BHEF, in Partnership with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Commits to Identify and Promote 21st Century Education Skills Critical to the American Workforce

Washington (July 30) — The Business-Higher Education Forum, with the support of a $400,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, will launch a national effort to engage businesses to promote a suite of skills known as "Deeper Learning" that business considers essential to the 21st century workforce.

Integration of the global economy has placed a premium on innovation in the workforce to meet the increased demands companies face in their efforts to be competitive in the 21st century workplace. Workers must possess a strong suite of Deeper Learning skills and be able to develop new proficiencies while maintaining existing ones. These skills include critical thinking, the capability to solve problems cooperatively, and the ability to communicate clearly, among others. Unfortunately, surveys of business leaders reveal that relatively few students possess many of these skills, which increasingly are of fundamental importance to industry.

Through this grant, the Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF), the nation's oldest organization of senior business and higher education executives dedicated to advancing innovative solutions to U.S. education and workforce challenges, will address a significant misalignment between educational outcomes and the needs of industry by mobilizing national business support for improved Deeper Learning skills. By collaborating directly with major U.S. corporations to formulate the national Deeper Learning platform, BHEF will:

• Validate the importance of Deeper Learning skills within the business community;
• Contextualize how businesses define Deeper Learning for their unique workforce requirements, articulating the tools businesses currently use to identify and develop Deeper Learning skills within their workforce; and
• Translate that information into national proof points which will serve as (a) the foundation for an industry-led strategy to promote effective practice and (b) the assessment tools that can achieve widespread employment of Deeper Learning.
• To realize these objectives, BHEF will work with a critical mass of business leaders to better align three corporate engagement strategies: c-suite leadership driving internal and external key messaging and action; business philanthropy that strategically targets desired outcomes; and mobilization of employees to attain common goals.

"This work, generously funded by the Hewlett Foundation, has the potential to transform our national economic landscape," said Brian Fitzgerald, CEO of BHEF. "By engaging with business leaders concerned with developing a national Deeper Learning agenda, we will build a community of effective practice focused on Deeper Learning that could translate into new approaches to student learning and the development of the workforce. With the collaboration of our members in this effort, we will have a Deeper Learning model that we expect will produce substantial, measurable decreases in the gaps between education outcomes and workforce needs."