What Are the Skills Required to Obtain a Good Job?

The National Guard Youth ChalleNGe (ChalleNGe) program provides a positive intervention for youth ages 16 to 18 who are experiencing difficulty in traditional high school. The program includes 40 locations (sites) in 31 states and territories. About 250,000 young people have taken part in the ChalleNGe program, and nearly 190,000 have completed the program. ChalleNGe is a residential, quasi-military program. Participants, called cadets, spend five and a half months onsite in the Residential Phase, in which they are immersed in daily classes, exercise, and other activities. The next 12 months, in the Post-Residential Phase, cadets work with mentors who help them with school or job search and work. Many ChalleNGe sites are interested in providing additional job training during the Residential Phase but face space, budget, and personnel constraints. In this report, the authors provide background on the middle-skills labor market-the jobs for workers with more than a high school education but less than a bachelor's degree. They discuss which occupations are in the middle-skills labor market and the training and education required for those occupations. They then identify a set of occupations, which they call the goal occupations, that are high-paying, attainable, and growth-oriented. Using occupational characteristics, the authors identify a set of common skills shared among the goal occupations. The report is intended to provide background on the middle-skills labor market for sites interested in occupational training and describe how to incorporate skills that are common among good middle-skills occupations into the ChalleNGe curriculum.-- Back cover.