Many community colleges hope to situate themselves as valuable employer partners and contributors to the growing workforce. And as calls intensify for community colleges to fulfill workforce development needs, it’s becoming even more important for colleges to establish sustainable relationships with local employers. Long-lasting and mutually beneficial partnerships provide students with a valuable avenue into the workforce, while also establishing community colleges as integral players in the labor market.
In this webinar we present the best practices for cultivating sustainable employer partnerships, and discuss how these partnerships can help colleges make significant strides toward achieving their financial and student success goals.
The first step we discuss is how to source and structure deals for sustainability. The practices profiled include:
This resource is part of the Create a Community College Pipeline to Place Students in Right-Fit Careers Roadmap. Access the Roadmap for stepwise guidance with additional tools and research.
- Create advisory councils for to gain quantitative and qualitative feedback and insight from industry partners
- Develop subscription-based workforce engagement through a small business consortium that supports soft skills training
- Use a regional training consortium to create a cross-industry shared training capacity, encourage lead passing, and reach a wider market through a regional training consortium
- Form partnerships with universities to leverage the power of a joint brand
The second step is to reduce institutional partnership risk. We share how to:
- Use boot camps to bring industry knowledge and new skills to faculty and further their professional development
- Isolate the risk of a new program launch with a spin-off incubator for short format programming
The last step is to adapt to and anticipate future demand, and we highlight the practice of embedding an agile funding mechanism to support fluctuating workforce and program needs.
To view the presentation, flip through the slides or download the PDF version.