A systemic conceptual model on the technical workforce supply and demand balance gap

Today's rapid technological changes and the decreasing student enrollment rates in science, engineering, technology, and math (STEM) fields are two of the major factors that contribute to the existing misalignment between supply and demand in technical workforce. Over the past two decades, educational institutions have focused on improving alignment and throughput through various methods but have generally fallen short of creating persistent solutions. Current increases in high school graduation rates without corresponding increases in transition to post-secondary education will lack the required impact to meet future workforce demands. A solution that shows promise to increase transition rates in post-secondary education is the use of intellectual capital intermediaries (ICI) to span public and higher education domains to increase college readiness in basic STEM disciplines. This has been shown to not only improve cognition of STEM subjects but also increases transition to post-secondary education. Notwithstanding the benefit of improved college readiness resulting from the work of ICIs, the efficacy, effectiveness and efficiency of ICI's on graduation rates have not been fully evaluated. This research proposes a conceptual model using archetypical systems structures to assess the efficacy, effectiveness and efficiency of ICIs in technical workforce formation. The archetypical systems structures provide a framework that can be used as a template to develop strategies to close the gap between workforce supply and demand. Copyright