John W. Thompson Quotes

Our education system is not meeting the needs of today’s workforce much less tomorrow’s.

Under the leadership of President Obama and a whole host of partners, including nonprofits, foundations, and advocates, the Department of Labor has made historic investments in community colleges, apprenticeships, coding boot camps, and summer jobs.

For wide swaths of training and education there are valuable spillovers which mean that the private sector needs support from the government. That is why I have been so determined to protect and grow apprenticeships and put higher education on a sustainable footing.

Let's focus on how we can take someone who is being poorly educated in an American public school and how they are poorly trained for a job, and put in place those opportunities for them to get that education, give their parents choice in education, make it real for them.

First create jobs, and then provide skills to people.

This 21st century economy holds great promise for our people. But unless we give all Americans the skills they need to succeed, countries like India and China will take good-paying jobs that should be ours.

Why cannot Georgia girls who need and have to work, and who need and want to go to school, be instructed in some practical training and become proficient in the industrial arts?

There's a belief... in the country that we can cure unemployment by creating opportunity. The skills gap proves that opportunity along is not enough to get people employed.

The ingenuity and creativity of the private sector is essential to meeting American's needs for a skilled work force.

I'm fascinated by the skills gap.

One of the smartest investments we can make in Connecticut is in job training programs.

I strongly believe in the apprenticeship model because we see in a lot of countries the local education system is not providing talent that businesses need. So it is important that there is an alignment between what the companies need and the education system, so the education system can build the right programmes.

The golden recipe for creating jobs is learning what kinds of people companies need and feeding them with training programmes.

We need a more strategic, coordinated, statewide plan that identifies high-demand jobs or industries with a projected under-supply and offer training to get these Oregonians to work.

Working with a Republican co-sponsor, Rep. Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania, I introduced a bill to strengthen our nation's career and technical education programs and more closely align them with the needs of local businesses and industries.

The TECH Careers Act will open the door for more Americans to have successful middle-class careers and help small businesses in Connecticut and across the country access a qualified pool of talented workers.

We wouldn't need any job training centers if our education was working in the first place.

From the outset, the Obama administration has recognized that building a robust skills infrastructure means building strong partnerships with community colleges.

Today, many companies are reporting that their number one constraint on growth is the inability to hire workers with the necessary skills.

Most of the people we're depending on for our economic future will not graduate from college. It is time we empowered them instead of ignoring them.

The university is a vast public utility which turns out future workers in today's vineyard, the military-industrial complex.

There are several million job vacancies on the country right now, but they don’t line up with skills [of the unemployed.]

The longer our graduation lines are today, the shorter our unemployment lines will be tomorrow.

Business has to have a seat at the table. Infrastructure isn't going to be built properly if business doesn't have a seat at the table. A school is not going to happen if businesses don't work with schools about what kind of jobs they really need.

Do you want to use your tax dollars to educate more people who can't get jobs? I want to make sure that we spend our money where people can get jobs when they get out.