Supply, Demand, and Workforce Education's Response to Technology's Changing Landscape

How Workforce Education Responds to Supply and Demand for Cybersecurity Professionals

1. Give an example of a current situation that describes the concepts of supply, demand, or elasticity, and how workforce education has responded.

In my opinion, workforce education has strongly responded to the supply, demand, or elasticity throughout the last decade, trying to cope with technology demands. The need for highly trained hands in the field of technology, in both software and hardware, has been overwhelmingly affecting the country's growth. With security being an important factor in technology today, the need for trained cybersecurity professionals has been growing too, which brought in community colleges and workforce development institutes to step up and provide the necessary training. Career certificates, professional certifications, and cybersecurity knowledge training were among the training provided by workforce centers.

Mostly all universities, colleges now provide cybersecurity training and workforce centers in the country as the threat level is higher than ever. This shows how the workforce when used to fill the gap for a certain profession, would work and cope. Cybersecurity professionals are still in dire demand even though the huge numbers graduated in that profession.

2. The mission of workforce education is to develop what the authors suggest is the most important of the three variables that determine national wealth – human resources. Chapter 3 discusses the imperative for training and education of human capital.  Compare and contrast this to the human capital training and education discussed in Pathways to Prosperity and America's Divided Recovery.  What remains the same?  What has changed?

As stated by (Grey & Herr,) "A nation cannot be competitive unless the businesses and firms, or at least a high percentage of them, are competitive, meaning that they can produce a product or service at the level of quality and price that meets national or international standards." In my opinion, this is a fact that the United States continues to compete with standards products that many countries cannot find in other markets. For instance, the way the country is producing its products depends on a long-lasting culture of integrity, still, and for years to come, these products will continue to fill and dominate global markets. These will not possibly be attained without world-class workforce development. If the country must continue to be internationally competitive, a highly trained workforce should be the focus in the future.

As also stated in the Harvard Graduate School of Education's paper: Pathways to Prosperity Project, "In today's increasingly global economy, other nations face the same challenge as the U.S. in preparing young people for an increasingly competitive labor market. From Austria to New Zealand, many of the relatively well-paid but low-skilled jobs that helped fuel prosperity a generation ago have disappeared." But still, the country could meet its production standards and produce products that other nations respect.

Other international markets are now competing unfairly with the United States' which affected the demand for some of our products. The fact that other countries make similar products for lower profit has greatly affected demands on some of our products, which has its toll on our economy. This has also been a factor in employees losing jobs due to business closing that used to supply other countries by goods now produced by countries such as China, for example, and other emerging economies. In our democracy, the country's laws and lawmakers are the factors behind our integrity when producing and or exporting. These factors now have changed in other competing international markets for lower profit instead.