s Office. For comparison, the state had a deficit of about $24 billion in 2008, worth about $36 billion in today’s dollars. 

    In Chula Vista, Southwestern College President Mark Sanchez said his district is already saying no to potential college classes in high schools and prisons because of a lack of state funding. 

    His district had over 32,000 students in the last academic year — the highest enrollment rate since the Great Recession.


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  • Hope Is Essential to Success of Any Job Search (opinion)

    Hope Is Essential to Success of Any Job Search (opinion)

    We live in uncertain and unstable times. The job market is contracting due to economic uncertainty, political instability and the increase of AI-driven automation. In my role as a career adviser, I talk to many students and recent graduates who have faced a long and difficult job search. The words and phrases I hear most often in these conversations are “dejected,” “soul-crushing,” or “I feel like I am screaming into the void.” International students face an added challenge, with H-1B visas seeming out of reach as they become more difficult and expensive for employers to process.

    All of this uncertainty can lead to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. What I hear from students, and in particular our international community at Columbia University, is, “What is the point of applying to jobs if no one will hire me?” Such self-defeating thoughts can lead to inaction and feelings of despair. Yet hope is essential to the success of any job search. Having hope or optimism that something will work out is central to achieving one’s goals.

    It is likewise essential that a career coach or adviser have a hopeful, positive attitude. A recent article published by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics describes how when people who were unemployed for a long period of time worked with caseworkers who had “strong confidence in the potential of their clients to find employment,” the relationship led to an increase in the client’s motivation and resilience, and to improved earnings and employment outcomes over time. Thus, our outlook as advisers can impact the students we are working with, so we must manage our own feelings of hopelessness. I find myself returning to Jane Goodall’s The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times for inspiration.

    Another source of inspiration I return to is a framework called Career Flow: A Hope-Centered Approach to Career Development, developed in 2011 by Spencer G. Niles, Norman E. Amundson and Roberta A. Neault. In the remainder of this article, I plan to provide career development professionals with an overview of this hope-based career development model and suggestions on how they can implement it to assist their students and graduates.

    In the theory, “Career Flow” is an analogy that compares different types of experiences in one’s career to the flow of water. Anyone who has felt “underwater” at work can understand this metaphor. Finding “optimal” flow in a professional setting means that your skills and personality match the tasks and requirements of your role. Below, I outline suggested steps based on the model to help you implement a hope-based approach to career advising.

    Step 1: Assessing and Establishing Hope

    Start by letting the advisee tell their story and share the challenges that they face. Listen and reflect back what you are hearing. But also start to consider the person’s outlook and demeanor. Many of the people I talk to, including federal workers who were laid off or furloughed, exhibit signs of hope even though they understand the current challenges they are facing and express frustration and sometimes fear. I have been surprised and impressed by people’s resilience and willingness to pivot, which I make sure to point out. That helps them see the strength they are exhibiting even in a moment of crisis.

    However, some people will present as mostly frustrated, with little hope. If you are talking to someone who seems particularly hopeless about their situation, it could be helpful to reflect that back to them. You might say, “What you just described to me seems like a very tough situation. I wonder if you might feel a sense of hopelessness?” Sometimes it just takes awareness for someone to realize that they need to shift their mindset. Validate their struggle, then help them reframe their point of view toward one that is more hopeful. For example, you could mention the Career Flow model that shows the positive benefits of having hope in a career search. If a student seems unwilling to shift, you might want to suggest that they seek extra support through family, friends or counseling services.

    Step 2: Self-Reflection and Self-Clarity

    Self-reflection and self-clarity are essential to any job search, including when it comes to establishing a hopeful approach. If someone is not clear about their own needs and values or has a lack of understanding of their situation and challenges, that person can struggle to succeed in their goals. Therefore, help them gain a greater sense of self-clarity by reflecting any key interests, skills and values you hear them describe in your conversation. At the same time, it is important to ask about possible challenges or obstacles to fully understand their situation and address hurdles standing in the way of their goals.

    If a student seems hopeless about succeeding in their goals, advisers can bolster hope by asking about areas of strength or asking them to describe a time they felt they succeeded when faced with a difficult task. Reminding students of past successes and helping to celebrate these wins can increase their sense of agency and help them believe they can overcome future challenges.

