How Community Colleges and American Job Centers can work together to support workforce excellence
Community colleges and American Jobs Centers must work together to maximize their impact on education attainment and workforce development.
Blog Post
Getty Images
May 12, 2022
One-Stop Career Centers, also known as American Job Centers, are locally-operated and federally funded, through Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), to support a wide range of employment, training, and career education services available to employers, workers, job seekers, and youth.
While community colleges and One-Stop Career Centers share a similar mission when it comes to leveraging education and training to help people find economic security, collaborations between these two publicly subsidized entities can be difficult.
One-Stop Career Centers must report outcomes measures for participants to the Workforce Boards who in turn report the measures to the US Department of Labor. Through our research, we have heard that many Workforce Boards are skeptical of community college programs helping them perform well on these required metrics. We have also heard from colleges who are frustrated by what they consider onerous reporting requirements to be eligible training providers. Many colleges do not have the data infrastructure in place to track outcomes information for their students, especially those in non-credit and/or workforce programs.
Thus, colleges have reported struggles to get American Job Centers to refer students eligible for Individual Training Accounts to their programs.
To bypass these challenges, Rick Hodge, formerly Dean of Career and Technical Education and Workforce Development at Los Angeles Southwest College and now Associate Vice President at Sacramento City College, successfully created a strong collaborative relationship between his college and the local One-Stop. His success story provides important lessons for community colleges and American Job Centers to work more closely together to accomplish their mutual aims.
In 2018, the Los Angeles city government, the Workforce Investment Board, and the Los Angeles Community College District initiated a push to locate American Job Centers and community colleges closer together on the theory that it would help the systems better align. LASC did one better. It co-located its One-Stop Center within its career center, which led to collaborations that leveraged each organization’s assets.
This was possible because rather than reporting to Student Services on campus, the career center reported to Rick as head of workforce development at LASC. LASC’s Career Pathways & Jobs Center (CPJC) initially had five employees – a director, two career counselors, a pathway specialist, and a non-credit specialist. When the One-Stop Center moved in, there were thirteen new employees in LASC’s School of CTE building.
As part of the agreement charter, the One-Stop agreed to promote the college’s career pathways and since 90 percent of LASC’s college service area are qualified for the One-Stop’s services, the One-Stop could both pay for faculty time instructing in relevant pathway programs and pay for students’ certificate training at LASC.
The partners also collaborated on recruitment and job fair events and worked with local unions to recruit participants.
The college and the Job Center also undertook several formal partnerships to enhance training for the community including hosting a Pasadena-based digital technology workforce event, collaborating on a construction-related program funded by California’s Strong Workforce Funds, and other pre-apprenticeship and non-credit credentialing programs.
Hodge offered three tips for how community colleges can go beyond co-location with their American Job Centers:
- Colleges should create a clear “front door” for one-stops and faster response times: Hodge shared that many one-stops had complained that community colleges were too slow, and had too many contacts across too many colleges. Since LASC’s career center reported to Hodge as head of workforce, rather than student services, he was able to provide a single point of contact, be more responsive with training options, and prioritize faster response times in other areas by elevating the importance of the one-stop center among career center staff.
- Colleges should establish buy-in from local government: Hodge recommends community colleges establish a strong rapport with city government before pursuing collaborations with one-stop. The city of Los Angeles and LACCD saw value in one-stops co-locating and collaborating with community colleges because of the relationship LASC and other colleges had built with local employers.
- Leverage physical space for partnerships: Enrollment declines and expanded online learning opportunities for faculty, staff, and students have made it such that many colleges are finding themselves with more vacant space on campus. Offering up physical spaces to partners like one-stops can be a strategic way to leverage vacancies on campus.
For more on maximizing the impact of community colleges, check out our New America's New Models for Career Preparation project, subscribe to our Ed & Labor Bulletin newsletter, and follow us on Twitter @IrisonHigherEd and @ShalinJyotishi.
Enjoy what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates on what’s new in Education Policy!