Abstract:

With rapid changes in technology, community and technical colleges are challenged to find ways to ensure that technical programs and curricula are aligned with changing skill demands among employers hiring their graduates. This need has been exacerbated with rapid changes in technology, and more recently with ubiquitous efforts to integrate machine learning and AI into new products and services. How can education institutions develop programs that anticipate emerging occupations – and identify the cross cutting skills that will enable their students to move into jobs that are, as yet, ill defined? Over the past three decades, Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) has successfully addressed this problem. EDC’s method involves by adapting the internationally validated DACUM (Developing a Curriculum) approach (Norton, 1997; DACUM, 2001), combining it with Germany’s “Training Occupations” approach, and supporting faculty through a set of customizable program development tools and professional development resources.

In this session participants will review the research design of the DACUM approach, a two day intensive focus group experience in which recognized expert front line workers develop a profile of an emerging occupation. Through this process they develop a new occupational title and definition that captures cross cutting skills found in a range of related occupations, and define work in this new occupation in terms of major duties and work tasks, and the knowledge, skills and behaviors needed to succeed in that work. Participants will review several profiles and related rubrics/assessment guidelines that describe employer’s expectations for worker success in targeted emerging occupations (Big Data Enabled Specialist, Data Practitioner, Computational Thinking Integration Specialist, and Computational Thinking Enabled Research Scientist). Participants will also review a suite of useful tools that support program developing including a Gap Analysis Tool that measures how closely programs/curricula are aligned with local industry expectations for worker success in new fields.

DACUM. An Online Resource for Occupational Analysis. (2001). Retrieved from http://www.dacum.org/index.asp

References:
[1] Robert E. Norton, DACUM Handbook, (Columbus, Ohio: 1997). The DACUM process has been widely promoted by Robert E. Norton and the Center on Education and Training for Employment at Ohio State University.

Keywords:

Workforce Development, Workforce Education, Emerging Occupations, Community Colleges, Technical Colleges, Business Partnerships, Competency-Based Training.