Takeaways: Education and Healthcare Employer Partnerships in Boston

A convening at the Academy in December 2025 brought together community college leaders, researchers, employers from the Boston area, education organizations, and philanthropists to discuss the best ways to help postsecondary students obtain the skills they need to secure meaningful employment. Specifically, the meeting focused on defining high-demand skills and matching learners with opportunities and employment in healthcare in the Boston area. 

Led by Bridget Terry Long (Harvard Graduate School of Education) and supported by Robert C. Pozen (MIT) as a funder and thought leader, questions explored during the convening included:

• Who are the learners of today?
• What should education systems prioritize to advance skill development and meet employer needs?
• What is the role of higher education in workforce training?
• What is the role of employers in fostering partnerships and new workforce practices?
• How can higher education and employers work together as equal partners in learner skill development and success?

More information about the discussion is provided in an article in the Academy Bulletin. 

The cross-sector meeting provided an opportunity to understand how education and training programs in Massachusetts support employment in the healthcare sector, which was inspired by the work of the Academy's Commission on Opportunities After High School. The broad, nationwide goal of the Commission is to address societal, economic, and education obstacles that impede a student’s progress while highlighting promising existing pathways from high school into postsecondary education, service, and work. That project is cochaired by Long with Nancy Cantor (CUNY) and Harrison Keller (University of North Texas).

Resources and materials provided to participants at the December meeting are available for all who are interested in region-specific and sector-specific approaches to connecting education and training with employment opportunities.

After the convening, Bridget Terry Long reflected on the presentations, discussions, and supporting materials and shared this reflection:

The Importance of Developing New Pathways 
Although there are promising work-based training initiatives, such as apprenticeships, these options are not feasible for all students, and they are difficult to offer in large numbers at low-resourced institutions. Additional pathways are needed, especially for the millions of students who attend college part-time while balancing jobs to support basic needs and juggling family obligations and other commitments. These students often have disrupted enrollment patterns, making degree completion a distant goal. 

Skill Development, Communication, and Demonstration 

• Durable skills continue to be valued—perhaps even more so—amid a rapidly changing and uncertain labor market, but students need clearer ways of developing and demonstrating those skills. 
  As technological advances change the nature of work, employers have become less motivated to seek candidates with technical skills that can be easily performed by AI systems. However, durable skills (e.g., communication, critical thinking, collaboration) remain valued, though they are difficult to measure and identify in hiring processes.  
• Gaining a desired skill or competency is not enough. Students must also learn to clearly communicate their skills to potential employers and demonstrate their use. 
  Having course credit or completing a badge or certificate will not necessarily signal the competencies necessary for a job. Students must learn how to translate their accomplishments in higher education into the skills relevant for employment. Efforts focused on creating microcredentials are unlikely to have much impact if there is no deliberate investment in helping students signal and discuss embedded employment skills.  
• Students must also develop professional habits to increase their chances of being hired, retained, and promoted.
  Employers value professional workplace behavior, such as punctuality, appropriate attire, and effective communication. Students who are entering career fields for the first time may need explicit guidance on this. 

Developing Effective Partnerships with Employers

• In a tight funding environment, institutions must consider changing how they work and partner with others to improve student outcomes. 
  The current funding environment and limited resources at broad-access institutions severely limit the ability to create costly new programs. Instead, institutions should consider ways to use existing assets for additional purposes and grow relationships with potential employers. 
• Higher education and employers use very different language to describe skills and competencies, and this mismatch restricts the ability to identify how a student’s coursework could translate into specific job qualifications. 
  College faculty, who are often focused on academic advancement and transfer, describe what they teach using frameworks and terminology that are very different than how employers conceptualize job skills and highlight qualifications in hiring processes. This hinders efforts to partner effectively and severely limits the ability to develop opportunities to connect students’ experiences to employers’ needs. Efforts to bridge academic language and translate course goals into job-skills language show promise by identifying ways to streamline and support student employment.  
• College partnerships with employers must go beyond broad discussions of industry needs to the details of specific skills and competencies, how they are used in the employer’s jobs, and how job applicants might signal those skills. 
  By working with employer partners in an iterative process, the college should develop clear guidance for students on how the focal skills are used on the job, and how job applicants should frame and articulate having those skills during the hiring process. The employer should have multiple opportunities to give feedback and help build bridges between the college and job market. 

The Need for Systemwide Efforts 

• Intermediaries may be needed to help build and coordinate partnerships across sectors. 
  By working across traditional silos, intermediaries such as universities, philanthropies, non-profits, and professional organizations can help employers connect their needs with higher education activities and vice versa.  
• To be most effective, colleges should seek partnerships with groups of employers and industry groups. 
  Working on individual partnerships with a set of employers is likely to be time-consuming and labor-intensive. Moreover, individual partnerships are unlikely to yield many job placements, and becoming reliant on a single firm would make colleges susceptible to the economic booms and busts of that employer. Instead, colleges and systems should try to engage industry groups that encompass multiple employers to identify a richer set of opportunities and a greater view of the industry’s trends. 

Materials prepared for the meeting are available here.