The National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA) released a report in December 2020 – “Employment Opportunities for College Graduates in Food, Agriculture, Renewable Natural Resources and the Environment, United States, 2020-2025” – showing that as the nation places greater emphasis on agricultural sciences and business to meet the challenges of developing complex global food systems for a growing population, a growing bounty of employment opportunities is presenting itself for U.S. college graduates. The NIFA report estimates nearly 59,400 jobs annually between 2020 and 2025 will be available in the agriculture sector of the economy. The question is, how are they going to be filled? Kansas City-based DeBruce Foundation has answers and strategies. By Dennis McLaughlin, McLaughlin Writers LLC. Source: Kristie Larson, Strategic Relationship Manager, The DeBruce Foundation; Chanelle Zak, Community and Multi-Media Coordinator, The DeBruce Foundation; Jennifer Ryder Fox, Ph.D., dean of the College of Agriculture at California State University, Chico.

DeBruce Foundation Takes An Agile Approach To Workforce Development

Ten years ago Yahoo News ran a story entitled “College Majors That Are Useless.” The article ranked degrees in agriculture, animal science and horticulture among the top five diplomas to avoid “if you are going to school in hopes of graduating to more job opportunities.” Theater and fashion design were the other two (since you asked). The piece was written by an award-winning, Hawaii-based freelance writer, actor and filmmaker who says when he is not banging out copy and screenplays, he surfs and spear fishes for dinner. So, questioning his bone fides for researching such an assignment on academia and agriculture was justified.

Blowback on the article was swift and biting. Jennifer Ryder Fox, Ph.D., dean of the College of Agriculture at California State University, published a rebuttal the next day in the online media outlet Growing Home, a nonprofit food pantry organization in the Denver area. “One might be led to believe that the author has something against eating, wearing clothes, enjoying a natural landscape, or smelling a bouquet of roses,” she wrote. “What other reason could he have for singling out agriculture, animal science, and horticulture as three of the five most useless degrees? His rationale and indeed the original rankings mentioned in his article are certainly not based on fact.”

In her piece Dr. Fox cited a recent (at the time) study conducted by Purdue University and funded by USDA that projected an estimated 54,400 annual openings for college graduates in food, renewable energy, and the environment between 2010 and 2015. Or 272,000 jobs total over the five years. The study also found that only 53,500 students with ag/food sector majors would graduate each year over that five year period, amounting to a shortfall of 25,000 positions unfilled over the period.

Commenting on the situation in California back then, Dr. Fox said the California Community College Centers for Excellence had completed an environmental scan of the agriculture value chain in California and found that there [were] 2.5 million individuals employed in more than 800 job titles within the agriculture value chain in the state. The average annual salary for agricultural value chain workers [was] $50,000. “While the number of production jobs is expected to decrease in the next five years,” she explained, “ a net increase of 181,000 jobs [was] expected throughout the entire agricultural value chain, which includes support, research, technology, production, processing/packaging, marketing, and sales and distribution.”

The challenge for the overall U.S. economy going forward is to attract, train, inspire and place qualified people into new jobs and career tracks that are emerging as advancing technology creates new capacities to create, design, produce, transport, market and track. Just a few, among others.

Over the last ten years there has been a growing need for educated agriculturalists, and projections estimate particularly strong double-digit growth in agricultural careers such as agricultural inspectors, animal scientists, food scientists and technologists, natural sciences managers, pest control workers, soil and plant scientists, and veterinarians. Not to mention how adaptation of advanced technology into the entire agriculture sector of the economy – sensors, drones, mapping and data collection systems, GPS, robotics, artificial intelligence et al – is calling for a new generation of ag engineers and technology specialists.

One more wrinkle. The Purdue study found that ag industry employers, prefer to hire graduates with agriculture and life science majors because most of them have been brought up on farms and in rural areas and have a natural affinity for ag job descriptions and requirements. But those numbers are dwindling as fourth and fifth generation sons and daughters opt for careers in the big city. As mentioned above, even if the ag industry is posting some 54,500 job openings each year, there is still a shortage of 1,000 candidates annually to fill them.

Enter The DeBruce Foundation

So is anyone addressing the situation? Yes. The DeBruce Foundation. Founded in 1988 The DeBruce Foundation is a national organization with an all-encompassing goal to expand pathways to overall economic growth and opportunity for individuals and communities. A noble goal. But the Foundation has been working with a different blueprint. It set out to accomplish its mission by expanding the traditional model of simply allocating funds to humanitarian, civic and philanthropic groups. Paul DeBruce, the founder of The DeBruce Foundation and former chairman and CEO of DeBruce Grain, Inc., assembled a team of experts from various professions and sectors of the economy to identify “transformative opportunities to make an even greater public impact for decades to come.”

