ABE Career Connections: A Manual for Integrating Adult Basic Education into Career Pathways

Summary

To further the efforts to connecting Adult Basic Education (ABE) with postsecondary career pathways, the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE), funded the Adult Basic Education Career Connections (ABECC) project in 2006-2010, a demonstration project involving five sites across the country. Between 2008-2009, the sites developed and implemented work plans focused on improving adults’ basic skills to prepare them to enter career pathways. To help other ABE programs undertake similar work, this manual, Adult Career Pathways: Providing a Second Chance in Public Education, provides an overview of career pathways and describes approaches used by the ABECC sites to align basic skills training and partnership efforts with local career pathways. This manual is organized into sections describing approaches to implementing pathways components, examples from the ABECC sites, the challenges they encountered, and resources that were provided to the sites. The content of this manual includes:

Overview of ABE Career Pathways - defines ABE career pathways and discusses steps involved in designing them.
Descriptions of Pathway Components and Site Examples - summarizes information on the pathway components and discusses challenges related to the pathway component and offers implementation examples from the ABECC sites.
Student Recruitment, Orientation, and Placement - discusses approaches to identifying participants, introducing them to the educational and employment steps along the pathway, and confirming a match between their skills and interests and the pathway goals.
Course Development - discusses approaches to designing and delivering contextualized basic skills courses, and strategies for helping participants transition to postsecondary education.
Partnerships - discusses approaches to establishing and sustaining partnerships in support of ABE pathways and provides information on the types of partners that may be involved and possible roles they may play.
Data Collection and Analysis - discusses approaches to collecting and analyzing program and participant data on an ongoing basis to measure participants’ basic skills gains and assess the effectiveness of the basic skills training. This section also examines the selection and use of appropriate assessment tools.

The manual concludes with summarizing lessons learned from the sites about the design and implementation of ABE career pathways and discusses possible implications for policy and practice. A list of resources with links, descriptions, and a glossary are also provided.

Citation

MPR Associates, Inc. (2010). ABE Career Connections: A Manual for Integrating Adult Basic Education into Career Pathways.

Retrieved From

http://www.policy2performance.org/wp-content/uploads/ABE_Career_Connections_Manual.pdf