NC-RA Seeking Founding Board Members

Published by Kathleen Houlihan on January 5, 2021January 5, 2021

Seeking Industry Partners and Thought Leaders Interested in Developing the Workforce of Tomorrow

PHILADELPHIA, PA, UNITED STATES, January 5, 2020

The National Career-Readiness Association (NC-RA), a forming 501(c)(3), is seeking industry and educational leaders to sit on its founding board charged with developing a National Workforce Recovery Plan (NWRP) that helps students and displaced workers find learning on-ramps leading to sustainable careers. The NC-RA will be built upon four pillars; develop, connect, validate, and advance career-readiness projects in schools and communities. The NC-RA board will be made up of executive leaders who can use the Horizontal Industry Framework (HIF) to develop policy, purpose, and curriculum that supports learning and workforce development initiatives.

The Board will be charged with helping the nation tackle the psychological, educational, and operational challenges of getting students and displaced workers back to work after the COVID-19 crisis decimated communities across the nation. This disaster recovery initiative is designed to inspire hope and promise at a time of greatest need by providing a win-win-win solution for jobseekers, organizations, and communities.

This initiative will provide a framework for all industries to effectively work together to tackle societal problems and pressing issues like sustainability, privacy and security, diversity and inclusion, and the political divide. The plan will uncover new methods for innovation and change and it will provide a sense of belonging that will move society forward in a positive way. Dr. Kathleen Houlihan, NC-RA’s Acting President, states, “The NC-RA Board’s ability to develop a National Workforce Recovery Plan is vital to our nation’s success as we emerge from this crisis with promise and purpose and as we seek ways to innovate, collaborate, and create thriving organizations and communities.”

The NWRP will create synergies between workforce and education that close achievement gaps by using innovation and collaboration in the work-learn space. The Board will also be working with educators to support the implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which essentially highlights inroads, for students, to high demand and emerging industries matching their career interests.

In 2001, the National Science Foundation (NSF) changed their career fields’ categorization to STEM. Government entities, schools, and industry collectively used the term STEM to identify the skills and integrated knowledge in science, technology, engineering, and math. Because of the popularity and mainstream use of the acronym, schools were able to develop curriculum, government was able to write policy, and industry was able to innovate in all of the STEM fields.

The Horizontal Industry Framework, developed by Dr. Houlihan, uses the same logic as STEM which brings entities from various industries together with shared knowledge of a subject to innovate and collaborate under a shared vision. The HIF does not replace STEM, it expands its initiatives and allows all industry professionals to have a common language that allows for participation and collaboration with government, educators, parents, displaced workers, and interested students. The Horizontal Industry Framework is also inclusive because it reaches diverse genders, races, ages, classes, and communities who can converge around similar interests and objectives.

By including the HIF as the base structure for the National Workforce Recovery Plan, SMEs, educators, and students with similar interests and schools of thought can coalesce to create curriculum, reframe current structures, innovate training on-ramps, and create the workforce of tomorrow.

To learn more about NC-RA, please visit www.nc-ra.org.

About Dream2Career, LLC
Dream2Career, LLC is a specialized intermediary that works with schools, businesses, and workforce groups to create synergies between workforce and education. The D2C mission is to integrate the HIF in ways that help students and career seekers succeed in learning and in life. D2C is a women-owned startup located in Northeastern PA.
To learn more about Dream2Career, LLC, please visit www.dream2career.org.

This article first appeared in EIN News