Mr. DeBruce had the ‘right stuff’ for the mission (to borrow the term from author Thomas Wolfe’s book and movie entitled the same). He grew DeBruce Grain into an agricultural industry giant which comprised grain facilities, grain trading, grain and oilseed processing and operated, as well, fertilizer terminals and trading and feed handling operations and ingredient trading in 75 locations throughout the United States and Mexico. Mr. DeBruce has also chaired the Kansas City Federal Reserve Board of Directors and presided over the Terminal Grain Elevator Merchants Association (TEGMA). He has served on the boards of the National Grain and Feed Association, Kansas City Board of Trade, Civic Council of Kansas City, American Royal and Customer Advisory Board to Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway. “His leadership as a trustee of The Nelson-Atkins museum of Art and other Kansas City non-profit organizations has resulted in lasting impact for the Kansas City community,” notes the Foundation’s leadership.

Despite Mr. DeBruce’s ties to agriculture and the Foundation’s location in Kansas City, a national agricultural hub, The DeBruce Foundation is not necessarily ag-centric. “As our workforce experiences vast changes,” the Foundation notes, “our responsibility grows to empower and equip [all] young people to navigate the [broader] world of work.” Last September The DeBruce Foundation commissioned a study conducted by GQR, a Washington D.C.- based opinion research firm that found that 80% percent of youth ages 16-24 lack a clear idea of how to prepare for a career.

A somewhat startling finding also emerged from the research: 67% of youth reported considering only one or two career paths. “The research presents a stunning opportunity to help youth identify their next steps by building career literacy,” says the Foundation team, “Exposing them to a wide array of career options in which their skills and interests can shine throughout their journey can instill in them a resilience and confidence for the future.” And for some, those next steps might include a serious look into how agriculture offers an exciting, lucrative, important and satisfying career.

A Transformative Model

The DeBruce Foundation, whose overall mission is to expand pathways to economic growth and opportunity, has placed intense focus on creating strategies and tools for workforce development. Its aim is to help individuals widen their vision in identifying new occupational paths and unlock their potential to succeed in careers they might never have considered. Agilities.org is the key to the Foundation’s efforts to raise an individual’s awareness of the skills and interests he or she has. Business leaders, entrepreneurs, educators, and researchers have been recruited by The DeBruce Foundation to provide innovative approaches to change how people pursue careers.

“The DeBruce Foundation creates solutions, develops curricula, and supports initiatives to help individuals along their career journey – from preparing for a career to retirement,” says Dr. Leigh Anne Taylor Knight, Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer at the DeBruce Foundation. “We aim to equip individuals to be agile in the face of an ever-changing world of work – meaning they are prepared to overcome challenges and navigate the upcoming changes in workplace technologies, job restructuring, and the shifting of traditional employment sectors.”

Using research and data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, The DeBruce Foundation team has identified groups of work skills used in every single job in the U.S. economy, Taylor Knight notes. “These work skills, coined as Agilities,are key to building an agile career and a resilient workforce.”

Developing Others
Innovating
Inspecting
Judging and Estimating
Managing
Operating Objects
Organizing
Selling and Communicating
Serving and Caring
Working with Information

“No matter what you do for a living,” says the DeBruce team, “you’re using each of these Agilities in different degrees, as every job uses all the Agilities in varying amounts. For example, a physical therapist uses Serving and Caring, Innovating, and Judging and Estimating Agilities most frequently, while a carpenter uses Operating Objects, Inspecting, and Judging and Estimating Agilities most frequently.”

For a student looking ahead to a career, knowing their Agilities can help them understand the multitude of workforce opportunities that align with their strengths and interests,” explains Taylor Knight. “Or, if their dream job uses an Agility they aren’t as skilled in,” she adds, “they know how they need to develop it in order to pursue that career.”

For someone re-entering the workforce or looking for a career in a different sector of the economy, knowing their Agilities can help them successfully assess where their current skills can bring value in that workspace.

How It Works

When individuals gain a better understanding of themselves, they take the first step toward gaining career literacy. When they build a professional network, they become better equipped for a successful career and more resilient and adaptable when changes occur in the industry overall or in a particular workplace. The Foundation partners with K-12 schools, universities, workforce development organizations, libraries, and other groups to increase access to career literacy resources and create shared, innovative programming to expand career pathways. “In a rapidly changing economy, it’s imperative that people develop career literacy to make informed decisions about their career paths,” says Taylor Knight.

Instead of matching someone to one job they could do, the Foundation wants to expand the number of careers individuals can recognize as options for their future. A fundamental component of the Foundation’s suite of career literacy tools is the Agile Work Profiler, an online assessment that can be completed in 10 minutes and identifies one’s Agilities. By discovering the intersection of one’s skills and interests, one can navigate the workforce in a more informed and empowered way.

The Agile Work Profiler works under the premise that as an individual’s interests and skills develop and change throughout a career, so does his or her Agilities. For this reason, the Agile Work Profiler can be taken multiple times throughout one’s lifetime and provide key information to the individual taking that next step in their career. “After they know their Agilities,” DeBruce Foundation staffers note, “career seekers can use The Foundation’s Career Explorer Tools, a suite of interactive, online tools that provide information about the income, preparation, work activities, and demand for each career.”

