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President Obama positions community colleges as a linchpin of federal policy on education and training for citizens adversely affected by the recession. Chief among recommended reforms is the notion of career pathways that enable students, especially non-traditional age adults, to participate in postsecondary education directed at employment.

This paper reviews the literature on career pathway reforms to describe these programs and the students who enroll in them. It also presents evidence from two third-party evaluations of federal grants supporting career pathway implementation.

Results suggest career pathway programs are spreading throughout the United States through unprecedented levels of federal funding. Adult learners are a primary target group, but more data are needed to determine on a deeper level who these students are and whether they are being well served.

This paper offers new information to help readers consider whether President Obama’s agenda will achieve its goals and positively impact college completion and economic recovery.

This research compares the effects of career credentials and family factors on self-employment careers in the United States and Western Germany. In Germany, both general education and vocational credentials structure self-employment, primarily at entry. In the United States, general education alone structures self-employment, primarily by stabilizing the self-employment careers of workers with higher credentials. Intergenerational transmission of self-employment is more prominent among men, while spousal transmission of self-employment status is more prominent among women. In the United States, but not in Germany, there is evidence of a “caretaker” pathway that brings mothers of young children into self-employment for short periods of time.

The purpose of this study was to examine the learning experiences of high school Black males participating in an academy of engineering that was configured as a magnet school. We followed a qualitative case study design to explore the experiences of 16 Black male academies of engineering students. We identified three recurring themes from the interviews with the Black male academy of engineering students: Promoting Interests in STEM, Drawing Connections to Core Academic Concepts, and An Affinity for Hands-on Learning through the Engineering Curriculum. The results of our study helped us to better understand how academies provide a platform for Black male students' interest in engineering as a viable college and career pathway.

A majority of human resource executives report that their inability to attract and retain middle-skills talent frequently affects their firm’s performance. Middle-skills jobs, those that require more than a high school diploma, less than a four-year college degree, and pay above the national living wage, account for nearly half of labor demanded in the United States. As technology transforms the workplace, digital skills are becoming increasingly important and in higher demand. In today’s dynamic workforce, managers are facing managing and developing interdisciplinary and multilevel teams while combating a technical skills divide (lack of qualified workers), making it difficult to recruit and retain a high-technology, middle-skill-level workforce. This chapter focuses on addressing unique challenges relevant to recruitment, upskilling, and management best practices as they relate to the integration of technology and middle-skill-level workers in a highly successful workplace.

Based on the theoretical and scientific literature, academic and career decisions to pursue STEM fields are made at the high school level, and Black high school students are more likely to participate in career and technical education (CTE) programs but are less likely to participate in CTE programs related to STEM. Additionally, Black male students are less likely to have taken the necessary prerequisites to pursue STEM fields in postsecondary education. As a result, Black male high school students are underprepared to pursue STEM college majors and careers.

However, when students participate in STEM high school CTE programs (e.g., career academies), they eventually attain STEM occupations. In this chapter, we will examine the role that high school career academies play, from the perspectives of school stakeholders, in addressing the talent pipeline by broadening the participation of Black males in STEM majors and careers.

As a site of contestation among job seekers, workers, and managers, the bureaucratic workplace both reproduces and erodes occupational race segregation and racial status hierarchies. Much sociological research has examined the reproduction of racial inequality at work; however, little research has examined how desegregationist forces, including civil rights movement values, enter and permeate bureaucratic workplaces into the broader polity. Our purpose in this chapter is to introduce and typologize what we refer to as “occupational activism,” defined as socially transformative individual and collective action that is conducted and realized through an occupational role or occupational community. We empirically induce and present a typology from our study of the half-century-long, post-mobilization occupational careers of over 60 veterans of the nonviolent Nashville civil rights movement of the early 1960s. The fourfold typology of occupational activism is framed in the “new” sociology of work, which emphasizes the role of worker agency and activism in determining worker life chances, and in the “varieties of activism” perspective, which treats the typology as a coherent regime of activist roles in the dialogical diffusion of civil rights movement values into, within, and out of workplaces. We conclude with a research agenda on how bureaucratic workplaces nurture and stymie occupational activism as a racially desegregationist force at work and in the broader polity.

The penultimate chapter pulls together pieces of the previous eight chapters to support you in building a career-level impact plan. While the other chapters are a mix of foundational knowledge and practical approaches, this chapter is more philosophical in nature and intended to motivate the reader to bring their impact journey to life. You are encouraged to reflect on your own journey and consider what steps you might take to achieve a career that is consistent with your values and own belief in the importance of the work you do. Contributions from impactful researchers from the University of Auckland help to illustrate how diverse career pathways can be, emphasising there is no one-size-fits-all approach and that career-level impact plans need to consider personal motives and values, intersectionality, as well as disciplinary, institutional, national and international contexts. Plans need to focus on identifying opportunities to hone impact skills, finding people who can be part of your broader impact support team and working out how to strategically balance the teaching, research and service expectations placed on you as an academic. Throughout this chapter, questions prompt you to start building your own understanding of impact in the context of your career or to strategically reflect on your impact journey up to now.