    Step 3: Visioning

    An inherently hopeful exercise, visioning is the ability to brainstorm future possibilities and identify desired outcomes. Sometimes, I talk to a student who is so focused on one goal, such as finding an academic job or postdoc position, that they forget to consider other opportunities where they can apply their skills and expertise. When starting the visioning process, encourage advises to imagine multiple ways of reaching their desired goal. This is also known as “pathways thinking” and, in the Career Flow model, quantity is more important than quality. When an extensive list of possible career paths is identified, the advisee should use self-reflection and self-clarity to narrow their options by selecting a few paths that best align with their interests, skills and values. Pathways thinking also supports advisees in being both flexible and adaptable, traits that are incredibly important in any job search.

    However, people who feel hopeless can sometimes lack the capability to consider other options. Help connect them to resources, such as career assessments like ImaginePhD, myIDP or O*Net, where they can gather information to explore different types of employment. Also, help them consider ways they can gain skills or experience through online courses, volunteering, on-campus work or internships.

    Step 4: Goal Setting and Planning

    Once a student has selected a few possible paths, then focus on setting specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) goals. Students often set lofty or poorly defined goals such as, “I want to find a job.” Help them identify small, realistic steps they can take to achieve their main goal of employment. For example, suggest that they find a job they want to apply to and create a tailored résumé and cover letter for the role and then schedule another career advising session in two weeks to review the documents. Again, consider possible barriers to their goals and how they can overcome them.

    Step 5: Implementing and Adapting

    As students start to reach their incremental goals they will encounter either positive feedback (e.g. a request for an interview) or a lack of success (silence or rejection emails). As they gather more data, help them revise or relinquish possible paths that are no longer relevant or serving them. Sometimes, you will need to help them accept the fact that a goal might not be achieved. This process is known as radical acceptance, or giving in to your current reality. Help them see that finding employment during a period of uncertainty is difficult and can cause pain, but life can still be hopeful and joyful.

    Another approach is to help students see what they have control over. We might not be able to control the economy, but we can control our actions and our outlook, and we can seek out help when we need it or find support in community with others. Overall, be there as a source of support, guidance and encouragement.

    In conclusion, it can take substantial effort to choose to be hopeful in periods of uncertainty, but we must maintain hope even in the darkest of times. To quote C. R. Snyder, who writes about the psychology of hope, “in studying hope …, I observed the spectrum of human strength. This reminds me of the rainbow that frequently is used as a symbol of hope. A rainbow is a prism that sends shards of multicolored light in various directions. It lifts our spirits and makes us think of what is possible. Hope is the same—a personal rainbow of the mind.”

    So, let us be a rainbow for those we work with and help them to let hope, rather than despair, lead the way.

    Francesca Fanelli has 10 years of experience working with graduate-level students and is a licensed mental health counselor in the state of New York. She currently serves as senior associate director of graduate career development at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she specializes in career advising and event management.

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  • Most superintendents satisfied with job, despite the stress and demands

    Most superintendents satisfied with job, despite the stress and demands

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    The school superintendent’s role has grown more complex and demanding over the past five years with unprecedented pressures around funding, staffing, safety and politics, as well as the continuing commitment to students’ academic growth and well-being, a mid-decade survey of superintendents shows. 

    The survey of 1,095 superintendents, conducted by AASA, The School Superintendents Association, was the first update since the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted in-person learning and caused dips in academic achievement. 

    It’s also the first survey in AASA’S American Superintendent study series since a record number of school shootings early in the 2020s spawned fears of safety and heightened efforts to safeguard campuses. And that’s all in addition to the emergence of culture wars over books bans and diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

    “I think my colleagues would tell you that the civility in communication to public officials plummeted, and I think people just felt that pressure,” said David Law, AASA president and superintendent of Minnesota’s Minnetonka Public School District. Law spoke during a Thursday briefing about the survey results. “This report about how hard the job is, it doesn’t surprise me. It’s a different job.”

