What is Career & Technology Education?

High school Career and Technical Education (CTE) started replacing "vocational education" in the mid-90s to reflect the changing nature of workforce education. Initially, vocational education focused on teaching agriculture, home-making, and trade and industrial education. However, today's career education prepares students for success more broadly.

Sixteen different CTE Career Clusters lead to over 79 different career pathways.

According to the Association for Career & Technical Education, there are currently 16 different Career Clusters leading to 79 different career pathways and hundreds of careers requiring different levels of education. The 114th Congress further supported this with the passage of H. R. 5587 to reauthorize the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006. H. R. 5587, also known as the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act, replaced the word "vocational" with "CTE," which impacted secondary and post-secondary CTE programs.

Career and Technical Education (CTE) purposefully teaches specific career skills to students in middle school, high school, and post-secondary institutions. CTE programs are split into 16 Career Clusters® attributed to different in-demand careers:

CTE focuses on teaching skills differing from theory-based instruction typical of traditional and university-based education. Teaching students hands-on experiences and application tests is essential because CTE careers require people in the workforce to have experience in their field before starting a career.

Many CTE pathways focus more on practice and improvement instead of textbook memorization. These changes to CTE apply to all educational age ranges because students can understand the fundamentals of any career as early as sixth grade and build on those skills throughout adulthood.

It is important to note that students who focused on Career and Technical Education in high school have a higher median annual income than those who didn't. Students who follow a CTE pathway in high school can customize and personalize their education to fit their interests and learning needs. Many high schools offer opportunities for students to explore a career cluster of interest while gaining valuable technical and employability skills needed in the workforce.

Many CTE skills learned in high school are critical to the workforce. Currently, the United States faces technical skill gaps in nearly 30 million jobs that don't require a bachelor's degree, with the median income paying over $55,000 per year. Middle and high schools need to educate students and parents that attending college is one of many choices after high school.

There is a critical teacher shortage in the United States, which significantly impacts CTE education. The current education system relies on people's passion for teaching CTE subject areas. The problem is that the pay does not translate to the classroom as easily as teaching the skills. Professionals working in a CTE professional field are not willing to walk away from significant paying positions to receive a pay cut and accept all the added stress of becoming an educator.

Only when the U.S. Department of Education, State Departments of Education, and School Divisions revamp how teachers are paid, we will continue to see significant teacher shortages of highly qualified CTE educators. But, of course, there are two sides to how teachers are paid. From a school division's point of view, having a balanced pay scale for instructional staff makes sense and puts all teachers at the same pay for the amount of time they have as an educator. But on the other hand, a person trained and paid in a CTE professional field they have to incur additional college debt to earn a teacher certification, pay to take Praxis exams, and then learn an entirely new career while also maintaining their current knowledge in their area of expertise.

Studies show that teacher pay is the number one reason people leave the classroom, and for CTE professionals, there isn't an incentive to resign from good-paying positions for a pay cut so they can teach. School divisions need to change how they treat CTE teachers by increasing monetary incentives when recruiting and identifying effective retention strategies like paying for professional CTE certifications and targeted pay stipends for managing computers and software. In addition, schools could partner with universities to identify CTE career switchers and offer to pay for courses leading to teacher certification along with Praxis exams with a promise of working as a teacher in the school system for a set number of years.

Solving the teacher shortage will require a different way of doing business if the United States is going again to take the education lead on the world stage. And according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly two-thirds of jobs are in occupations that typically don't require a college degree but require some CTE skills training and experience.