A conference on “How Boosting Adult Educational Skills Can Grow the Middle Class” is scheduled for Thursday, October 10, 2013, 9 – 10:30 AM PT. You can watch the live webcast of the conference for free. Find out how at this link. 

Sponsored by the influential Washington, D.C.-based Center for American Progress (CAP), the conference’s intent is to showcase results from an important new study to be released at the conference on adult skills in the U.S compared to other highly developed countries. 

The study, “Survey of Adult Skills”, was conducted by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).  The Survey of Adult Skills is conducted in 33 countries as part of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC).  The U.S. Department of Education requested the special analysis of U.S. results from the survey that will be presented at the conference.

I believe this conference is important for a number of reasons, mostly obvious … except for one. Over the past several months, I have been in a number of meetings and attended several conferences related to education- and training-related public policy, which uniformly focused on improving education and training in our K-12/16 systems for children and young adults. 

I have said in previous posts and will repeat here, the recommendations and reforms proposed are all for the good.  I support them.  But where is the public policy focus on training adults?  As a society and as business people we can’t keep talking on the one hand about how technology and markets are changing at ever-greater speeds and then pretend that this doesn’t require more investment in adult learning. 

The skills gap needs to be taken seriously and addressed. This upcoming conference is one indicator that the policy elites are starting to wake up to this fact. I’ll be watching.  I hope you will too.