Updated Tool for Identifying CTE Programs Leading to Non-Trad Careers

Last week, the Department of Education's Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education released an updated "Crosswalk" to help CTE leaders identify programs that prepare students for non-traditional fields. The new crosswalk can be found on the Perkins Collaborative Resource Network at https://cte.ed.gov/accountability/linking-data. In addition to the crosswalk itself, other materials include an introduction that explains the data sources, methodology and decision rules that were used to complete it.

The crosswalk updates earlier versions developed by the National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity, and relies on linking CIP (Classification of Instructional Programs) codes to SOC (Standards Occupational Classification) codes, as well as occupational data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Each program code is labeled whether it is non-traditional for males and whether it is non-traditional for females, and the percent of each gender employed in related fields is included as well.

As a reminder, non-traditional fields are defined in Perkins V as "occupations or fields or work, such as careers in computer science, technology, and other current and emerging high skill occupations, for which individuals from one gender comprise less than 25 percent of the individuals employed in each such occupation or field of work." Because Perkins requires state and local recipients to report on the percentage of CTE concentrators of the underrepresented gender enrolling in programs leading to non-traditional fields, grantees need a uniform way to identify programs to include in reporting.

States are not required to use the new crosswalk to identify non-traditional programs, as they may rely on other data sources to make those decisions. Be sure to check with your state CTE office about their plans for the new crosswalk and whether the programs identified as non-traditional for the purposes of data reporting and supports will be updated!

Comments

[erle hall]

Computer Science is not an occupation. It is not even a pathway. It is a discipline. ICT is an industry sector with pathways in information tech support, programming, networking, etc. but computer science is simply too broad and does not have a particular career focus to be called an occupation.