Aligning Postsecondary Education with Regional Workforce Needs: A Tale of Two States

Overview & Synopsis

The United States faces a pressing national security and competitiveness challenge rooted in a shortage of a diverse, highly skilled workforce, particularly in vital cross-disciplinary fields such as data science and analytics, cybersecurity, and information technology. To address this challenge, Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF) launched the National Higher Education and Workforce Initiative, employing a model of strategic business engagement with postsecondary education to meet the highest priority workforce needs. Through the initiative, BHEF plans, launches, and assesses projects, partnerships, and scaling strategies that are designed to enable business and higher education to move from transactional engagement in low-touch, piecemeal activities to strategic, long-term partnerships that align postsecondary education with workforce needs. Two of these projects--in Maryland and Ohio--offer models of such partnerships. Contains BHEF's Strategic Business Engagement Model. [This article was originally published in "The Book of the States, The Council of State Governments" 2015.]