SHRM's Johnny C. Taylor, Jr. Testifies Before Congress on Workforce Preparedness
SHRM President and CEO Johnny C. Taylor, Jr. began this conversation during the first hearing of the 119th Congress as he testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and posed a powerful question: “Imagine what we could be if we unleashed the power of talent?”
SHRM’s E2 Initiative is tackling the U.S.’s broken, leaky, and busted talent pipeline by connecting education to employment across three key pathways: K-12 education, higher education, and untapped talent. This is a collaborative effort. No one sector, no one stakeholder, no one organization can do this alone. We have to work together — across traditional boundaries — because our challenges are interconnected, and our solutions must be as well.
People do not live, learn, or work in silos — and we can’t afford to operate in them either.
“Imagine what we could be if we unleashed the power of talent?”
Johnny C. Taylor, Jr.
SHRM President and CEO
SHRM seeks to be the connective tissue that repairs the workforce pipelines between learning, work, and opportunity. And we’re doing it by increasing awareness, advocacy, and action.
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Broken, Leaky and Busted
To build smarter, stronger bridges between the systems that shape our workforce, E² will work to better connect K–12 classrooms to career pathways, align higher education institutions with the evolving job market, and ensure untapped talent has equitable access to inclusive employment opportunities.
Fixing the education-to-employment pipeline requires coordination among all stakeholders. Despite the challenges, our system remains the best in the world. To explore the challenges, opportunities, priorities, and what’s working across each key pipeline, download SHRM’s resource here.
We have seen drastic changes in the employment market, but the reality is it does nothing to erase the underlying skills gap. In fact, it may exacerbate the skills gap in the long term. We need to continue to forge a better alliance between education and employment, invest in workforce training and open our recruiting efforts to nontraditional pools of talent.
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Contact SHRM Government Affairs at governmentaffairs@shrm.org to learn more.