The collaborative project aims to broaden the participation of two-year institutions of higher education in emerging technology programs by increasing the capacity and infrastructure to grow and sustain strong regional partnerships at the following institutions: William Rainey Harper College (IL), Ivy Tech Community College (IN), Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College (MS), Washburn University Institute of Technology (KS), and WSU Tech (KS). Over its three-year duration, this project will fund the development, implementation, and evaluation of each institution’s new capacity to meaningfully engage in cross-sector partnerships to advance efforts in workforce development.

The collaborating institutions (the cohort) will engage employers in ways that have not been done before at their institutions by implementing the Business and Industry Leadership Team (BILT) advisory council model. This model is substantially different from the traditional advisory committees currently used at the colleges that generally meet twice per year, lack employer involvement, and are not considering future labor market needs. In the BILT, regional employers have co-leadership roles and collaborate with faculty to develop and update course content by sharing the knowledge and skills needed for the workforce 12 to 36 months into the future. This deeper level of engagement will significantly impact the quality and relevancy of academic programs and will make students better prepared for the workforce.

Building relationships with regional business leaders will ensure classroom content is current and create opportunities for student internships, apprenticeships, mentorship, and guest speakers. Institutions will implement the BILT process using publicly available BILT resources and a BILT consultant for the regional-specific industry partnerships being targeted. The colleges will share lessons learned, best practices, progress on individual institutional plans, and solutions to barriers to implementing college-wide change.

The overall objective of this project is to build institutional capacity to grow external partnerships for workforce development programs to make them more responsive to regional workforce needs. Goals include developing, implementing, and evaluating an institution-specific, replicable, scalable plan to transform the current traditional advisory committee process into the BILT model to create meaningful engagement with industry partners and identifying recruitment and outreach strategies that focus on ensuring representation of underrepresented individuals and businesses on the BILT teams. Institutional activities vary by institution; however, shared activities include implementing the BILT advisory council model for at least one academic program, using publicly available BILT resources and a BILT consultant for targeting specific regional industries and employers, and developing and implementing institution-specific strategic plans to build capacity for growing and sustaining regional partnerships within its respective regional innovation ecosystem.

Collaborative activities include creating a framework for implementing BILT at community and technical colleges that is replicable and scalable; educating faculty and employers on the value of the BILT for students, programs, and the regional economy; establishing a schedule of virtual monthly meetings; creating a community of practice to share best practices, progress on individual institutional plans, challenges faced, and solutions designed to address barriers to implementing institutional change; creating a collaboration platform for discussions and document storage; convening an Administrators Working Group comprised of PIs and co-PIs to communicate the status of cohort progress and ensure all deliverables are on target; and planning an annual in-person cohort workshop adjacent to the annual Workforce Development Institute conference hosted by the American Association of Community Colleges. A third-party evaluator will assess the outcomes and impacts of the cohort’s project.

The broader impacts of this project will be increasing partnerships between academia, industry, and others through the BILT which will lead to strengthening and deepening employer engagement and enabling community and technical colleges to contribute to and become equitable partners in the regional innovation ecosystem. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.