The Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program has released The Workforce Playbook: A Community College Guide to Delivering Excellent Career and Technical Education. After researching community colleges across the country, The Aspen Institute selected North Dakota State College of Science as one of six institutions they visited to learn what the best colleges do to build effective workforce programs. The Workforce Playbook recognizes NDSCS as a high-performing community college that has excelled in delivering excellent career and technical education.
“We are honored to have been selected to contribute to the Aspen Institute’s Workforce Playbook,” said NDSCS President John Richman. “Being selected as one of six two-year colleges from across the United States exemplifies the College’s effectiveness at strategically building programs and collaborations to fulfill workforce needs.”
The Workforce Playbook highlights NDSCS in several areas, including: assessing who’s being left out of the local economy, making partnership building an explicit expectation, effective K-12 outreach and engagement, and matching employers with students who are interested in their industry.
“As demographics evolve and the world of work changes rapidly, it is more important now than ever for community colleges to deliver excellent workforce programs,” said Josh Wyner, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program. “Aspen has been researching community colleges that deliver exemplary workforce education – including North Dakota State College of Science – and have featured their practices in our just-released Workforce Playbook to guide other community colleges in offering the education their students and the employers in their communities need.”
“We are proud of the work we do to fulfill our mission to educate and train the workforce for North Dakota and the region, and we are excited to share our practices and successes that can enhance career and technical education across the country,” said Richman. “We look forward to considering other successful workforce initiatives contained in this report to further strengthen NDSCS.”
Aspen’s workforce playbook is designed to help community college leaders develop practices and employer partnerships that improve labor market outcomes for students. Using concrete examples from high-performing community colleges, the playbook offers specific guidance about what colleges can do to build more effective workforce programs so that students gain the skills they need to succeed in the next stage of their lives.
The Workforce Playbook is available online at highered.aspeninstitute.org/workforceplaybook.