Posts by Bob Young

A Community College Bets Big on Technology Training On December 18, 2025, Lackawanna College broke ground on a 17,500-square-foot Center for Technology Innovation (CTI) in Scranton, Pennsylvania, with plans to…

Construction Employers Meet CTE Students Where They Learn On March 24, 2026, the General Building Contractors Association (GBCA) joined the City of Philadelphia's CTE Career Fair at Drexel University's School…

Pennsylvania is making a calculated bet on an idea that sounds obvious but has been stubbornly hard to implement at scale: if you tell students about career and technical pathways…

Pennsylvania's high schools award thousands of industry credentials every year. What we don't know — with any real rigor — is whether those credentials actually change students' lives. A new…

Free Training, Guaranteed Audience: How Philadelphia Is Rethinking Public-Sector Hiring When the City College for Municipal Employment launched under Mayor Cherelle Parker, it answered a question that workforce developers have…

Starting Earlier: Career Awareness Before Middle School Pennsylvania's 2025–26 school year is rolling out the most significant structural expansion of CTE programming in recent memory, and it starts earlier than…

A Resource Hiding in Plain Sight Every Pennsylvania CTC director knows that the state publishes a list of approved industry-recognized credentials. Most have glanced at it. Far fewer have built…

The Evidence Gap CTE Has Been Avoiding Career and technical education has enjoyed a renaissance over the past decade. Enrollment is up, bipartisan support is strong, and industry partnerships have…

A Governance Structure Built for Another Era Pennsylvania operates more than 80 career and technical education centers, institutions that train students in everything from advanced manufacturing and health sciences to…

The Scale of the Ambition Philadelphia has run summer youth employment programs before. WorkReady Philadelphia has been a fixture of the city's summer landscape for over two decades, placing thousands…