    An adult sits at a desk. Two students are nearby by and everyone is smiling

    David Law is superintendent of Minnesota’s Minnetonka Public School District and president of AASA.

    Retrieved from Minnetonka Public Schools on December 04, 2025

     

    Despite the challenges and the fact that the vast majority of superintendents reported at least moderate stress levels, a similarly high proportion of respondents said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their current superintendency. Watching students grow and succeed was superintendents’ greatest fulfillment, according to survey results.

    Some 89% of superintendents said they were currently satisfied or very satisfied in their job, down slightly from 92% in 2020. Additionally, 59% of respondents said they planned on staying in the superintendency in the next five years. That’s up from 51% in 2010. 

    AASA’s national decennial studies began a century ago, in 1923. The most recent survey, which was conducted in fall 2024, covered superintendents from 49 states representing rural, suburban and urban districts of various student counts, although 70% of respondents worked in districts with fewer than 3,000 students.

    Areas of strengths and challenges

    As CEOs of their districts, superintendents have to deal with a broad scope of responsibilities. The survey found that superintendents were most likely to identify their areas of strength as an instructional leader or visionary for their district (40%) and for fostering a positive district and school climate (35%). The least common areas of strength cited were in crisis management (15%) and managing the daily politics of the job (14%).

    When asked to pick up to five issues that consume the bulk of their time, most respondents said finance (54%), followed by personnel management (44%), superintendent-board relationships (41%), facility planning and management (41%), and conflict management (39%).

    The top two issues that superintendents said most frequently prevented them from doing their core work as an educational leader in the past year were state bureaucracy and mandates (53%) and federal bureaucracy and mandates (40%). Other leading obstacles included social media issues (35%) and political divisions in the community (29%). 

    When asked to state the biggest problem facing public schools in their district, superintendents most often answered funding, followed by politics and staffing. 

    Support from communities

    A high percentage of superintendents overall said they felt somewhat or very supported by their communities (91%). However, the range varied by district size, with 88% of leaders of districts with fewer than 1,000 students reporting such support, compared to at least 94% at districts enrolling between 3,000 to 24,999 students and those in districts of 50,000 students and more.

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  • As the job market tightens, workers without degrees could hit a ‘paper ceiling’

    As the job market tightens, workers without degrees could hit a ‘paper ceiling’

    by Lawrence Lanahan, The Hechinger Report
    December 2, 2025

    DENVER — On a bus headed downtown, Cherri McKinney opened a compact mirror and — even as the vehicle rattled and blinding morning sun filled the window — skillfully applied eyeliner.

    McKinney is a licensed aesthetician. She went into bookkeeping after graduating from high school in 1992, then ran a waxing salon for years. Later she shifted into human resources at a homeless shelter. But stepping off the bus, she started her work day as a benefits and leave administrator for Colorado’s Department of Labor and Employment.

    She wouldn’t have made it past some hiring managers.

    “My background is kind of all over the place,” McKinney said. “You might have looked at my résumé and thought, ‘Wow, this girl doesn’t have a college education.’”

    In fact, Colorado’s state government was looking for workers just like her. In 2022, Gov. Jared Polis signed an executive order directing state agencies to embrace “skills-based hiring” — evaluating job seekers based on abilities rather than education level — and to open more positions to applicants without college diplomas. When McKinney interviewed with the state in the summer of 2024, she said, she was asked practical questions about topics like the Family Medical Leave Act, not about her academic background.

    For a decade, workforce organizations, researchers and public officials have pushed employers to stop requiring bachelor’s degrees for jobs that don’t need them. That’s a response to a hiring trend that began during the Great Recession, when job seekers vastly outnumbered open positions and employers increased their use of bachelor’s degree requirements for many jobs — like administrative assistants, construction supervisors and insurance claims clerks — that people without college diplomas had capably handled. The so-called “paper ceiling,” advocates say, locks skilled workers without degrees out of good-paying jobs. Degree requirements hurt employers, too, advocates argue, by screening out valuable talent.

