Skills Emergency – How Community Colleges Can Respond Leveraging Tech

Edalex Podcast

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Held on 23 April 2025, this webinar explored how a state government, industry, and learners are impacted by the rise of skills and ways in which Community Colleges can respond to the looming skills emergency leveraging technology.
Current worker shortage estimates put the skills gap at 1 billion globally and 75 million in the U.S. by 2030. Community Colleges are stepping up to address this skills breach and can do much to respond by leveraging new and existing technology, starting with asking: What do we want to recognize and why? How could we recognize the learning of those with some college / no degree? How do we also capture and recognise human-centred skills (soft, durable skills) valued by employers?

In this webinar, the panel addressed the challenges and opportunities currently faced by Community Colleges including impacts on rural Community Colleges, heard a state government, industry and learner perspective on the impact of skills on the education to employment journey, why industry-led curriculum development is and should be on the rise, how AI can help with the administrative burden, and how Community Colleges can leverage their existing systems (such as their LMS and SIS) to unlock skills recognition data to enable scalable solutions.

Rounding out the webinar was a showcase of some of the practical guides and technology tools (free and paid models) currently available to assist Community Colleges in achieving skills recognition success.

Panelists:

• Chris Breitmeyer – President of the Rural Community Colleges Network, whose member institutions serve the 89.3 million people who reside in rural America
• Nicole Tucker – Chief Operating Officer at Louisiana State Civil Service, who recently shifted away from requiring degrees to a skill-based hiring model
• James McKenzie – Manager at Heglar Creek Electric & Heglar Creek Plumbing, graduate of College of Southern Idaho (CSI) who also works to co-design skills based learning with his Community College partner
• Dan McFadyen – Managing Director and Margo Griffith – Principal Skills Consultant from Edalex, a skills technology company at the cutting edge of skills recognition data software

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Chapters

1. Skills Emergency – How Community Colleges Can Respond Leveraging Tech (00:00:00)

2. Challenges and Opportunities for Community Colleges in rural regions by Chris Breitmeyer (00:04:17)

3. Louisiana’s Shift to a Competency-Based Hiring Framework by Nicole Tucker (00:14:19)

4. Why Workplace Readiness Skills Matters from a Local Business Lens by James McKenzie (00:25:55)

5. Making Skills Visible by Margo Griffith (00:40:12)