In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

c h a p t e r s i x The Limits of ‘‘Training for Now’’ Lessons from Information Technology Certification j i m j a c o b s a n d w. n o r t o n g r u b b Students need to have other things that feed into that learning experience so that they’re not left with just a training that’s only good for now, but an education that will carry on. And that’s why certi- fications are folded into courses; they’re not standing out there as a course. We’re not going to train you in just this Cisco, it’s folded into a wider thing. —A community college dean, National Field Study Workforce development in the United States is largely carried out in community colleges, particularly for middle-level jobs, as well as in four-year colleges and universities for middle-level and professional positions. Typically, students complete a series of courses designed by educators to meet the skill demands of relevant occupations, and then they receive credentials based on courses passed—often disparaged as ‘‘seattime ’’ credentials, because they depend on sitting still long enough to accumulate the required course credits.∞ Unlike some other developed countries—particularly the German-speaking countries—the United States does not maintain a work-based system to prepare those entering the workforce, and the criteria for credentials are largely decided by education providers rather than employers. In the past two decades, however, this approach has been challenged in several ways, particularly by those who believe that relatively low skill levels among the technical workforce can be attributed to school-based education rather than job preparation more closely aligned to the workplace (Secretary’s Commission for Achieving Necessary Skills, 1991). The failure to prepare an adequate workforce has been widely cited as a potential threat to U.S. competitiveness, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s, when the presumably superior Japanese and German workforce-development Lessons from Information Technology Certification 133 systems were seen as major threats (Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce [CSAW], 1990). One response has been to strengthen the academic preparation of all students, but other responses have included the e√orts to develop more work-based learning—through the ill-fated e√orts of the 1994 School-to-Work Opportunities Act, now abandoned and viewed as ine√ective (Hershey et al., 1998; Stull, 2003) —and e√orts to create new kinds of credentials to replace seat-time credentials. In particular, as part of the boom in information technology (IT) during the 1990s, specific high-profile firms, including Microsoft, Novell, and Cisco, created firmspeci fic certificates to certify the abilities of individuals to work with the hardware and software of that firm only. Their promoters vowed that such certificates would reshape the workforce preparation system and establish new modes of learning (Flynn, 2002), and others suggested that firms were creating a parallel educational universe outside of the traditional institutions, threatening to displace community colleges (Adelman, 2000). As one of the apparent challenges to the future of colleges, we included the issue of IT certification in the National Field Study. In each of the National Field Study colleges, therefore, we surveyed all the firm-based certificate programs o√ered by the college, interviewed instructors and administrators, and tried to collect information on the magnitude of such e√orts and their e√ects on students. We wanted to address three specific questions: ≤ What is the involvement of community colleges with certification programs? ≤ What is the impact of these activities on the future delivery of workforce development at these colleges? ≤ What implications do these developments have for the equity role of community colleges? Four years later, the demand for IT certificates has waned, and the supposed threat of these practices to community colleges has disappeared. The responses of colleges to IT certificates, however, have been instructive about a more general set of issues, including the role of formal schooling in workforce preparation, the linkages between colleges and employers, the balance of specific versus general approaches to workforce preparation, the equity of alternative approaches, and the nature of community colleges themselves. In this chapter, we first examine the roles of credentials in workforce development. We then describe the rise of IT certificates (and several other alternative credentialing e√orts) and the multiple ways community colleges incorporated them into broader programs. We...

Share