Seven Los Angeles and Orange County, California, community colleges recently joined forces to better prepare their students for jobs in the international trade-related workforce. Through the Global Trade & Logistics Consortia (PRO-GTL), college faculty members, working closely with local business and civic leaders, are creating new courses and certificate programs for students interested in jobs […]

Central Community College (CCC), in Grand Island, Nebraska, has been intentional about building partnerships with local high schools. The college has dual-enrollment programs, called career pathways, that encourage high school students to get a jump on career and technical programs as early as junior year. Pre-nursing is one popular career pathway, along with advanced manufacturing […]

When Dow Chemical Company needed to expand its Gulf Coast operations, Stacey Chiasson, Dow’s public affairs coordinator, got on the phone with Monty Sullivan, president of the Louisiana Community and Technical College System (LCTCS). Within 30 days, the two organizations had signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) outlining plans for a new apprenticeship program, which […]

How do you offer job training when employers can’t spare their workers for even a half day? That’s the problem that the administrators at Minnesota State Community and Technical College’s (M State) set out to solve. The Fargo/Moorhead region has the lowest unemployment in the country. Therefore, employers often need to hire M State students […]

Career training at Robeson Community College, in Lumberton, North Carolina, has taken a high-tech turn, focusing less on trades like plumbing and carpentry and more on fields like advanced manufacturing and allied health. The person steering these changes is Channing Jones, vice president of workforce development at Robeson, who notes that technology has become the […]

As a senior policy fellow for the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce, Keith Bird spent years working on a new model for credentialing that makes it easy for employers and other stakeholders to know what skills and competencies students have mastered. Now, as president of Kentucky’s Gateway Community and Technical College, one of 20 community […]

At Harper College in Palatine, Illinois, a test of College for America’s (CfA) competency-based education (CBE) model has been underway since fall 2015. Harper is one of seven founding members of a consortium created to enable community colleges to explore CfA’s CBE platform and partner with area employers to address workforce-competency shortfalls. In the current […]

Since Gateway Community and Technical College and the local Citi call center, in Florence, Kentucky, embarked on a workforce-development partnership more than 10 years ago, more than 2,600 employees of the financial-services company have started or completed college credentials. More than 1,800 have taken college-credit courses at Gateway, and another 800 have taken customized training […]

The Alamo Colleges district, in Texas, recently won the Bellwether Award for its Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training (I-BEST) program, which provides free workforce training in addition to social services and remedial education. What makes the I-BEST program, started in 2010 and inspired by a Washington state program, so successful? “One thing we focus […]

Houston Community College (HCC) has stretched the definition of “community” to include the global community, with strategic alliances it has formed around the world, resulting in fully accredited degree programs in Vietnam; training and workforce development in Brazil; and consulting services in the Middle East. These international relations not only have boosted community and economic […]