History of Career Clusters

The History of Career Clusters by Katherine Ruffing

Introduction:  As the nation has shifted and adjusted to an economy that has evolved beyond mass production toward the information age, the workplace and its demands have similarly evolved.  These evolutions have created a new role for education, especially career technical education (CTE).  The National Association of State Directors for Career Technical Education Consortium (NASDCTEc) has supported and contributed to the development of a new vision for CTE.  This vision embraces several principles, including ensuring that CTE maintains a high level of excellence supported by the identification of academic and workplace standards, measurement of performance/accountability, and high expectations for participant success.  This paper will provide a history of career clusters and a rationale for why they were developed, how Career Clusters support NASDCTEc’s new vision for CTE and what Career Clusters promise for CTE’s future.

Perkins Implications:Recent federal legislation reflects the current shifts in workplace priorities.  Since 1917, with the Smith Hughes Act, the federal government has invested in CTE. The Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act, initially passed in 1984, expanded upon earlier legislation and has responded to changes in workplace and employers’ demands.  Perkins II, reauthorized in 1990, first began to integrate academic and vocational skills attainment and shifted the emphasis from students who were non-college bound to the career development of all students.  Additionally, this law created Tech Prep, which emphasized the role of industrial and educational advisory groups. Perkins III, authorized in 1998, took the vision further by placing a much stronger emphasis on academic preparation and integration.   CTE students were expected to achieve the same academic standards as other students, as well as attain the vocational and technical skills to transition to either employment or postsecondary education.   Although these ideas had been implied in earlier Perkins legislation, Perkins III and the pending Perkins reauthorization enforce these explicit goals.  Perkins III set the stage to eliminate the stigma that CTE was for ‘other people’s children’ and began to put in place measures to ensure both academic and technical rigor, as well as preparation for careers not just jobs.

Other Legislative Implications: Other documents and pieces of legislation in the 1980s and 1990s also had an impact on the development of career clusters.  In particular, the Department of Labor released the Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS).  This document identified the skills and competencies needed for success in a modern workplace.  It defined foundation skills, which include basic, interpersonal, and ‘soft’ or employability skills, as well as workplace competencies, such as an individual’s ability to use resources. 

In 1994, Goals 2000: Educate America Act created the National Skills Standards Board (NSSB).  This board was charged with identifying broad occupational clusters and creating a system of standards, assessments and certifications for each cluster.  In that same year, the National School-to-Work Opportunities Act (STWOA) created the National School to Work Office (NSTWO).  NSTWO required states to develop portable credentials based on industry recognized skill standards, preferably standards that were also recognized by NSSB.   The move toward standards-driven systems was strengthening.

Building Linkages Project:  During this time, the NSSB, the NSTWO and OVAE began to recognize the commonality of their goals, which led to teaming together in 1996 to create the Building Linkages project.  This was an attempt to create a voluntary skills standard system.  The intention was to develop curricular frameworks in broad career cluster areas that would allow for successful transitions from school to work.  NSSB took responsibility as the lead contractor, the NSTWO was in charge of communicating with employees, and OVAE provided support for the evaluation of the effort.  Funding came from both the U.S. Departments of Labor and Education.  Building Linkages strived for three goals.  1) How to create national skill standards’ materials that were efficient, effective and easy to integrate into an academic curricula and instruction throughout the U.S.; 2) How industry-endorsed portable certificates could be promoted within education and training; and 3) How to develop buy-in from consumers, such as state and local policy makers, teachers and employers.

The Building Linkages project was based off the skill standards that had been previously developed in 21 of the 22 pilot skill standard projects (see Appendix A), which were also funded by the Departments of Education (16 projects) and Labor (6 projects).  These earlier projects required the pilots to identify core academic knowledge and skill requirements and SCANS type skills or workplace basics, but did not require the pilots to identify standards based on progressive career paths that spanned from entry through upwardly mobile positions within the industry.  Although Building Linkages was not concerned with developing standards, it did take the existing federal and state industrial, technical and academic standards and try to develop an integration model.

The Building Linkages project consisted of three pilot projects: retail and banking; health; and manufacturing.  Each industry was required to be led by a state.  Oregon undertook the retail and banking project, in conjunction with California and Washington. Health was led by Utah through the National Consortium on Health, Science and Technology and included seventeen other states.  This consortium drew directly from one of the 22 skill standard projects.  Manufacturing was led by the state of Indiana through V-TECS and built on earlier work already accomplished by Indiana.   The membership of each consortia consisted primarily of K-12 vocational educators and school-to-work counselors, although there was an emphasis on involving employers, unions, academic K-12 educators, postsecondary educational representatives and representatives of alternative education.  Overall, two of the three pilot projects enjoyed success and became the foundation for the future Health and Manufacturing career clusters. 

Retail and banking was terminated during its second year because it was determined to be “too narrow,”   and many of the identified occupations were low-wage, entry level positions.  Yet, this project made significant contributions.  Components of it eventually evolved into the finance and marketing, sales, and service clusters. 

