Community Colleges at the Heart of Workforce Education and Training
Community colleges play a lead role within the State of California’s workforce development system, which comprises a wide range of agencies, departments, programs and funding streams focused on helping students, unemployed adults, incumbent workers, veterans, and underemployed workers obtain the skills and credentials needed to participate successfully in the workforce and move along a career and wage progression.
It is critical that the programs administered by the Chancellor’s Office be aligned to the mission of the community colleges contribution to jobs and the economy. The Collaboratives, Initiatives, Advisories, and Consortia must partner in new ways with a laser focus on preparing students with the skills required to meet the demands of the new workforce.
In that context, the programs administered by the Workforce and Economic and Development (WED) Division of the Chancellor’s Office shall:
· Be responsive to the needs of employers, workers, and students.
· Collaborate with other public institutions, aligning resources to foster cooperation across workforce education and service delivery systems, building well-articulated career pathways.
· Have programmatic decisions that are data-driven and evidenced-based, investing resources and adopting practices on the basis of what works.
· Develop strong partnerships with the private sector, ensuring industry involvement in needs assessment, planning, and program evaluation.
· Be outcome oriented and accountable, measuring results for program participants, including employers and workers.
· Be accessible to employers, workers, and students who may benefit from its operation.
Goals
The Workforce and Economic and Development programs goals are:
1. To advance California's economic growth and global competitiveness through education, training, and services that contributes to continuous workforce improvement.
2. To bolster California's economic and jobs recovery through labor market-aligned education, workforce training services, and sector strategies that include workforce improvement, technology deployment, and business development that meet the needs of California’s competitive and emerging industry sectors and industry clusters.
a. To use labor market information to advise the Chancellor’s Office and regional community college bodies on the workforce needs of California’s competitive and emerging industry sectors and industry clusters.
b. To the extent possible, all WED programs shall work with, share information with, and consider the labor market analyses produced by the Employment Development Department’s Labor Market Information Division and the California Workforce Investment Board.
3. To provide logistical, technical, and communications infrastructure support that engenders alignment between the career technical education programs of the community college system and the needs of California’s competitive and emerging industry sectors and industry clusters.
4. To collaborate and coordinate investment with other state, regional and/or local agencies involved in education and workforce training in California, including but not limited to the California Workforce Investment Board, the Employment Training Panel, the California Department of Education, and the Employment Development Department
5. To identify, acquire, and leverage community college and other financial and in-kind public and private resources to support economic and workforce development and the career technical education programs of the state’s community colleges
6. To work with representatives of business, labor, and professional trade associations to explore and develop alternatives for assisting incumbent workers in the state’s competitive and emerging industry sectors. A key objective is to enable incumbent workers to become more competitive in their region’s labor market, increase competency, and identify career pathways to economic self-sufficiency, a living wage, and lifelong access to good paying jobs.
7. To supply in-demand skills for employers, creating relevant pathways and stackable credentials, getting Californians into open jobs, and ensuring student success.
Workforce and Economic Development Program Objectives
· To analyze, secure, and disseminate labor market data in a way that informs and supports state, regional and local decision-making regarding college programming, including decisions to increase or decrease investments in programs of study in context of the regional economy
· To adopt a skills panel process, as a default process, when responding to labor market needs.
· To moderate the workforce system complexity for industry and partners who interact with the community colleges – in particular, for those competitive and emergent sectors that span multiple geographic regions and a multitude of colleges – through a network of sector navigators, partnerships and collaborations.
DOING What Matters ™ for Jobs & the Economy
To better address the structural skills mismatch, the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, Workforce and Economic Development Division (WED) will embark on a two-year campaign for DOING What Matters ™ for Jobs & the Economy. This four-pronged effort will inform local decision making, address regional economies and focus on competitive and emerging industry sectors.
DOING What Matters ™ for Jobs & the Economy
Doing What Matters™ will reinforce student success through skills panels. Once an unmet labor market need is identified:
· A sector navigator, if needed, will be designated to moderate the complexity of the workforce system.
· An inventory of community college assets for expertise/capabilities/capacity will be collected to address labor market need.
· Potential workforce partners: employers, unions, regions, agencies (CDE, CC, CSU, UC, CWIB, local WIBs, ETP, EDD, etc.), other will be identified.
· Partners will convene into skills panel to drive deliverables:
ü Curriculum model definition/approval
ü Define career pathway or systems of stackable credential articulation, including contextualized basic skills
ü Map to career readiness assessment
ü Insert career guidance module into CACareerCafé.com and WhoDoUWant2B.com
· A proposed funding framework to build out blueprint will be developed (RFA should include common metrics)