Create a Community College Pipeline to Place Students in Right-Fit Careers
Many colleges offer career decision support on campus for enrolled students but fail to use their extensive career services to market their offerings to adults in the workforce. Bring this career decision support directly to prospective students to demonstrate how your college can provide the necessary training, skills, and networking opportunities to connect them with their right-fit career.
Community-based career bootcamps help dislocated workers who may be unaware of the resources on campus identify a new career path and relevant retraining options. Use practice seven in our Recapturing Adult Learner Enrollments study to learn more about how to deliver a bootcamp.
As the pace of technological change accelerates, workers must continuously upgrade their skills to remain current in their fields. To serve lifelong learners throughout the course of their careers, community colleges must design programs that align with adults’ priorities and their lifestyles using innovative and flexible methods, such as stackable certificates, prior learning assessment (PLA), and credit crosswalks with corporate partners. To learn more about these practices, read section two of our Recapturing Adult Learner Enrollments study.
The PLA playbook is a resource for quickly educating campus stakeholders. It clarifies prior learning terms, draws distinctions between different methods of assessing prior learning, and introduces the main organizations offering PLA assessment or implementation support.
Whether it’s the high school student considering college or the adult worker returning to upskill, the promise of a stable, well-paying job is one of the main reasons that students choose community colleges. Workforce training programs present several opportunities to provide students with guaranteed employment after completion.
For instance, dual work-education programs, which allow students part-time experience at their eventual place of employment, or partnerships that include guaranteed employment of program graduates both demonstrate that community colleges can act as a job-securing intermediary between employer and student. Use practice 10 in our Recapturing Adult Learner Enrollments study to learn more about providing students with guaranteed employment offers.
After completing their education or training, graduates may still face a daunting job search. Employment searches are made difficult by a variety of factors, including inexperience with resume creation and a lack of knowledge about where to meet employers.
Services like speed-interviewing and employer partnership-based educational training can provide students with the technical and soft skills they need to navigate the job search and acquisition process.
Southwest Tennessee Community College teamed up with local manufacturers to create the Industrial Readiness Training (IRT) program. IRT consists of a five-week course during which employers have the chance to review students’ performance, while students learn more about their chosen profession’s on-the-job skill needs. Use practice eight in our Recapturing Adult Learner Enrollments study to get students ready to start their careers.
This resource requires EAB partnership access to view.
Access the roadmap
Learn how you can get access to this resource as well as hands-on support from our experts through Strategic Advisory Services for Community Colleges.
Learn More