Community Colleges Tailor Training Programs To Better Meet Workforce Needs

A year into a statewide program that's transforming workforce training programs at the state's 15 community colleges, about 1,000 students have been served in nearly half of the 140 accelerated programs that will be rolling out of the system through 2013.

The colleges are taking part in the Massachusetts Community Colleges & Workforce Development Transformation Agenda (MCCWDTA), made possible by a first-of-its-kind $20-million workforce development grant from the U.S. Department of Labor. It's meant to fund and expand training programs and encourage partnerships with employers and colleges.

The agenda focuses on six growing sectors: health care, biotechnology and life sciences, advanced manufacturing, clean energy/sustainability, information technology and financial services.

Schools are adjusting programs and creating new ones that target workers who lost jobs or want to change careers without necessarily going back to school for a degree, at least not right away.

The programs are meant to allow students to complete training with college credits along with industry-recognized certifications and give them the opportunity to complete accelerated training, often cutting out general education classes and offering math classes tailored to what applies to a specific field, rather than general math classes.

"If you can get a certification that gets you a job, then you can continue on and get an associate's degree that will get you a better job," said John Henshaw, assistant dean of workforce development at Mount Wachusett Community College (MWCC) in Gardner.

Programs are open to the public, but were designed to meet the needs of individuals eligible for the federal government's Trade Adjustment Assistance Program, which are for workers who lost their jobs due to foreign trade.

Nypro Program Nears Debut

Clinton-based plastics giant Nypro Inc. has worked with colleges locally and around the world and has offered its own Nypro University to train employees and the public since the 1970s. But approaching MWCC about helping write a workforce training grant proposal led to a new collaboration.

Angelo Sabatalo, director of organizational development for Nypro, said the company determined it really needed "the ability to train individuals so that when they hit the workforce, they have performance-based skill sets so they can actually get into the work environment and perform at the expected level."

To do that, Nypro needed to improve its skills assessment of employees and students.

"When somebody ... was either looking for a job or if we were trying to promote somebody, you would look at their past history, you would look at their resume … There was really no way to assess their actual skill sets," he said.

Sabatalo said the assessments include three pieces of equipment in which instructors can replicate some of the issues workers would face on the factory floor, giving instructors a baseline on which to judge a student, worker or applicant.

Then a level of training is determined and the student is reassessed afterward.

Sabatalo said MWCC wanted to work with Nypro to expand the program to the public, further helping Nypro fill its skills gap by letting students earn industry-recognized certifications.

In the past month, Nypro has done pre-assessments of 130 workers, and MWCC will roll it out soon.

Challenges Of Alignment

So many changes to each school's programs means there are groups involved with MCCWDTA charged with making sure that everyone's on the same page.

"What we're trying to do is help them align with each other and also align with the needs of the industry," said Robert Ross, director of the BioTeach Program at the Massachusetts Biotechnology Education Foundation (MassBioEd).

Ross said his group is also working to make sure students can move between programs, knowing they're receiving the same type of education and training.

MassBioEd is helping use the MCCWDTA grant money to move away from anecdotal information about industry needs and look into more quantifiable information about current needs and how to project future needs.

Ross explained that the agenda is different than what MassBioEd has worked on in the past because it faces a time limit, which has caused the organization to move swiftly to find lasting solutions.

And that's a major component of the agenda. Dale Allen, MCCWDTA project director and Quinsigamond Community College's vice president for community engagement, said once programs are in place and the back-end, database adjustments implemented, there will be few new costs from the agenda to maintain.

"Massachusetts is a frontrunner in the way we have partnered with the workforce development side," Allen said. "In year four (after the three-year grant expired), we hopefully can serve thousands of students with very little required to sustain it from the colleges or any other source because, ideally, we're changing these systems."

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