    Related: Interested in more news about colleges and universities? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

    In recent years, at least 26 states, along with private companies like IBM and Accenture, began stripping degree requirements and focusing hiring practices on applicants’ skills. A job seeker’s market after Covid, plus labor shortages in the public sector, boosted momentum. Seven states showed double-digit percentage increases in job listings without a degree requirement between 2019 and 2024, according to the National Governors Association. A 2022 report from labor analytics firm Burning Glass (recently renamed Lightcast) found degree requirements disappearing from private sector listings too.

    But less evidence has emerged of employers actually hiring nondegreed job seekers in substantial numbers, and a crumbling economic outlook could stall momentum. Last year, Burning Glass and Harvard Business School found that less than 1 in 700 hires in 2023 benefited from the shift to skills-based hiring. Federal layoffs and other cuts pushing more workers with degrees into the job hunt could tempt employers to return to using the bachelor’s as a filtering mechanism.

    “I think it’s a sort of do-or-die moment” for skills-based hiring, said Amanda Winters, who advises state governments on skills-based hiring at the nonprofit National Governors Association.

    Winters said the shift to hiring for skills requires time-consuming structural changes. Human resource departments must rewrite job descriptions, and hiring managers must be trained to change their approach to interviewing to assess candidates for skills, among other steps. And even then, said Winters, there’s no reason for managers not to prefer applicants with college degrees if they indeed have the skills.

    Related: Students worried about getting jobs are adding extra majors

    Colorado is trying to push employers, both public and private, to make this shift. Polis’ 2022 order devoted $700,000 and three staffers to institutionalizing skills-based hiring in state government. According to a case study by the National Governors Association and the nonprofit Opportunity@Work, the state is working with human resources departments at individual agencies, training them to rewrite job descriptions to spell out skills (for example, “active listening and interpersonal skills”). When posting a job, hiring managers are encouraged to click a box that reads: “I have considered removing the degree requirement for this role.” 

    Polis’ team also built a dashboard to track progress toward “Wildly Important Goals” related to skills-based hiring — like boosting the share of job applicants without a bachelor’s degree by 5 percent by summer 2026. State officials say about 80 percent of job classifications (categories of jobs with specific pay scales and responsibilities — for example, Human Resources Specialist III or Accountant I) now emphasize skills over degrees.

    All told, the state says, 25 percent of hires within those job classifications in 2024 — 1,588 in total — were people without degrees, roughly the same share as in 2023, when the state began collecting this information. Similar data from other states on their success in hiring skilled, nondegreed workers is scarce. State officials from Maryland and Pennsylvania, two of the first states with executive orders dropping degree requirements, said they track education levels of applicants but not of new hires. 

    To spark skills-based hiring in the private sector, the Colorado Workforce Development Council, a quasi-governmental group appointed by the governor, encourages local workforce boards to help assess employers’ needs and job seekers’ skills.

    One of those boards — Pikes Peak Workforce Center in Colorado Springs — conducts workshops for local businesses on skills-based hiring and helps them write job descriptions that emphasize skills. When a company registers for a job fair, said CEO Traci Marques, the center asks both what positions are open and which skills are needed for them.

    The center also teaches job seekers to identify their skills and show employers how they apply in different fields. A recent high school graduate who served on student council, Marques said, might discuss what that role taught them about time management, conflict resolution and event planning.

    The goal is for skills to become the lingua franca between employers and job seekers. “It’s really that matchmaking where we fit in,” Marques said.

    One new matchmaking tool is learning and employment records, or LERs. These digital records allow job seekers to verify their degrees, credentials and skills with former schools and workplaces and then share them with potential employers. Two years ago, a philanthropic coalition granted the Colorado Workforce Development Council $1.4 million to create LER systems.

    LERs are still in the early stages of development, but advocates say they could eventually allow more precise matching of employers’ needs with job seekers’ skills.

    Once nondegreed workers get in the door, employers can also see payoffs, said Cole Napper, vice president of research, innovation and talent insights at Lightcast. His research shows that workers hired for skills get promoted at almost the same rate as education-based hires and stay at their jobs longer.

    But as the labor market cools, the question now is whether people without four-year degrees will get in the door in the first place. Nationally, job growth has slowed. Maryland and Colorado froze hiring this summer for state positions.

