3 The Opportunity Ahead: A Call to Action for American Skills and Jobs the employment space. First, because of the expanding number of employers that are clearly signaling what skills and credentials they will hire to; second, a growth in innovative models for accelerated training; and lastly, partnerships between the private sector, education and training providers, and state and local governments supported by granular, local-level data. The skills that workers need to become job-ready tend to be relatively common across employers, well- documented, and measureable. For instance, the top eight skills needed for IT jobs cover 43 percent 63 of all IT jobs in the United States, and many of these skills can be successfully taught and tested online. Employers are also increasingly accepting competency-based credentials, not just formal academic credentials, in making hiring decisions. Combined with technical certification and testing, credentials provide flexible alternatives to those seeking to retrain in a new field, gain a new skill, or enhance their earning potential for an IT position. This model can save employers time in searching for qualified candidates and save candidates money compared to more expensive traditional degree programs. At the same time, it opens up markets for training providers of all kinds armed with clarity about what skills they should be teaching students to increase job placement rates. There have also been exciting advances in “accelerated training,” a reimagined, competency-based approach to developing technical skills that might otherwise take years of practical experience or expensive four-year degrees to master (see box below). Advances in Accelerated Training for IT Skills Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) One pilot, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), trained Navy recruits and unemployed veterans with no previous technical experience to perform at or above the competency level of a 10-year expert with only 16 weeks of intensive training. Per Scholas Accelerated training has also been successful at providing entry-level skills that put people on the first rung of the career ladder. Per Scholas, a free, 12-15 week technology job training program has trained more than 4,500 un- and underemployed adults since 1998, has a 77 percent job placement rate. Finally, opportunities to build upon and expand successful partnerships between local and federal government, and the public and private sector, are substantial and increasingly important. For example, in Cincinnati, Partners for Competitive Workforce (PCW) has facilitated strong partnerships between the CIO Roundtable (25 CIOs responsible for over 6,000 local IT jobs), the Chamber of Commerce, and a range of innovative training opportunities from mid-level career re-training to entry- level support role training. To take another example, the Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF), a membership organization of Fortune 500 CEOs and college presidents, works to align college and community college curricula with in-demand skills. It has led workforce development projects focused on cybersecurity and IT education, in which universities and community colleges such as California Polytechnic State University and Miami Dade College partner with businesses such as Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and NextEra Energy to establish undergraduate cybersecurity and IT programs that train for in-demand skills. When it comes to partnerships, the Administration can play an essential convening role, highlighting best practices and new models, setting the tone for mayors 63 CEB TalentNeuron research and analysis, crawling of public profiles, skill predictor algorithms, CEB TalentNeuron Skill Taxonomy & SME Interviews. CEB, 2013.Unpublished 75