Assessing Educational Pathways for Manufacturing in Rural Communities: An Investigation of New and Existing Programs in Northwest Florida

随着建设国家熟练技术劳动力的呼声，对科学、技术、工程、数学（STEM）等技术领域的中等技能专业人才的需求正在增加。为stem技术领域培养高质量的中等技能专业人员，建立职业道路至关重要。基于先前对信息技术（IT）职业发展路径的研究，这个有针对性的研究项目调查了先进制造（AM）中教育规划、雇主需求和新员工经验的一致性，并测试了用于评估这种一致性的工具和流程的有效性。着眼于农村地区的机遇和挑战，该项目的总体目标是通过更好地理解课程、雇主期望和学生对AM工作的准备之间的关系来提高农村的制造能力。定量和定性混合方法的研究设计将内容分析和文本挖掘与调查、访谈/焦点小组相结合。通过整合先进制造业教育、技术丰富的技术人员领域的就业资格、以及作为雇员或创新者/小企业主从事创业和内部创业的准备等方面的文献，对文献进行了综述，从而构建了研究框架。研究设计、仪器开发和数据分析将以融合人力、社会和文化资本理论的理论方法为指导。研究团队将采用文本挖掘方法进行文本预处理和关键词提取，以识别教学大纲中指定的学习成果；标记文本；提取和识别关键词；并将国家、州和专业标准与行业证书/认证要求与课程大纲和招聘启事相匹配。访谈和焦点小组的定性分析将通过将数据聚类到主题的迭代过程来检查雇主和雇员的期望，直到饱和和主题稳定。将计算和检查来自不同来源的数据之间的匹配程度，以确定教育规划和工作要求的一致性和差异性。对工具/仪器和过程进行测试，以分析先进制造业中工作要求的教育计划，这将证实分析其他stem技术人员计划职业道路的方法的可行性。

With the call for building the nation's skilled technical workforce, the demand for middle skill professionals in technical fields in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) is increasing. The alignment of educational programming and job requirements for STEM-oriented technician sectors is essential for establishing career pathways that produce high quality middle skills professionals for technology-rich fields. Building on prior research on career pathways in Information Technologies (IT) this targeted research project investigates the alignment of educational programming, employer needs, and new employee experience in Advanced Manufacturing (AM) and tests the usefulness of tools and processes developed to assess such alignment. Focusing on the opportunities and challenges in rural areas, the overarching goal of the project is to improve rural manufacturing capacity by better understanding the relationships among curriculum, employer expectations, and student readiness for jobs in AM.The quantitative and qualitative mixed methods research design combines content analysis and text mining with surveys, and interviews/focus groups. A review of the literature frames the study by integrating the literature on advanced manufacturing education, employment qualifications for technology-rich technician fields, and readiness to engage in entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship as employee or innovator/small business owner. The research design, instrument development, and data analyses will be guided by a theoretical approach that blends theories of human, social, and cultural capital. The research team will apply text mining approaches for text preprocessing and keyword extraction to identify learning outcomes specified in syllabi; tokenize the text; extract and identify keywords; and match national, state, and professional standards and requirements for industry certificates/certifications with course syllabi and job postings. Qualitative analysis of interviews and focus groups will examine the expectations of employers and employees through an iterative process for clustering data into themes until saturation and themes have stabilized. The extent of matching among data from different sources will be calculated and examined for congruence and divergence of educational programming and job requirements. The testing of tools/instruments and processes for conducting analyses of educational programing with job requirements in advanced manufacturing will confirm the viability of an approach for analyzing career pathways in other STEM-oriented technician programs.