    At a recent job fair at Pikes Peak, single mother Yvette Stanton made her way around the tables, some featuring placards that read “Skills-Based Hiring.” After a few months at a sober living facility, Stanton had lined up day care and was ready to work. She clutched a green folder with a résumé documenting certifications vouching for her skills in phlebotomy and medication administration. “When you have more certifications, there are better job opportunities,” said Stanton.

    She approached a table for the Colorado Department of Corrections. Human resources specialist Jack Zeller told her that prisons do need workers with medical certifications, and he said she could also apply to be a corrections officer. But, he said — holding out his phone to show her the job application site — she should wait until Jan. 1.

    “If the hiring freeze ends like it’s supposed to,” he said, “there’s gonna be a billion jobs going up on the website.”

    Related: Apprenticeships for high schoolers are touted as the next big thing. One state leads the way      

    Colorado works not just on the demand side, pushing employers to seek out workers based on their skills, but also on the supply side, to arm people who might not choose college with marketable skills and help them find jobs in in-demand industries.

    The Polis administration encourages high schools and community colleges to make available industry-recognized credentials — including certified nursing assistant, certified associate in project management and the CompTIA cybersecurity certification— that can earn students credits while giving them skills for better-paying jobs. The governor is also making a big bet on work-based learning opportunities in high school and community college, especially apprenticeships.

    If employers meet talented workers who lack degrees, they’ll grow more comfortable hiring for skills, said Sarah Heath, who directs career and technical education for the Colorado Community College System. “You’ve got to prove it to people to get them to buy into it,” she said.

    At Red Rocks Community College in Lakewood, a suburb of Denver, President Landon Pirius has set a goal of eventually providing a work-based learning experience to every graduate. Earlier this year, the college hired a work-based learning coordinator and an apprenticeship coordinator, and it partners with Northrop Grumman on a registered apprenticeship that lets cybersecurity students earn money while getting technical instruction and on-the-job learning.

    In his frequent discussions with regional employers, Pirius said, “the message is consistently skill-based hiring.” He added: “Our manufacturers are like, ‘I don’t even care about a degree. I just want to know that they can do X, Y, Z skills. So when you’re teaching our students, make sure you teach them these things.’”

    Colorado community colleges also see opportunities to equip students with skills in fields like aerospace, quantum computing, behavioral addiction treatment and mental health counseling, where there’s a growing demand for workers and some jobs can be handled without a four-year degree. In 2022, Colorado gave its community college system $15 million to create pathways to behavioral health careers that don’t require a Master of Social Work degree or even a B.A.

    Related: ‘Not waiting for people to save us’: 9 school districts combine forces to help students

    Colorado’s skill-based talent pipeline extends to high school. In a “Computer Science and Cybersecurity” class at Warren Tech, a high school in Lakewood, Zachary Flower teaches in-demand “soft skills” like problem solving, teamwork and communication.

    “The people who get hired are more often the ones who are better communicators,” said Flower, a software developer who was a director of software engineering and hiring manager for a travel company before he started teaching. Communication skills are half of the grade in Flower’s capstone project: Students communicate independently throughout the year with local industry sponsors, and at the end they present to a panel of engineers and developers.

    Despite the emphasis on skills-based hiring, a 2023 study projected that more than 4 in 10 job openings in Colorado from 2021 through 2031 would require at least a bachelor’s degree — the second-highest proportion of any state in the country — because many industries there, like engineering, health care and business services, require higher education, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.“But there’s still a significant amount of opportunity for people with less than a bachelor’s degree,” said Nicole Smith, chief economist at the center.

    People, in other words, like Cherri McKinney, who couldn’t afford college and didn’t want to spend four years finding her path. McKinney plans to stay in state government, where she believes she can develop more skills and advance without a college degree. Indeed, a 2023 executive order demanded that every state agency develop at least two work-based learning programs by the end of this year.

    Gov. Polis, who championed workers like McKinney, ends his second term in January 2027 and cannot run for reelection. State budgets are fragile in the Trump era. McKinney’s colleagues call often, nervous about their benefits in a time of hiring freezes and government shutdowns.

    McKinney isn’t worried.

