Date sent: Thu, 6 Feb 1997 06:48:57 -0800
From: LindaP (Texas)
Subject: National Skill Standards Board Mission Statement

http://www.nssb.org/bg/emission.html

The National Skill Standards Board Mission Statement:

An Elaboration

The mission of the National Skill Standards Board is to encourage the creation and adoption of a national system of skill standards which will enhance the ability of the United States to compete effectively in a global economy. These voluntary skill standards will be developed by industry in full partnership with education, labor, and community stakeholders, and will be flexible, portable, and continuously updated and improved.

This national skill standards system is intended to do the following:

•promote the growth of high performance work organizations in the private and public sectors that operate on the basis of productivity, quality and innovation, and in the private sector, profitability;

•raise the standard of living and economic security of American workers by improving access to high skill, high wage employment and career opportunities for those currently in, entering, or re-entering the workforce; and

•encourage the use of world-class academic, occupational and employability standards to guide continuous education and training for current and future workers.

The mission of the National Skill Standards Board (NSSB) is to encourage the creation and adoption of a national system of skill standards. The NSSB is a catalyst for the development of a voluntary system of skill standards that will support America's competitive position in the marketplace. The NSSB itself will not develop standards, but will serve as a catalyst to encourage those who will be the end-users of these standards -- business, education, labor, community groups, and state and local governments -- to develop these standards. We use the word creation consciously. Our role is not to codify existing standards, but to encourage the creation anew of a system of standards that tell the American worker what it is a person needs to know and be able to do to succeed in modern society and in the global economy.

These standards are meaningful only to the extent that the intended end-users adopt and use them; their creation alone is insufficient. The NSSB's role is to be a catalyst for the development of a voluntary system which creates and updates standards, to publicize the standards, and to encourage their use.

A national system of skill standards which will enhance the ability of the United States to compete effectively in a global economy. Our vision for standards is standards that are national in scope, not federal. The NSSB is not a federal government agency. It is a national body representing the end-users -- employers, unions, workers, students, teachers, and citizens -- who want to understand the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed for success in the modern workplace.

If these voluntary standards are truly national, they will represent a clear statement of our country's competitive position with respect to the skills of its people vis a vis other countries. Our nation's competition is not between the economy of one state versus another, Wisconsin versus Illinois. We are operating in a global economy; we compete on the basis of the skills of our people with all the other countries of the world. We seek not fifty separate state programs, but a system that serves all fifty states well. We hope each state that desires to create a competitive workforce will embrace this national system of standards voluntarily and make them known in every community throughout the state.

These skill standards, then, are designed to support America's competitive position in the increasingly competitive global marketplace. We believe an investment in the skills of our people will enhance America's competitive position, by giving it an edge that allows us to compete on a basis that includes quality, innovation, and productivity, in addition to price. Building our economic success as a nation through skills allows us to also benefit all our people, regardless of their state of residence or the particular industry or job they work in.

Price is no longer enough to capture and keep market share. Businesses now have to compete on the basis of quality, variety, customization, convenience, and timeliness. The United States can compete effectively on this basis only if its enterprises change the way they organize their work and use their human resources. Successful competition in the global economy can only be achieved if our people are on a continuous learning curve, so that their skills keep pace with the rapid changes in technology and work processes in the workplace and in society.

These voluntary skill standards will be developed by industry in full partnership with education, labor, and community stakeholders. The system of skill standards we envision is a voluntary system, not a system of federal regulation. Employers will use skill standards only if they prove useful in recruitment, hiring, promotion, and training decisions. If they are not useful, they will not be used. Industry must take the lead role in the development of the standards, to assure they represent today's and tomorrow's workplace requirements.

Business is not our only stakeholder. For the standards to be effective tools for teachers in educating students, for workers in maintaining their own competitive edge in the marketplace, for the unemployed in gaining the necessary skills to enable them to enter or re-enter the workforce, or for communities in understanding and meeting the skill requirements of local employers, these stakeholders must also be full partners in developing the standards. Teachers in K-12 education, vocational education, community and four-year colleges, and job training organizations must have a voice; and so must workers, the administrators of our state education and training systems, and organized labor so that the standards developed are embraced by and work for all. If all of the diverse stakeholders are full participants from the beginning, they will assure that the standards meet their needs. A voluntary system assures that it will be a customer-driven system.

Each of these stakeholders should determine who speaks for them; they are fully able to decide who would best represent their interests in the standards development and implementation. By allowing stakeholders to choose their representation, we assure not only the individual support of the representative, but also create the base of institutional support for creating and using skill standards that is so vital for their long-term sustainability.

The standards will be flexible, portable, and continuously updated and improved. In today's environment, change is the only constant. New technologies are creating new jobs, new industries, and new ways of working. If skill standards are to effectively articulate these changing workplace realities and help workers anticipate change, the standards themselves must be continuously updated and improved.

Just as important, the voluntary skill standards must describe the underlying competence that defines worker excellence. The standards will be meaningless if they are merely detailed lists of competencies that describe specific task steps and lose sight of what it takes to perform in an ever-evolving work environment. By flexibility, we mean standards that have staying power and that get at the critical elements of performance without getting bogged down in lists of tasks that all too quickly become outmoded. In short, employees need to understand the whys of their jobs, and not just the hows.

