Revising the transactional approach to workforce development

“Despite many advances in community college workforce development practice, there are some warning signs that need addressing in the near future. There has been a decline in credit enrollment in many workforce programs and, in particular, the participation of low-income working adults. This decline began during the recovery from the Great Recession, and while Covid exacerbated it, the enrollment decrease appears to be related to perceptions of whether the curriculum will lead to jobs. With the exception of healthcare programs, employers are not utilizing community college programs as a major source for talent. Finally, while the focus on student success in the past two decades has significantly altered community college practice in many parts of the institution (dual enrollment, counseling, developmental education), often the structure and content of most credit and noncredit occupational programs have not changed much. I believe most of these issues have emerged from a too-narrow implementation of what I have called the transactional approach to workforce development programs. In my work at Macomb Community College (Michigan), where I was president from 2008 to 2017, we modified the “transactional” approach to one which intentionally takes into account not just the needs of employers, but the needs of students and the communities served by the institutions. (We were not unique; many community colleges have initiated similar practices.) Shortcomings of the status quo What do we mean by the transactional approach? For the past 40 years, the conventional wisdom dominating community college workforce development activity assumes that colleges should only respond to the skill needs of employers and develop programs to meet those needs. If we implement the skill needs that employers tell us, they will hire our students. Taken too literally, this approach raises several issues. First employers are often unable to articulate their skill needs easily. This is especially true when new technologies are implemented and employers are uncertain of what skills they need. Sometimes they fall back on articulating behavioral needs as “showing up on time” or “working in teams” without any specific reference to how these relate to the employment needs. Second, they don’t connect their skill needs with wages, working conditions, occupational advancement and other factors which are important to students. These play a significant role for students in determining their career choices. Third, the emphasis upon companies “telling us what they want” often misses the particular need of the community college in preparing low-income students to succeed in work. For example, Black students preparing for work in an occupational environment dominated by White employees will need skills for dealing with on-the-job racist encounters. These important skills are rarely recognized by employers. New book by Jim Jacobs: Moving a Community College Forward: My Story as an Educator, Researcher, President, and Radical Fourth, the transactional approach is often utilized with individual employers and the college miss the importance to the community of major sector of employers or the economic development needs of communities for particular skills that may help in attracting specific economic development areas. Finally, the transactional emphasis also marginalizes the contributions of the college can make to employers to enhance their learning practices at the workplace. After years of educating adults, community colleges have the skills to know how employers can create programs that can advance their own workforce, recruiting from within. We can become an important resource in the design and development of work-based learning programs. The transactional approach is too narrow for them to realize their mission of economic and workforce development for their students and the communities they serve. Macomb’s approach What should a new approach look like? Here is an example from our work at Macomb. One of the major local industries within the manufacturing sector in Macomb County is autobody design. The college had a significant program in that area which resulted in employment for our graduates. In 2008, during the Great Recession, thousands of Macomb graduates from that sector were laid off. The college, in collaboration with the local workforce and a private employment service firms, established a program to retrain these designers in the industrial design skills related to the construction of nuclear power plants, petroleum refineries and subway systems. Armed with these skills, the employment service firm placed these students in companies in the South West or construction firms that were creating large overseas facilities. However, the goal of the project was not just to employ the students, but to use these students as a base for the design firms in Macomb County to diversify their work from autobody design in these other areas. The approach of Project Redesign provided employment for our students, and an economic development strategy for the community. It focused on an important sector within our local economy and one where the college has significant capacity. The assisted students had left the institution years before, but the assumption was that the college was responsible for continuing to serve them. Much of the actual new training was hands-on devoted to learning the new design skills through practice. Finally, while the college initiated the program, we mobilized the resources of other institutions in the community, including a private employment service firm to aid in its success. Embedding a strategy Scaling a strategy to modify the transactional approach will have significant implications for our institutions. First, we need to trim the breathe of our workplace curriculum offerings and develop deeper ties between a few programs within key sectors in our communities. Most colleges have far too many workforce programs to successfully maintain. This results in our resources spread too thin to make a real difference for employers, students or the community. Within private sector areas a college deems critical to students and the community, very dense ties should be developed. This would include senior college leadership spending more time learning about these sectors and shaping how college should interact with them. This is not something to be left to the customized trainers or a local advisory board — presidents need to be directly involved. A close relationship with a sector of employers will also help employers better understand our students and their workforce needs to succeed. We would become far more rooted in the local employer culture and networks. Third, we would become intentional “advocates” for our students, with employers placing the reputation of the college behind them. Fourth, our role with students would not cease when they completed the program. We would proactively maintain ties with them in times of downturn and/or upgrade their skills when facing a new technology. Finally, we would operate our programs and activities with the intention of always attempting to create clearer sector definitions of skill needs, wages, compensation and ways of measuring student learning. We would become a resource for employers on developing more effective and efficient training for their workforces. To be an engine of opportunity, we need to become more respected in our communities about what we know both about jobs and how to prepare for them. These will take a significant reallocation of resources, new positions and a renewed emphasis to place workforce issues into a central space within the college. Within this perspective, we can strategically fit in discussions of short-term Pell programs, stackable credentials, apprenticeship or other delivery aspects. These important activities alone are not the “answer” to the problems of workforce education unless they are embedded within a substantial knowledge of the local industry needs and deep understanding of what students want out of their occupational programs. The post Revising the transactional approach to workforce development first appeared on Community College Daily .

Summary generated from the RSS feed of Community College Daily. All article rights belong to the original publisher. Click through to read the full piece on www.ccdaily.com.