    “When I made my first career switch from bookkeeping to aesthetics, what I realized was I am the eye of this storm,” she said. “Things swirl around me, and if I bring myself in my way that I do to my jobs, that’s what is going to create the stability for me.”

    Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].

    This story about job skills was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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  • Are young college graduates losing an edge in the job market?

    Are young college graduates losing an edge in the job market?

    This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.

    Dive Brief:

    • Young college graduates are now spending more time unemployed than job hunters with only a high school diploma, according to an analysis published Monday.
    • Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found that, from June 2024 to June 2025, 37.1% of unemployed workers between the ages of 22 and 27 with at least a bachelor’s degree either found work or stopped looking for work each month. That’s compared to 41.5% of their peers who only completed high school.
    • Their report comes amid other signs of a tough job market for recent graduates. The most recent unemployment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, released Thursday, shows 9.7% of bachelor’s degree holders ages 20 to 24 were unemployed in September — up from 6.8% a year prior.

    Dive Insight:

    A college degree still provides young workers with economic and professional advantages, the Cleveland Fed analysis found. Once employed, college graduates earn more than their degreeless counterparts and experience increased job stability, it said.

    However, researchers pointed to signs that some of the job market advantages of a college degree are eroding. 

    For decades, workers with a high school degree typically saw unemployment rates about 5 percentage points higher than college graduates did, according to the analysis. 

    That gap temporarily widened during the 2008 financial crisis, when high school graduates had a particularly difficult time finding work. 

    But the Great Recession obscured that the gap in job-finding rates between high school graduates and those with four-year college degrees had been slowly closing since the turn of the century, according to the Cleveland Fed researchers.

    With brief exception during the pandemic, the unemployment rate gap between the two groups has slowly shrunk since 2008.

    In July, the 12-month average unemployment rate for young college graduates stood only 2.5 percentage points lower than that of their peers without a postsecondary degree. That’s the smallest gap since the record low of 2.4 percentage points in March 2024.

    That slim difference, combined with the delay in degree-holders getting hired, indicates “that a long period of relatively easier job-finding prospects for college grads has ended,” researchers said Monday.

    “The labor market advantages conferred by a college degree have historically justified individual investment in higher education and expanding support for college access,” they said. “If the job-finding rate of college graduates continues to decline relative to the rate for high school graduates, we may see a reversal of these trends.”

    The pandemic resulted in a tight labor market, but the Cleveland Fed researchers said their findings can’t solely be attributed to the long-lasting disruptions of COVID-19.

    “If historically tight labor markets drove narrowing, the high school job-finding rate should have risen to match college rates rather than a decline in the college job-finding rate,” they said. 

    The decades-long trend also predates the influence of artificial intelligence on the job market.

    Instead, the researchers noted that the timing correlates with a broader market shift from “college-biased to education-neutral growth in labor demand.”

    “Declining job prospects among young college graduates may reflect the continued growth in college attainment, adding ever larger cohorts of college graduates to the ranks of job seekers, even though technology no longer favors college-educated workers,” they said.

    However, older degree-holders are not seeing the same stark unemployment numbers.

    In September, 3.6% of bachelor’s degree-holders ages 25 to 34 were unemployed, according to BLS data. That’s well under the overall unemployment rate of 4.4%, which is the highest it’s been in four years.

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  • Nursing Holds Much Promise for Aspiring Job Applicants

    Nursing Holds Much Promise for Aspiring Job Applicants

    With the dawn of a new year ahead, anyone looking for new opportunities can find one in nursing, with a wealth of job openings currently available.

    Beverly Malone, Ph.D., RN, FAAN

    President and CEO, National League for Nursing

    A persistent shortage of registered nurses (RNs) and licensed practical nurses (LPNs) is at the root of nursing jobs going unfilled, caused by: 

    • An aging nursing workforce, prompting a wave of retirements accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic
    • The increased demand for healthcare by the aging Baby Boomer generation
    • Job stress and burnout precipitating workforce exits, particularly by nurses with less than two years of experience
    • A shortage of nurse educators, limiting the capacity of nursing programs to admit more qualified applicants

    Among the additional effects of too few nurses are higher levels of medication, safety, and other clinical errors, and potential hospital closures in regions with the lowest ratio of nurses to patients. For example, in June 2023, there were nearly 300 rural hospitals at risk of immediate closure. Texas and Kansas led this trend, with 29 of their hospitals facing imminent shutdown. 

