Abstract
AbstractIn 2018, the United States Congress passed the Strengthening of Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act. This legislation included the requirement to conduct a comprehensive local needs assessment, which must include input from community stakeholders. This project designed and evaluated a three-step process that identified, classified, and surveyed the local business community. The project considered two approaches to conducting a needs assessment: Gap Analysis and Asset Inventory. The end products from these two approaches differ in that a Gap Analysis asks how to achieve a specified end state from the current starting condition: what is needed to accomplish the desired goal. The Asset Inventory collects data to establish the current state and then evaluates what can be accomplished with the identified resources: what can be done with the current assets. The Asset Inventory approach was selected because it allows for an open-ended question.
The analysis methodology for this research is mixed methods concurrent. The quantitative portion of the project was a document analysis. Document analysis has been most often associated with qualitative assessments; but, in this research, the process was used to make an estimate of the target economic entities resident in the McCall Donnelly School District. The Needs Assessment Asset Inventory was initiated using a document analysis protocol. Public and private businesses and agencies provided source documents: staffing positions, job recruitment announcements, yellow pages and business permits. The data derived from these documents were classified to determine the represented economic entities in the school district. In the qualitative portion, interviews with business owners and managers were asked what skill sets new employees should have to be successful candidates.