How the HIRED program aims to upskill and re-skill Arkansans

for today’s workforce

Karl D. Schubert

 

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (November 14, 2024) –On Thursday, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Secretary Hugh McDonald, Chief Workforce Officer Mike Rogers, and Arkansas Workforce Connections Director Cody Waits awarded $48 million in training grants to support workforce development efforts aligned with the Arkansas Workforce Strategy.

“The great thing about the HIRED program is that it’s not just education-focused—it’s also closely aligned with Arkansas’ fastest-growing industries,” said Governor Sanders. “The $48 million we’re announcing through the HIRED grant program will help provide a solution to Arkansas’ business leaders who are seeking more qualified, skilled, hardworking employees to grow their companies.”

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HERE WE ARE a little more than a year into the HIRED grant, and I wanted to give Apprenticely’s readers an update on how we at the University of Arkansas are using it for re-skilling and upskilling Arkansas workers. This comes as a follow-up to our long-running DART grant, where we’ve focused on academic instruction in the two-year and four-year schools. Now, with input from our advisory board of employers and other stakeholders, we’re broadening that effort with an eye specifically toward workforce development.

To us, that meant developing certificate-based courses for people who may find themselves being put into new jobs doing data analytics or data evaluation but who may have had zero training in this kind of work. As one of our advisory board members from J.B. Hunt put it, “We’ve got all these ‘citizen data scientists’ who haven’t had any formal training, so they don’t have the common vocabulary or terminology or process because they’re self-taught. It’s not that that’s bad. It’s just that, from the employer’s point of view, they don’t have a common set of processes and approaches.”

So our goal for the HIRED grant is to provide that for them.

The first thing we did was go talk to employers to find out what they need, and how they need their employees to be prepared. We did three information-gathering sessions around the state, and that’s where we got the “citizen data scientist” feedback, with basically a mandate to start from scratch.

Well, we thought, there are two big things these people need to learn: the data science analytics process with Excel, because a lot of people still use Excel to do this work; and the most common programming language, Python. So we created an Excel-based Introduction to Data Science course and a Python Programming for Data Science course that assumes zero programming experience to start. These courses are a certificate one, two, and three, with credit for a final assessment.

We’ve just turned on the pilot for those two courses. We’re offering them first to the people who work for the companies on our advisory council and companies who committed support, including, interestingly, some of the faculty at some of the state’s colleges. This also includes the Arkansas Army National Guard and Air National Guard, and we’re very excited about that. We’re doing these courses in pilot form so we can get the feedback from these folks and make any needed changes before we put these courses out to a broader audience.

As part of this initiative, we’re expanding our workshops formerly designed and implemented under DART, which we call Data Science 101 (DS101) and Data Science 202 (DS202). We’re traveling to the different regions of Arkansas and putting on these DS101 workshops for the instructors of the two-year and four-year academic institutions around the state, introducing the basic concepts of data science and teaching the instructors how to do the data science analytics process, how to use Excel, how to do Python programming from scratch, and how to teach data science with a “workforce readiness” approach. And we start from scratch, assuming they’re just starting down the data science and analytics path. We’ve done Central and Southern Arkansas so far, and will be workshopping in Northeastern and Eastern parts of the state next. Workshop DS202, which we’re starting to develop now, is for those who have completed DS101, and there we’re talking about more advanced data science topics and also how to teach the courses. Workshop DS202 will be offered regionally in the same order we offered DS101: Central, then Southern Arkansas, and so on.

We’ll also talk to our state-wide ecosystem of academic institutions about the certificate courses. Just like with our undergraduate courses where we make all the materials available to everybody in our state-wide ecosystem, for these certificate courses we’ve recorded them both branded and unbranded. And part of the deal is that we’re going to transfer those courses from our global campus to the ecosystem schools that would like to offer it themselves, so they can brand it and offer it in their regions and support it. They’re pretty excited about that.

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The HIRED grant is a two-year grant, with the possibility of extending it for three additional years. It was a competitive grant, and we were invited to submit a proposal. It was required to be developed on a short timeframe, so they wanted people to put in applications for things where they had an existing ecosystem developed, and we already have a group of people that we work with. So getting commitments for internships and apprenticeships from the companies in our ecosystem was pretty straightforward for us. Nearly 50 percent of them are on board in some way, from mentoring students, or helping to send students through the program, or providing other support for us. After this year, we can apply for an extension of three more years.

In this new initiative, I think we’re seeing the future of education taking shape. A few years ago, when I was working on the start of the DART statewide ecosystem, the senior associate dean in engineering that I was working with was Norm Dennis. And when Norm retired, he said to me, “I bet that within a few years you’re going to start putting these courses online.” I kept that in mind. And in fact that opportunity did come up with the STEM Prep work, which allowed us to do some of our first-year courses online, so when a two-year-school student registers for a class there, they pay their tuition and fees and then they’re registered as a non-degree-seeking student at the U of A. And they can get credit for that class, which is a way of helping the two-year schools get up and going with their two-year program.

So when this HIRED opportunity came up, the companies on our advisory council asked, “Can you put these courses online so students all over the state can take them?” And even though we didn’t initially have the funding for that, I said, “Yes, I think we can.” So I checked into the credit-for-prior-learning process here at the university, and it turned out to be acceptable—but no one had been doing it in the way we envisioned. The provost’s office said, “Well, we figure you all can figure out what the process will be, so go ahead and go for it.”

I then talked to our faculty about doing it, and they were enthusiastic about it. We paid them to do the course development, which is fair and reasonable because everything else is automatic in these kinds of courses. The only time an instructor is involved is if the student has a question they can’t answer, or if they do the final assessment, which has to be graded by a faculty member, a teaching assistant (TA), or a graduate student.

But for most, it’s 100% online and automatically graded. Now my objective over the next few years is to get as much of our first two years of courses available online as possible. And going forward, whenever we’re developing new courses, we’re developing them to be online and to be “certificate-ized” at the same time. We recognize that not everybody’s going to be going after a degree, so our goal is to make these courses as convenient as possible for the widest possible audience.

That should be very good news for all the “citizen data scientists” across the state, as well as for our employers. I would say that, from a university point of view, there’s this broadening idea that workforce development is a very good thing, and this is a way that universities can be instrumental in that. You see it all over the country now, and some institutions of higher learning are really flashy about it—you can sign up for free online courses from MIT and Stanford and the like.

But our sense is that an online course that isn’t tailored to the specific workforce that the student is going after is never going to meet the mark. We developed our courses from scratch, by working with Arkansas employers, about what Arkansas students and the Arkansas workforce need to know, to help the industries of Arkansas build a workforce that’s second to none.

Our overall goal is to increase data-science and analytics literacy (and expertise) throughout the State of Arkansas—at all levels.  We believe that understanding data and understanding how to use data to gain insights is as important today as learning to make change was a century ago.  Why?  Because the currency of today is data—it is all around us, and decisions that we make and that are made around us are nearly all data based.  So our approach of creating workforce-focused state-wide training and education on data literacy and analysis is aimed at providing Arkansans with the knowledge and skills to be successful.  And our data science foundational workshops for faculty and instructors, workforce focused, are aimed at multiplying that effect exponentially.
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Dr. Karl D. Schubert, FIET, is Professor of Practice and Director, Data Science Program for the College of Engineering, the Sam M. Walton College of Business and the Fulbright College of Arts & Sciences, University of Arkansas.