Workers today will find that in two-three years most of their current skills will no longer be adequate to perform their jobs. Educational institutions and businesses in Appalachia are largely unprepared for educating and retraining workers to meet this challenge. There must be progressive training through preschool, elementary, secondary and post-secondary schools on into working life for every person in the work force. The need exists to coordinate a seamless integration of this lifelong education in information age skills. This would mean not just training people for existing jobs.
Education needs to allow people to adapt to changing times and prosper.
This is a daunting task but an opportunity to share learnings from across the Appalachian Region. These four areas are factors in how successful the region will be in the information age. Cooperative ventures offer hope of providing education within each community. The institutions will need to pool resources across traditional turf boundaries to meet this challenge. Access to learning for this field must be as decentralized as the field itself.