Since its founding, the Council on Competitiveness has emphasized the key linkage between workforce skills and U.S. competitiveness, and analyzed emerging trends affecting the American workforce. Armed with this insight, the Council has engaged with stakeholders across the nation to promote new approaches to ensuring a competitive workforce that can unleash American innovation and sharpen the U.S. competitive edge, leading to increased productivity, greater prosperity and higher standards of living.
The Council’s landmark National Innovation Initiative (NII) and action agenda—
Innovate America: Thriving in a World of Challenge and Change—identified “talent” as one of three fundamental drivers of innovation and competitiveness. Innovate America set forth an agenda to build the U.S. base of scientists and engineers, catalyze the next generation of American innovators and empower U.S. workers to succeed in the global economy.
Building on the NII, the Council has remained focused on America’s workforce through a series of dedicated initiatives and reports on topics such as 21st century manufacturing, energy and cutting-edge technology. In each of these efforts, the Council has emphasized the critical importance of education and workforce development.
In 2016, the Council released
Work: Thriving in a Turbulent, Technological and Transformed Global Economy. Work looked across the Council’s initiatives and reports to highlight some of the many recommendations aimed at strengthening America’s workforce that emerged from this body of research, analysis and dialogue between U.S. business, education, technology and labor leaders. Work also reviewed important long-term trends affecting the U.S. labor market, and the challenges and opportunities they present for America’s workers.
The recommendations in Work offer a roadmap to align U.S. education and training to 21st century skill needs, leverage our intellectual capital more effectively, supply our businesses with the talent needed to compete globally and enable America’s most valuable competitive asset—our people—to apply their creativity and effort toward productive, prosperous lives.
Still today, shifting drivers of the U.S. economy, globalization and technological change are significantly affecting jobs and the skills in demand. American workers are creative, industrious risk-takers and among the world’s most productive. But many lack the education and skills needed to secure high-paying jobs in the fast-paced, knowledge-based, technology-intensive economy that has evolved in the United States. Addressing these challenges remains at the core of the Council’s work as we engage leaders from academia and industry to develop the workforce of today—and tomorrow.