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Palgrave Macmillan

Teaching and Learning Employability Skills in Career and Technical Education

Industry, Educator, and Student Perspectives

  • Book
  • © 2020

Overview

  • Provides examples of how industry-desired employability skills can be successfully taught and learned to prepare high school students for the local workforce
  • Fills the gap in research on applied STEM courses that focused on the practical application of academic STEM knowledge and concepts to real world job experiences
  • Focuses on alternative post-secondary pathways which account for delays into the workforce via the STEM track
  • Provides concrete examples of career readiness strategies employers want to see
  • Demonstrates how students learn personal and interpersonal skills from hands-on activities and projects

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Urban Education (PSUE)

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

Keywords

About this book

This book examines how industry-desired employability skills—or “soft skills”—are taught and learned in high school career and technical education (CTE) engineering and engineering technology programs. Identifying, recruiting, and keeping workers with strong personal and interpersonal skills is a constant challenge for STEM employers who need to hire young workers to replace an aging technical workforce. To answer the call, teachers interviewed explained that they maintain regimented daily classroom routines that include individual and small group hands-on activities and projects. In turn, their students explain learning personal responsibility, work ethic, teamwork, leadership, conflict management, and social skills in the classroom. Narratives from the workforce and classroom interweave to put employability skills frameworks into action.


Reviews

“The examination of employability skills and the way that subsequent chapters break this concept down into concrete practices is especially helpful in understanding how we as educators can be building soft skills into our students' learning and into our teaching in a more thoughtful, intentional way.”
Elizabeth Leblanc, Director of Instruction, Taos Academy Charter School, USA, and Co-Founder/CEO, Institute for Teaching and Leading (i4tl), USA

“Before reading this book, I wasn’t aware of the high school programs available that taught critical thinking, teamwork, and problem solving techniques that could be applied to the manufacturing/service trade industry. Our recruiting team will be partnering up with similar programs in our city to build a strong bench of employees. As the aging technical workforce retires, the next generation will have to fill both existing as well as newly created jobs.”
Linh Tran, President and CEO, Advanced Commercial Contractors, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of Sociology, University of South Florida, Tampa, USA

    Will Tyson

About the author

Will Tyson is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of South Florida, USA. His research examines interpersonal and structural influences on science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) educational and career pathways out of high schools, community colleges, and four-year universities. He specializes in mixed methods research.

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Teaching and Learning Employability Skills in Career and Technical Education

  • Book Subtitle: Industry, Educator, and Student Perspectives

  • Authors: Will Tyson

  • Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Urban Education

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58744-4

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham

  • eBook Packages: Education, Education (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-58743-7Published: 13 October 2020

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-58746-8Published: 14 October 2021

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-58744-4Published: 12 October 2020

  • Series ISSN: 2946-241X

  • Series E-ISSN: 2946-2428

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: IX, 171

  • Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations, 2 illustrations in colour

  • Topics: Career Skills, Professional & Vocational Education, Engineering/Technology Education, Learning & Instruction

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