Nearly two years ago, I wrote that the 2020s had the potential to be the decade of career and technical education.

The world feels as if it has been turned on its head many times over since then. But as we start out 2022 amid the repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemic, I am more convinced than ever that skills-based career education and training hold the key to addressing many of the biggest challenges of the years to come.

In the short term, acute labor shortages are holding back the U.S. economy from reaching the full potential of its recovery. For the long term, we must rethink from top to bottom the way we educate learners and prepare them for the workforce — and how we as nonprofit leaders put support behind those systems. Society must begin to train workers at the speed of change, rather than trailing miles behind as skills gaps continue to gain momentum and the chasm grows. It is imperative for all of us in the nonprofit world to lend our knowledge and dollars to support this shift — and to ensure we remain on the cutting edge of the trends reshaping the workforce.

Here are three predictions for how the rest of the 2020s will continue to be defined by career education:

  1. The four-year degree will no longer be seen as the default post-secondary education option.
  2. Lifelong learning will become the norm.
  3. Nonprofits will help lead the way in tackling the skills gap.

Read the full article about predictions for career and technical education by Jeremy Wheaton at Forbes.