One difficulty that all three consortia experienced was how to arrange the K-12 system around an important part of schooling – preparing students for work.  Although most were in agreement that a strong academic base was necessary, there was disagreement regarding how to organize curricula and instruction and then how to assess.  For example, everyone agreed on the need for skill standards, but there was considerable disagreement over their role.  Should skill standards be used as a base for developing CTE courses and assessments or should they be integrated into academic courses and used for contextual learning?  This tension encouraged projects to focus on career pathways. 

The concept of career pathways originally emerged from the original 22 pilots in a simpler form.  The pilots were intended to use existing skill standards to connect career pathways more clearly, but not to create skills for new occupations.  Building Linkages used career pathways not only as an organizational tool to connect skill standards but also as an educational tool; a vehicle to transfer the 22 pilots into the education world and connect them to state standards.  Career pathways were used to increase the integration of standards – both academic and industry – and provide a base to organize curricula, instruction and assessments. The hope was that higher levels of skills and knowledge would hopefully emerge as pathways moved toward higher level positions.    Unlike the 22 pilots, Building Linkages did want to create skill standards for new occupations.

In addition to the expansion of career pathways, Building Linkages was able to make several other recommendations. 

1. There was a need for the Department of Education and others to establish a “voice” as to the role of skill standards in education reform. 
2. The volunteer partners needed to provide states effective plans to demonstrate how they would develop working relationships with representatives of state education and the training system.
3. NSSB needed to develop a common nomenclature so that there would be a universal definition for words like academic, concentration and core.  Additionally, the volunteer partners needed more direction from NSSB as they cross-referenced skill standards to academics to grade levels.
4. Finally, the project needed to research the best way to put skill standards into education frameworks, graduation requirements and assessments.

 

OVAE’s Role:  NSSB was only responsible for Building Linkages for one year.  Eventually, the funding and oversight fell solely upon the Department of Education.  They continued to build upon Building Linkages, which, as previously mentioned, had successfully created standards and pathways for Manufacturing and Health.  Next, OVAE selected three clusters and targeted grant money toward the development of the Information Technology, Transportation/Distribution and Logistics, and Arts/Audio Video Technology and Communication career clusters.  They selected a company out of Boston, Education Development Center (EDC) to lead the IT Cluster; V-TECS worked with International Communication Industries Association, now known as INFOCOM on the Arts/AV Cluster; and the state of Illinois oversaw the Transportation Cluster.  This second group of grants was not given as much freedom, in an effort to curtail variation; they were awarded grant money in the form of a contract that stated 14 specific tasks for each group to achieve.

Meanwhile, most states at this time had developed their own set of skill standards systems based on SCANS, alternative national models and/or industrial advisory groups, and had integrated these skills into the CTE curriculum.   Although it was a big step that states were developing these sets of skills, there were many variations among the identified skills and how they were defined.  In addition, each state varied in the level of performance expected to achieve workplace skills, some expected students to achieve basic levels of writing and problem-solving, while other states required levels at or above state academic levels.   In many states third-party industry driven assessments had emerged at the job specific level.  Even within the current three Building Linkages groups, variations were still presenting problems, despite changes to the grant.

These variations and a desire to update the vision of CTE led OVAE to eventually adopt the 16 Career Clusters in 1999.  The goal was to continue developing the education pipeline, so that students would learn the academic and technical skills within an integrated curriculum that would prepare them for the workforce.  As we have seen, the theories that support career clusters were not new within the workforce development or the education worlds.  In addition to the Building Linkages project, several countries such as Canada, Germany, Great Britain and Denmark had already established career cluster frameworks.  Even within the United States, several states had also independently created frameworks. 

To begin, OVAE reviewed international, national and state efforts to define clusters.  Additionally, they looked at the cluster models that had already been developed by organizations such as V-TECS’s fourteen industrial/occupational “families” with levels within each family (see appendix B), Building Linkages and its four recommendations, NOICC, and the models developed by states.  What OVAE found was that all models approached clusters in one of the following four ways.

1. Career interest – defines career clusters based on career interest.  They allow students to explore a wide range of areas based on an analysis of a student’s interests and value systems
2. Educational approach – creates clusters from vocational and academic programs and disciplines that are defined in the Classification of Instructional programs (CIP/OES). It defines clusters the way the education community defines majors and departments.
3. Occupational approach – based on Standard Occupational Classification System (SOC) and usually builds from the NOICC units of analysis, which were historically used to for occupational systems.
4. Industrial approach –organizes cluster around broad industry areas or economic sectors.  It is typically based on the Standard industrial Classification System (SIC) and the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes – used to define economic sectors. 

 

OVAE chose to organize their career clusters using the industrial and occupational approach.  They felt it provided the best context for all aspects of industry and allowed students to pursue a full range of careers with vertical and lateral mobility.  Yet, there were a few professions that were not industry specific and had to be grouped by occupation, such as legal and protective services, administration, and business.  In November 1999, OVAE released the following Sixteen Clusters.