Minnesota State Workforce 2030
By 2030, Minnesota State will close the gaps in Minnesota's workforce. This is the moonshot goal that we call Workforce 2030. It is a staggeringly ambitious goal and one that requires both intentional culture change and innovation, as well as advocacy and leadership with partners and stakeholders across the state. Workforce 2030 is a search for education strategies and policy review to improve outcomes for underperforming students from all backgrounds.
Minnesota State recognizes that it must adapt and change its systems and cultures to meet the needs of today’s students, rather than expect today’s students to learn or adapt to the systems and culture of yesterday’s higher education. These efforts require intentionally prioritizing capacity-building to make change across all levels of Minnesota State and empowering individuals regardless of title or responsibility to examine, explore, and experiment with evidence-based innovation to close attainment gaps.
Workforce 2030 is our foundational goal, serving as the organizing principle for all our work, our operational structures, policies and procedures, and for the inclusive, safe, and anti-racist organizational ethos we strive for. It unites our resolve and drives a strong sense of urgency towards achieving the goal.
The focus of Workforce 2030 includes:
Enhanced Access to a higher education by strengthening partnerships and collaboration with K-12, business and industry, community-based organizations, and philanthropic partners to expand and grow current programming and identify new ways to support students
Academic Success by establishing guided learning pathways that focus on academic preparation, progression, and accomplishment within an area of study and career
Student Engagement within the institution, both academic and non-academic, including supporting basic needs
Evidence-based decision making by building a technology infrastructure and expanding capacity for deeper data analytics
Financial Resources for students and growing the financial resource base for campuses
Workforce and Talent Diversity by incorporating the local and national context with the changing student and employee demographics and needs - focusing on cultural competence development, inclusive hiring practices, and improved campus climate
To accomplish our Workforce 2030 goal, we must ensure that the strength of our institutions is not lost while, at the same time, ensure our system can continue to serve all residents of Minnesota. Transformational and collaborative work toward this goal is happening throughout the Minnesota State system, with support from all of our campuses, our presidents, our bargaining units, and our faculty and staff.
We’re all working on this together because the core value for Minnesota State is to provide an opportunity for all Minnesotans to create a better future for themselves, for their families, and for their communities.
The workforce of tomorrow will be increasingly diverse, and tomorrow’s employers will have to engage communities, recruit employees, and serve customers that are more diverse than they are today. Given 75% of emergent jobs in Minnesota will require postsecondary education, it is crucial that Minnesota State colleges and universities educate, prepare, and credential tomorrow’s employees.
Closing the educational workforce gaps ensures prosperity for all our students, their families, and the communities in which they live. It is a moral imperative, an economic imperative, and imperative for meeting Minnesota’s workforce needs.
Education is meant to be the great equalizer. Advancing our workforce goals, and removing barriers that stand in the way of all students’ success is the only way to disrupt entrenched systems and barriers that have impeded disadvantaged students from achieving their potential.
Workforce development is an economic imperative, key to Minnesota’s future and a thriving economy
In order for the state to prosper Minnesota State must offer all students a chance to succeed.
Recognizing the power of education to transform lives, Minnesota State is deeply committed to this work. Only by addressing systemic and structural inequities in educational access and outcomes, can we help our students build a better future for themselves, their families, and our communities. It will require both intentional systems and culture change and innovation, as well as advocacy and leadership with partners and stakeholders across the state to accomplish.
Workforce 2030 aims to bring about greater success for all our students through the removal of barriers which impede success and equitable outcomes. This work is about a fundamental shift in our approach to educating and supporting the success of our students.
Students experience many external barriers such as economic fragility, mental health issues, food and housing insecurity, and issues with childcare, transportation, and racism, as well as internal barriers such as registration holds, financial aid, overburdened advisors, etc.
The conditions and factors that have created disparities are not easily siloed and solved. Jobs, housing, education, employment, health, and food security are parts of a deeply interconnected system. To ultimately be successful, Workforce 2030 requires not only partnership and collaboration among our schools, but in building and strengthening partnerships across sectors with businesses, industry, nonprofits, K-12, philanthropic organizations, local and state government, and within our communities.
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Minnesota State acknowledges the land and the tribal nations upon whose land this work is being accomplished. We acknowledge that we are on Dakota land. We recognize the Native Nations of this region who have called this place home over thousands of years including the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), Lakota, Nakota, Ho-Chunk, and Cheyenne. We acknowledge the ongoing colonialism and the legacies of violence, displacement, migration, and settlement that foreground the formation of Minnesota State Colleges and Universities and subsequently this report. We commit to advancing critical efforts to understand and address these legacies, including the larger conversation of reparations, repatriation, and redress urgently needed for the scope of ethical acknowledgment to begin in earnest.
This statement was developed by the Minnesota State Equity 2030 Chancellor’s Fellows and is reproduced here with their permission.
With thanks to Iyekiyapiwin Darlene St. Clair (2020) for her guidance that “land acknowledgements need to include the present, be more than a list, refer to a commitment, and give some broader context.”