    Both states’ widely dispersed populations meant that the loss of vital healthcare infrastructure would have a devastating ripple effect on local economies, in addition to threatening healthcare access for some of society’s most vulnerable. So, how to address these multiple challenges? 

    Encouraging more nurse educators

    One obvious approach to expand the nursing workforce is to hire more nurse educators to prepare a greater number of nurses for practice. While this goal may sound simple, in reality, it is hard to achieve, given budget constraints and the lack of state, federal, and local funding to support clinical nurses desiring to transition into education. 

    Still, there are so many rewards that come with a career in nursing or nursing education — or both. Yes, it’s more than possible to combine the daily satisfactions of clinical practice with the long-term fulfillment inherent in teaching, mentoring, and preparing outstanding practice-ready practitioners. That remains true whether you become an instructor in academia exclusively or a clinical nurse educator, supplementing your own nursing practice in an academic medical center.

    Nursing itself has become a multi-dimensional field with a number of career pathways, including advanced practice roles. Specialties like nurse-anesthetist or doctor of nursing practice (D.N.P.) often come with welcome higher paychecks and professional status. 

    Plus, with nurses now providing more of the frontline preventative care and chronic disease management in community clinics and through non-traditional healthcare settings, a variety of job opportunities may provide scheduling flexibility that’s compatible with family responsibilities. 

    Nursing education offers an incredible opportunity to engage in research that has the potential to transform the educational landscape for generations. Nurse educators, with their scholarly expertise, are also often at the forefront of nursing and community leadership, tapped to consult in the highest circles of government, public policy, nonprofits, and industry. 

    The sky is the limit. Consider exploring the possibilities of nursing and nursing education, while helping resolve one of today’s most urgent crises: too few healers to provide the healing.

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  • UTS academics pitch alternative to job cuts – Campus Review

    UTS academics pitch alternative to job cuts – Campus Review

    The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) vice-chancellor has been asked whether he would consider an alternative restructure plan written by his own academics, at a NSW government hearing on Friday.

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  • Class of 2025 says they see the effects of a tough job market

    Class of 2025 says they see the effects of a tough job market

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    The Class of 2025 faced a particularly tough job market, searching for jobs earlier, submitting more applications — averaging 10 applications to the Class of 2024’s six — and receiving fewer offers on average, a National Association of Colleges and Employers study said in a recent report, in partnership with Indeed.

    Graduates were more likely to accept those offers, however, even amid uncertainty; 86.7% of those offered a job had accepted in 2025, compared to 81.2% of 2024 graduates.

    “Compared to earlier classes, they were more likely to say they were unsure about their plans, and more were planning to enter the military, suggesting they were unsure about private-sector employment,” NACE said in an Oct. 30 announcement regarding the report.

    Young workers have been particularly exposed to the changes brought by artificial intelligence tools, some research has indicated. A report from Stanford University noted that early-career workers in AI-exposed fields have seen a 13% relative decline in employment. Those fields included software engineering and customer service, among others.

    Notably, less than a third of students surveyed by NACE said they used AI in their job search, and in a separate survey conducted by the organization, fewer than 22% of employers said they used it in their recruiting efforts.

    Skills-based hiring also appears to still be largely unknown to graduates, NACE said; fewer than 40% of those surveyed said they were familiar with the term, though a little less than half said they were asked to perform a skills assessment as part of their job application.

    Companies previously told Hirevue and Aptitude Research they don’t feel effective at skill validation, still relying largely on resumes and self-reported skills for assessments. The majority of graduates surveyed did participate in what NACE called experiential learning, however, including internships, indicating a cohort that may be interested in learning skills on the job.

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  • Algal bloom expert loses job amid outbreak – Campus Review

    Algal bloom expert loses job amid outbreak – Campus Review

    After nearly three decades researching South Australia’s oceans at Flinders University, a leading algal bloom expert now faces an uncertain future after being told his role is being scrapped under a major restructure.

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