If the standards use a common language, if they describe knowledge, skills, and abilities using the same framework, then the standards will be portable. Students and workers will be able to move from state to state, industry to industry, employer to employer and know that the skills they've achieved are understood.

The national skill standards system intends to promote the growth of high performance work organizations in the private and public sectors that operate on the basis of productivity, quality, and innovation, and in the private sector, profitability. This nation, if it is to be competitive in the global economy, cannot compete on the same basis as countries with much lower cost structures than ours. We cannot compete solely on price, but we can compete on quality, customization, innovation, and timeliness. To do so, however, requires American enterprises to work differently, to reorganize work so that we capitalize on our front-line workforce, and ask them to take major responsibility for the continuous improvement of products and services and the processes by which they are produced.

Enterprises who adopt this approach are ones we call high performance work organizations. These organizations recognize that sustainable economic success depends, in large part, on workers who:

•can take on one another's jobs when needed to meet customer expectations,
•work collaboratively in a variety of teams, and
•who think and learn in constantly evolving ways.

In essence, the high performance work organization demands that the entire workforce has a high level of skills, not just managers or professional workers.

These high performance organizations are needed not just in the private, for-profit sector but also in the public and nonprofit sectors. After all, our public infrastructure supports our private businesses; businesses use the public highways to move goods to market and public education provides businesses with a skilled workforce. Nonprofit organizations, such as the Red Cross, support our communities in times of natural disasters. These three sectors are inter-dependent; all need to operate at high levels of performance.

Raise the standard of living and economic security of American workers by improving access to high skill, high wage employment and career opportunities for those currently in, entering, or re-entering the workforce. Workers in a high performance enterprise are able to share in the benefits of a growing economy and have achieved economic security, because they have attained the skills needed to command wages and benefits sufficient to support their family. Productivity alone is not sufficient; it must be linked with improving the standards of living of all American workers: workers in manufacturing and service jobs, in enterprises large and small, and for front-line workers and managers.

The NSSB cannot assure access to good jobs, but it intends to improve access to these jobs for all Americans by making sure that the skills needed to get these jobs are clearly spelled out to students, new entrants to the job market, current workers, laid-off workers, and people trying to re-enter the work force. By clearly and simply spelling out the skill needs of employers, we hope to promote both horizontal and vertical career movement. Our work will result in voluntary standards that make it easier for workers to see how their skills can be transferred laterally from one industry or job area to another, as well as ease the transition from novice to expert worker.

Whether someone is moving from school-to-work, work-to-work, or out-of-work to work, skill standards will make clear what skills and knowledge the transition requires. The routes to meeting those standards will differ among individuals who are currently employed, students, or individuals who are trying to apply their skills to a new occupation. Skill standards will serve as a tool to increase accountability and performance among providers of educational and training services.

Encourage the use of world-class academic, occupational, and employability standards to guide continuous education and training for current and future workers. If our standards are intended to allow this country to compete effectively in the global economy, then what is required are skills that are second to none. Every American is a part of the global economy. We do him or her a disservice if our standards only address local or even state labor market requirements. If the United States has the most skilled work force in the world, its enterprises will use American workers when they are competing on the basis of quality, rather than acquire labor from other countries. We cannot afford to give American enterprises a reason to look elsewhere.

The standards must address academic, occupational, and employability skill requirements. Our work will build on a strong foundation of academic skills and show an explicit link between the skills learned in the classroom with those required in the workplace, and how the basic skills of reading, writing, listening, speaking, and computation are used in the workplace. They will also draw on and show the application of the employability skills of problem-solving, decision making, learning-to-learn, teamwork, negotiation, and others as described in ASTD's Workplace Basics and the SCANS report. Occupational skills refer to the skills that are transferable among broad industrial or occupational areas (e.g., computer applications) as well as the core occupational knowledge and skills that are particular to a cluster of occupations. The voluntary skill standards will represent a synthesis of these three types of skills as they are applied in the workplace.

In a traditional Tayloristic workplace, a few workers (e.g., managers, professionals, and technicians) need a high level of academic education, a few workers are highly-skilled in a narrow job category (e.g., machinist), but most front line workers require little of either. The emerging high performance work organization requires a high level of academic knowledge and ability, a high level of occupation-specific knowledge and skills, and possession of employability or SCANS-like skills such as problem-solving, teamwork, etc. across all levels of the organization, from the front line worker to the CEO.

In a high performance work organization, academic, occupational, and employability skills are not independent of one another. It is the integration of all three that is necessary to function effectively. Therefore, any system of skill standards must recognize the significance and synergy among these skill components and assure that they are explicitly addressed.

The skill standards are designed to guide, not mandate, continuous education and training. In a rapidly changing world, our education and training institutions must keep pace with change and adapt their pedagogy and the content of educational programs to the continually evolving sets of skill standards. Only those institutions that take on the challenge of change and continuous improvement are likely to prosper.