Barbara Endel is the Program Director of Jobs for the Future and co-leader of Accelerating Opportunity: A Breaking Through Initiative. She joined Rick Kogan on The Afternoon Shift to talk about the training obstacles to getting a good paying job. We tackled questions like why, in spite of training from early education through high school, college, and even in public or private job training, are people not finding jobs they were hoping to get? And why aren’t we training people for the jobs that are actually most readily available?

“I think the most relavent point around Josh’s story is… Given the experience that Josh and many servicemen and women have, the training that they get from the military…how do we translate that into skills that are recognized by today’s employers? 

“Community colleges…have been working very dilligently for several decades to be relevant, to do both short and long-term training programs. But there’s no question that today’s career training at the high school level, community colleges, and four-year colleges really need to make their curriculum more relevant to today’s jobs,” Endel says. 

Hear more from today’s conversation by listening to the clip above.