"One in 12 students now at community colleges — or more than 940,000 — previously earned a bachelor’s degree, according to the American Association of Community Colleges. And even as college and university enrollment overall declines, some career and technical education programs are reporting growth, and anticipating more of it."

Hastened by the pandemic, a trend many have been forecasting is coming true: bachelor's degrees are increasingly less relevant in the modern economy.

See how trends in higher education point towards CTE programs as an opportunity for meaningful career building. How are we preparing the youth of today for the future that is fast approaching?

As career trends become less certain, managers are having to be more adaptive to lead their teams to success. This piece from the Harvard Business Review highlights the importance of managers filling the role of coaches, since "coaching is becoming integral to the fabric of a learning culture—a skill that good managers at all levels need to develop and deploy."

In order to develop an agile and adaptive organization, leaders need to think like coaches, rather than in an other-directed, one-right-answer mentality. What's more, coaching skills can be learned by anyone, and there are a variety of styles to implement based on the situation and team dynamic at hand.

As we move towards a new year and continued uncertainty, how can a coaching methodology improve your organization or classroom's culture?

Continuing on the theme of cultural paradigms, this blog piece from Thought Exchange outlines Peter Senge's eleven laws of systems thinking and how they apply to the education system in the United States. 

The brief recap of each of Senge's eleven laws are tied to community engagement as a means to improve the outcomes of education, from bringing in a more diverse group of people to address a problem to the goals set by the organization (or community, or group). 

Use this piece as an entry point to understand the complex yet subtle ways our systems operate, and to reflect on how we can improve our processes.

For a deeper dive into changing a system, check out Donella Meadows' impactful piece on leverage points. 

Meadows outlines twelve of these leverage points, and describes how they might be useful. Importantly, she also cautions us to understand that, "what you are about to read is a work in progress. It’s not a simple, sure-fire recipe for finding leverage points. Rather, it’s an invitation to think more broadly about the many ways there might be to get systems to change."

Beginning with a brief overview of systems theory and then diving into her twelve points, this paper remains relevant as ever and offers us an opportunity to examine any of the systems we are part of and start to make changes.

"What skills matter most during the pandemic? What other forms of education, beyond a four-year degree, are gaining traction? Where should colleges be focusing their efforts now?

"Download [this] infographic to read results from a Chronicle survey of more than 250 hiring managers at medium and large companies and nonprofits to hear what they actually want from higher ed."

Relating back to the importance of building meaningful skills in high education, we found this infographic from the Chronicle of Higher Education to be quite insightful to the importance of shifting focus in what we study and how it is offered to students.