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Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic is transforming the global economy and significantly shifting workforce demand, requiring quick, adaptive responses. The pandemic has revealed the vulnerabilities of many organizations and regional economies, and it has accelerated trends that could lead to significant improvements in productivity, performance, and resilience, which will enable organizations and regions to thrive in the “next normal.” What is unclear is how demands in the science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) workforce have changed and whether there is an opportunity to upskill, retrain, and certify a significant portion of displaced workers to meet new and shifting labor demands in a way that is equitable, inclusive, and resilient to global instability.

To explore how communities around the United States are addressing workforce issues laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic and how they are taking advantage of local opportunities to expand their STEMM workforces to position them for success going forward, the Board of Higher Education and Workforce of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (the National Academies), with financial support from the Lumina Foundation, established an ad hoc committee to plan a series of workshops to identify immediate and near-term regional STEMM workforce needs in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The complete Statement of Task for this project is included in Appendix A. The planning committee identified five U.S. cities and their associated metropolitan areas—Birmingham, Alabama; Boston, Massachusetts; Richmond,

Virginia; Riverside, California; and Wichita, Kansas—to host workshops highlighting promising practices that communities can use to respond urgently and appropriately to their STEMM workforce needs. The planning committee also organized a sixth workshop to discuss how the lessons learned during the five region-focused workshops could be applied in other communities to meet STEMM workforce needs.

The committee considered a variety of factors in selecting cities for the workshop series. It aimed to select cities that differed from one another by geographic region, population size and density, racial and ethnic demographics, educational attainment, and employment trends affected by COVID-19. The committee intended for the cities examined in the workshop series to cover a broad range of attributes so that cities not examined in the series could find some applicable or overlapping scenarios for meeting their own regional STEMM workforce needs. Committee members’ networks for engaging local stakeholders and identifying speakers were integral to the workshop planning efforts as well. Each workshop began with an overview of the selected metropolitan areas’ employment and education situation that included data from the Federal Reserve and other sources. The committee designed the workshop series so that workforce and education data were arranged for each region in a consistent graphical format for comparison purposes.

The planning committee designed the workshops to highlight promising practices that community colleges and baccalaureate-granting institutions of higher education, as well as non-academic training and certification programs, can use to respond urgently and appropriately to those needs. The speakers, panelists, and workshop participants presented a broad range of views and ideas that aimed to address the following questions in the Statement of Task:

• How have the current and near-term regional STEMM labor market needs changed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly the needs for the skilled technical workforce, such as information technology and computing fields, health technology sectors, and manufacturing?
• To what extent can regions create a profile that links STEMM educational and training resources with COVID-19–impacted workforce needs, including retraining and certification of professionals?
• What practices and policies can local higher education institutions and workforce training organizations adopt to respond to local

• industry STEMM workforce needs, both individually and as part of regional coalitions? Which effective practices and policies are replicable and scalable? What barriers, if any, exist that inhibit these programs from meeting COVID-19 shifts in regional STEMM workforce needs?
• How can workforce training and education systems address the significant and urgent needs of the underrepresented minority population, which has been especially impacted by the effects of COVID-19? Can the recent events related to the death of Black men and women at the hands of police and the Black Lives Matter movement raise awareness of the disenfranchisement of the nation’s underrepresented minority populations that result from institutionalized racism, and therefore increase focus on the needs of those populations?
• What actions are needed to assist local higher education institutions, training and certification programs, industry, and policy makers at the local, state, and federal levels in fostering improved linkages between education and training resources and STEMM workforce needs at the regional level as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic?

This proceedings of a virtual workshop series summarizes the presentations and discussions from the six public workshops that made up the virtual workshop series and highlights the key points raised during the presentations, moderated panel discussions and deliberations, and open discussions among the workshop participants. In accordance with the policies of the National Academies, this proceedings has been prepared by the workshop rapporteurs as a factual summary of what occurred at the workshops. The planning committee’s role was limited to planning the workshop. Statements, recommendations, and opinions expressed are those of individual presenters and participants and are not necessarily endorsed or verified by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and they should not be construed as reflecting any group consensus.

The workshops did not attempt to establish any conclusions or recommendations about needs and future directions, focusing instead on issues identified by the speakers and workshop participants. During a planning meeting preceding the workshop series, the committee selected a variety of themes to discuss throughout the workshops relevant to addressing STEMM workforce shifts resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. The

themes the committee selected included job training offerings; valuing, managing, and leveraging diversity and equity principles and practices as key components of workforce training; degrees and credentials; the digital divide; social support services; and data. Box 7-1 includes additional details on these themes.