According to Dr. Leigh Anne Taylor Knight, as one explores ways to use their Agilities, they will find many agricultural jobs described on Agilities.org. For example:

Agricultural Equipment Mechanics (using the Operating Objects agility).
Buyers and Purchasing Agents of Farm Products (using the Selling and Communicating agility).
Environmental Engineering (using the Judging and Estimating agility).
Biochemists and Biophysicists (using Innovative agility).
Veterinarians (using the Serving and Caring agility).

The DeBruce Foundation’s tools help people explore opportunities in the workforce that they might have not been exposed to or have seriously considered.

The Science Behind The Agile Work Profiler

By The DeBruce Foundation Team
(with editing for length)

The Agile Work Profiler (AWP) was inspired by The DeBruce Foundation’s objective to broaden career opportunities for individuals. The notion of agility has two critical implications in the evolving economy.

First, individuals often have strengths that are assets in a variety of career domains, even when such domains are seemingly dissimilar and are thus unlikely to be considered meaningful options. When making employment decisions, people customarily consider a limited set of homogenous work options, typically within a single career domain. The notion of agility implies that the person may succeed in a diverse set of options both within a given career domain and across several different domains.

Second, the notion of agility implies that the individual can build new strengths based on interests in different opportunities in the world of work. Such an approach to work is becoming increasingly consequential in an economy where people change jobs and make different career moves more frequently than before.

Thus, an Agility is a capability that can be improved over time, depending on the individual’s scope of career interests. The wider the scope of interests, the broader the opportunities for the person to consider determining which of their capabilities, if any, should be improved (and to what degree) in order to pursue their interests.

The profession of labor force development, career counseling and human resource management offer a rich array of tools that help individuals explore their skills, abilities, and interests in making work-related decisions. Employers, educational institutions, and social service agencies also use such tools for recruitment and guidance. However, these instruments and the related practices often assume that optimal results arise from narrowing individual choices—that is, from matching the individual to a limited, homogenous set of options. This practice is traditionally seen as an effective means to greater value creation for the individual and the economy. Existing instruments and practices also tend to view the individual’s skills and abilities as comprising a static set of capabilities. Therefore, they overlook the possibility that a broader scope of individual interests can act as a guidepost to help build new strengths that facilitate the pursuit of new opportunities.

A third aspect of conventional approaches is that existing tools are typically unable to directly relate an individual’s capabilities to all occupational choices that exist in the economy. This oversight is a critical weakness when the objective is to expand career choices and opportunities. The AWP was conceived to address these three characteristics. It is designed to:

Expand and diversify one’s career opportunities,
Guide individual efforts to build new strengths in light of a wide range of occupational interests, and
Enable the person to make career choices and assess whether they need to build new strengths in light of how their existing capabilities and interests relate to all occupational options in the economy.

The AWP draws on dynamic data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS periodically surveys members of each occupation in the U.S. on the role of various skills, abilities, and work activities (i.e., specific tasks) in their occupation. It formally classifies about 970 occupations for data collection. Each occupation includes, on average, 60 jobs (sub-occupational titles), thus altogether covering nearly 60,000 jobs in the U.S. economy. The development of the AWP was based primarily on work activity data (as opposed to data on skills and abilities) for two reasons. First, work activities (e.g., analyzing information, operating mechanized vehicles, coaching others, organizing daily tasks, caring for others, selling products) are behavioral properties of work and more open to being acquired or learned by the individual, compared to deeper skills and abilities, which tend to be more attitudinal and may therefore require greater effort in potential processes of individual change. In some cases, skills and abilities are construed in close proximity to personality traits (e.g., ‘originality,’ ‘social sensitivity’) which are notoriously difficult to change. The behavioral activity data, on the other hand, specifies which particular work tasks—instead of personal traits—are important in a given occupation. The second reason for preferring the work activity data was its quality over the data for skills and abilities. BLS surveys about 30 individuals from each occupation for work activities, resulting in a total sample size of nearly 30,000 responses across the 970 occupations. In contrast, only about seven individuals from each occupation are surveyed for skills and abilities, limiting the reliability and predictive quality of the collected data.

The analysis supporting the current version of the AWP uses BLS work activity data from 2017. This dataset involves survey responses on 42 different work activities from about 30 individuals within each of the 966 occupations specified by BLS’ 2015 occupational dictionary. Each of the 42 work activities falls into one of four general types of work behaviors:

Information input (five activities)—where and how are the information and data gained that are needed to perform this job?
Interacting with others (17 activities)—what interactions with other persons or supervisory activities occur while performing this job?
Mental processes (10 activities)—what processing, planning, problem-solving, decision-making, and innovating activities are performed with job-relevant information?
Work output (nine activities)—what physical activities are performed, what equipment and vehicles are operated/controlled, and what complex/technical activities are accomplished as job outputs?

The DeBruce Foundation continuously procures other information about occupations—such as actual employment prospects, income trends, and educational requirements—which, combined with AWP results, provides a robust means to foster more effective and diverse career choices for individuals. The Foundation’s efforts are driven by its core mission to expand pathways to economic growth and opportunity. One way to achieve the mission is to use the AWP to broaden opportunities for all individuals in our evolving economy.