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号召，对科学，技术，工程和数学（STEM）技术领域的中级技能专业人员的需求正在增加。STEM导向的技术人员部门的教育规划和工作要求的一致性对于建立职业道路至关重要，这些职业道路为技术丰富的领域培养高质量的中级技能专业人员。基于先前对信息技术（IT）职业道路的研究，该针对性研究项目调查了先进制造（AM）中教育规划，雇主需求和新员工体验的对齐，并测试了开发用于评估此类对齐的工具和流程的有用性。关注农村地区的机遇和挑战，该项目的总体目标是通过更好地了解课程之间的关系，雇主的期望，并在AM学生准备工作，以提高农村制造能力。定量和定性混合方法的研究设计结合内容分析和文本挖掘与调查，访谈/焦点小组。文献综述框架的研究通过整合先进制造业教育，就业资格的技术丰富的技术人员领域的文献，并准备从事创业和内部创业作为员工或创新者/小企业主。研究设计，仪器开发和数据分析将由理论方法指导，融合了人力，社会和文化资本的理论。研究团队将应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，州和专业标准和行业证书/认证要求与课程教学大纲和职位发布相匹配。访谈和焦点小组的定性分析将通过一个迭代过程，将数据聚类为主题，直到饱和和主题稳定下来，从而检查雇主和雇员的期望。将计算不同来源的数据之间的匹配程度，并检查教育方案和工作要求的一致性和差异。对工具/仪器和流程进行测试，以进行先进制造业工作要求的教育规划分析，将证实分析其他STEM技术人员计划中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.