August 2019 Volume 1

OPERATIONS & MANAGEMENT

Building Your Workforce at Community Colleges An interview with Ray Nejadfard, Cuyahoga Community College

When it comes to finding skilled employees, community colleges represent an excellent resource. So, how can organizations best engage locally to develop a collaborative action plan to feed their workforce pipeline and improve the needed skills of current employees?

a group of employers working together gives us a larger pool of positions and therefore more ability to customize programming.

FIERF: How can colleges and industry collaborate to develop the skilled workforce of the future? RN: Employers should first ask themselves a couple of questions: Would our organization benefit from access to a pool of local, trained and skilled employees? If the answer to that question is yes, then what are your specific needs? Where are your skill gaps for future and current employees? Look at your current job descriptions and open position postings to determine the specific skills important to your operation. Reach out to local manufacturing organizations and the Forging Industry Educational and Research Foundation for connections at your local community college and trade schools. Visit the college to see firsthand their training facilities and learn about the courses taught and student outcomes expected to develop a plan to meet your needs and develop career pathways for students. FIERF: What are the specific roles of industry and community college in this collaboration? RN: Industry participation is key.Themore substantive involvement by key company personnel in the process, the more successful it will be. A very important way to provide industry input is to participate in the college’s Industry Advisory Committee that typically meet two times per year. This group focuses on meeting industry’s needs. Employers should provide specific information on current and future needs, determine specific knowledge, skills and abilities sought and provide feedback to the college on student progress. The role of the college is to develop and/or enhance curriculum content to meet employer needs, provide industry critical skills for employment readiness, facilitate ongoing engagement with employers and find subject matter experts (SMEs) to develop training programs. FIERF: How do you recommend companies engage with schools and students? It is as essentially important to cooperate with your competitors as it is to cooperate with your allies to develop your talent pipeline. When everybody has skin in the game, we can create a sustainable, balanced system that will pay dividends in a skilled future workforce.

One person with a lot of experience in trying to do just that is Ray Nejadfard, dean and executive director of the Engineering/ Manufacturing Technology Center of Excellence at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland. Ray sat down recently with the Forging Industry Educational & Research Foundation to share his experiences in working to connect industry with the community college community. FIERF: Ray, it’s been very exciting to work with you and Cuyahoga Community College to share with industry the resources you bring to the community. Can you talk about that process and how we can take the model we’re developing here in Cleveland to other colleges? RN : Community colleges are in a unique position to work with industry, because our mission is to meet the needs of employers locally. Our first step was to host the Forging Foundation’s Workforce Development Summit in April that brought together 20 industry and academic participants to learn from each other. From the forging supply chain participants, we learned their areas of greatest need and we were able to share resources we bring to the table in terms of credit and non-credit courses teaching those skills, the availability of our Mobile Training Lab, where we can bring the training on-site and our ability to customize training. Having

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