Education
Quality education is essential to a skilled and competitive workforce. Access to education, coupled with reliable, quality childcare is key for improving economic opportunities for all Americans.
Our education system is failing many students as shown by data that reveals two-thirds of our fourth and eighth graders are unable to read or do math at their grade level. And the United States ranks below a number of other countries in reading and math proficiency. Recognizing the importance of childcare as a key component of the education system is crucial to addressing the current challenges and ensuring that every child has the support they need to thrive.
- 6th in ReadingGlobal Ranking for U.S. Students
- 10th in ScienceGlobal Ranking for U.S. Students
- 26th in MathGlobal Ranking for U.S. Students
Introducing Commerce Meets Classroom, a new series from our K-12 education Senior Manager, Kyle Butler, featuring the business perspective on pressing education issues.
Stories of Education and Workforce in Action
Across our nation’s talent pipeline, we explore the stories of employers investing in the workforce of today and tomorrow to close the skills gap.
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Programs and Initiatives
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Most people agree that the foundation for later learning and skill-building is shaped by children’s earliest childhood experiences. But do we all agree on what “early” means? Our brains grow faster between the ages of 0 and 3 than at any later point in our lives, forming more than one million new neural connections every second. When babies have nurturing relationships, early learning experiences, and good health and nutrition, these neural connections are stimulated and strengthened, laying a strong foundation for success in school and the workforce.
The world is changing. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is here, and it is having an impact on everything, including the future of work. A significant evolution of the labour market is forecast over the next 10 years, and we do not fully know all the jobs of the future. Given the hyper transformation of technology, business models, and work, it is important to understand and anticipate what this means for youth, society, businesses, and government, so that everyone has an opportunity to participate in the digital economy.
Given we all do play a role in shaping the culture of our organizations, teams and communities with every minute and every interaction – whether we intend to or not – how should we go about creating a culture that doesn’t just lead to innovative leaders, but that leads to growth and meaning and ownership in our young people in particular?
The Metro Atlanta Chamber has created a model to convene and unite local businesses, childcare providers, school administrators, and other community leaders to identify what works for their community, increase the state's focus on early childhood education as an economic issue, and advocate with one voice for the right solutions.
On Wednesday, April 17, the U.S. Chamber Foundation co-hosted a Twitter chat with Save the Children Action Network (SCAN) to engage a broad audience in a conversation about early childhood education as a critical workforce issue. The goal of the chat was to engage individuals, advocates, and employers across the country in a focused discussion where we could all collectively share the data, stories, and research behind this two-generation challenge. We were thrilled with the turnout.
Increasingly human resource professionals are applying supply chain theory to the growing misalignment of talent available to meet 21st century workforce needs. There are a number of drivers at the root cause of this trend, one notable driver being the technological evolution that has dramatically changed the skillset required for workforce demand.
Whether new and changing roles are due to modernizing technologies, transformations in how work is organized and carried out within a company, or retraining workers to transition into new jobs because their current jobs are being eliminated, employers must demonstrate leadership in identifying these transitional moments as an opportunity to establish an upskilling strategy to build on existing investments and skill sets.
The “Learner Revolution” represents an exhilarating, yet daunting deconstruction of the degree as we know it: a world where a learner will not be tethered to one institution for their degree, where in fact, earning a whole degree will be only one option on a success-focused learner’s menu.
The triple bottom line promise of workforce development is clear—good for the worker, good for the employer, good for the community—but to meet that potential, it’s essential to invest in stabilizing the workers we need to upskill, giving them the foundation they need to persist and succeed.
In both prosperous and challenging times, there is an ongoing gap that stands in the way of opportunity for many. Maybe we need to stop calling it the skills gap, or we need to collectively redefine what the gap is. No matter what we call it, we can all agree that the time for solving it is now.
