Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

CCSN president sets school’s course for future

CCSN President Richard Carpenter has a three-pronged plan for the future of the community college.

He plans more job training customized to fit area businesses, expanded online courses and an increase in technical degrees to enable students to go right into the workforce.

All three components are essential to the Community College of Southern Nevada's mission of workforce development, Carpenter said during a meeting with the Las Vegas Sun editorial board Monday.

The college needs to provide the region with new workers and must keep the current workforce up to date on the latest technology or information necessary to their fields, Carpenter said.

About two out of every three jobs is technical in nature and about 80 percent of the jobs currently being developed need specific technical degrees according to the U.S. Department of Labor, Carpenter said.

"The skill sets for those kind of people change almost monthly," Carpenter said. "You can't stop training in a lot of these types of technologies because then you are obsolete."

The college -- the largest institution of higher education in the state -- will still continue to offer general education courses to prepare students for the universities, but it will be refocusing its efforts on its technical heritage, he said.

The first step is a new Division of Workforce and Community Development, Carpenter said, which will begin to emerge this week out of the rubble that was the college's extended programs department.

In an ongoing effort to streamline the college's massive administration, Carpenter removed three administrators from their posts in December and reorganized the department to better meet the college's mission.

The college's new efforts will not cost taxpayers a dime, Carpenter said, as the reorganization of the current programs and the elimination of some positions will actually save about $300,000 a year.

Extended programs had been operating overall in the red by about $200,000 a year, Carpenter said, mostly because the department had hired staff in excess of its revenue generation.

The department had earned the reputation in the past of being the dumping ground for many of the college's crony hires, but he said all of the people being eliminated from the department are being removed because of inefficiencies in their performance or in the overall department and not because of how they were hired.

The new Division of Workforce and Community Development will be divided into eight segments to meet the workforce training needs of the community, Carpenter said. Those categories are: literacy and language; transportation, manufacturing and construction; education and government; business assessment consulting; hospitality and gaming; apprenticeships; health care and emergency services; and community and personal enrichment.

Rather than offering "canned" courses that may not apply to a specific business, college officials will sit down with local human resource directors and company leaders in their market area and "discuss very specific competencies their workforce needs to be developed." Carpenter said. College officials will then either customize a course the school already offers, or broker with a third-party vendor to offer the course at a cheaper cost to area businesses than those businesses could get on their own.

"We're doing bits and pieces of a lot of this stuff currently but none of them are as focused," Carpenter said. "It's not a coordinated effort."

The community and personal enrichment classes will encompass much of what's currently offered through the college's continuing education programs, Carpenter said, and will continue to be offered as long as enrollment covers the costs. All of the segments must carry their own weight, he stressed.

"When I say entrepreneurial and self-sufficient I mean that in the purest sense of the word," Carpenter said. "This will be a business operating out of the college."

The concept is modeled after Carpenter's previous experience in developing workforce training courses for businesses at his previous institutions in Wisconsin and Alabama. At Calhoun Community College in Decatur, Ala., Carpenter helped secure an exclusive $8 million, five-year contract to train Boeing employees.

And most recently, as chancellor of the Wisconsin Technical and Community College System, Carpenter helped his institutions work with area businesses to secure more than 4,000 different contracts training 127,000 employees. The contracts produced revenues in excess of $25 million, Carpenter said.

"It's a relatively new idea at CCSN but it's being done across the country," Carpenter said.

The community college already offers more than 4,000 courses at its Green Valley Leslie and Joan Dun Advanced Technology Center, including ACT courses in computers, informational technology, industrial technology and safety skills, management and leadership, adult literacy, personal and professional development and English as a second language, said Debra Solt, the center's site administrator and program developer. All of the courses can be customized to a particular business or the college can broker with a business to allow their employees access to several courses at once at a lower rate.

The center is also the only site offering federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration training in Southern Nevada, she said.

The college has about 50 contracts in the works right now but has already worked with more than 300 companies, Solt said. CCSN also works with Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno to offer courses to all state employees.

Solt said she's excited to do more of the customer-focused contracts. Despite the success at her center, many of the college's courses were developed by throwing a program together and "seeing what sticks," Solt said.

"Instead of menu-driven it will be customer-focused," Solt said. "I'm still like a kid in a candy store, there are so many opportunities here."

Recent customized courses have covered workplace Spanish for construction managers, work safety standards and new human resources regulations, Solt said. The college has contracts with Nevada Power, Hoover Dam, Bombardier, and Western Area Food Chain Association grocers to help train replacement employees and to grow future managers from within the workforce. The college also has contracts to offer classes to employees of MGM Mirage and the Bellagio.

Carpenter said he hopes CCSN's training programs will allow the college to be a beacon of aid to area business and will also bring more businesses to Nevada because those incoming businesses will know that the college can help ensure that their new workforce is well trained. The college already partners with the Nevada Development Authority to do just that, Carpenter said.

CCSN's role in providing training is "imperative" to economic development, Somer Hollingsworth, president and chief executive officer of the Nevada Development Authority, said. Educational opportunities is a key incentive in being able to entice a company into the state.

"CCSN has done a lot of training for us already, for companies from one end of the perspective to the other, and they've always done a great job," Hollingsworth said.

In his reorganization of the college's extended programs department, Carpenter also pulled the distance education back under the dominion of academic affairs. Expanding the college's online offerings is essential to meeting the growth of the university, Carpenter said. About 15,000 students attempted but were unable to enroll in online courses last year.

Carpenter said he is developing an internal training center to teach more faculty how to use the technology and to develop programs, for online courses and hybrid courses that use both Web technology and traditional classroom lectures. Carpenter said the college is planning to invest more than $3 million in student technology fees toward upgrading student computer labs and enhancing classroom infrastructure to support using technology during in-class lectures. Part of that money will go toward buying state-of-the-art equipment to develop more courses and to be able to offer whole degree programs online.

Students can complete most of a general education associate's degree online now with the exception of a few classes, but it's not well marketed, Carpenter said. He expects to charge students a $10 convenience fee for enrolling in the online courses to help pay for the additional cost of developing the Internet courses.

The goal of all of these programs is to produce more workers who will contribute to the economy, which will then bring more money into CCSN to continue to develop and train workers, Carpenter said.

"It's sort of a cycle."

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