One effective tool that we have developed to facilitate the transition to a new job or profession has been our community colleges. These two-year institutions have been in the forefront of teaching the types of skills that build on workers' previous experiences to create new job skills. Currently almost one in three of their enrollees are aged thirty or older, a statistic that suggests that these individuals have previous job experience.

In recent years, competition from abroad has risen to a point at which our lowest skilled workers are being priced out of the global labor market. This diminishing of opportunities for such workers is why retraining for new job skills that meet the evolving opportunities created by our economy has become so urgent in this country. A major source of such retraining has been our community colleges, which have proliferated over the past two decades.

The marked move of capital from failing technologies to those at the cutting edge has quickened the pace at which job skills become obsolete. The completion of high school used to equip the average worker with sufficient skills to last a lifetime. That is no longer true, as evidenced by community colleges being inundated with workers returning to school to acquire new skills and on-the-job training being expanded and upgraded by a large proportion of American business.