In the Fall of 1994, a group of instructors, counselors, and administrators gathered at City College of San Francisco to address the following issue:
Participants of the session agreed that CCSF, and indeed all community colleges, need to evaluate the dramatic changes occurring in the U.S. economy and workforce, and use that information to better prepare students for the employment realities in their chosen career.
Participants continued to meet over the following months, and eventually became a formal task force, through a decision of the Master Plan Committee of CCSF. In February of 1995, this new “Workforce Education Task Force”—comprised of faculty, classified staff, students, and administrators—approved a mission statement and agreed to develop a strategic plan. The goal of the strategic plan was and continues to be: “to implement a comprehensive workforce educational delivery system that will provide the best long- and short-term learning opportunities for individuals seeking employment in the Bay Area region’s workplaces.”
CityWorks received a resolution of support by the Board of Trustees at their December, 1995 meeting.
The following pages provide a summary of the Task Force’s strategic
plan, now known as
CITYWORKS: A STRATEGIC PLANNING MODEL FOR WORKFORCE EDUCATION
AND TRAINING.
CityWorks Introduction
Before we attempt to implement a new workforce education and training model, we turn our attention to some well-documented trends in the workforce. The next decade and beyond will reflect the following trends:
Community colleges can play a key role in maintaining, improving, and
renewing the human resources of our country. This can be accomplished
by restructuring our current curricula and by revitalizing a spirit of
cohesiveness with business and industry, with other education providers,
and with community based organizations.
Learning for the 21st Century
As we look toward the future, we must realize that it is no longer enough that we transmit facts to our students. Rather, we must help them to “construct knowledge,”—to integrate personal experience with information received from others. We can do this by using methods such as the ones outlined below:
Instituting a workforce educational delivery system requires that we look at what is already in place at the college, determine what is working, assess the areas that are deficient, and repair/delete what is not effective.
Strengths
CITYWORKS: A Strategic Model for Excellence
in Workforce Education and Training
Our report next turns its attention to the CityWorks model itself and four key elements that the model must address: student populations and their needs, program elements needed, career clusters at CCSF, and support systems/capacities.
Student Populations
It is critical to talk about diversity when addressing student needs.
By “diversity,” we do not simply refer to differences in ages and ethnicities.
Equally important are differences in students’ reasons for attending college.
• Some students need help with basic skills.
• Others are recent high school graduates.
• There are re-entry students in search of retraining.
• There are students seeking upgraded skills so they can change jobs
or advance in current positions.
• There are entrepreneurial students who enroll in courses to develop,
and/or advance their small business or professional pursuits.
This diversity in the student body reminds us that there is no one way to educate all people.
Program Elements
Learning Activities—Offering a combination of both work-based
and school-based learning will better prepare students for entering or
re-entering the workforce. Work-based learning includes such activities
as job shadowing, on-the-job training, workplace mentoring, instruction
in general workplace competencies, and actual job experience. School-based
learning, on the other hand, should include such activities as career awareness,
selection of a career major, and instruction that integrates academic and
vocational learning via applied and contextual teaching methodologies.
Work-based and school-based experiences are not defined by where they take
place, but rather by the substance of the learning activity. Under
the Strategic Plan, those learning activities would either teach foundation
skills (basic reading, writing, and computation skills as well as study
skills and time management); core competency skills (higher level requirements
in math, English, technical fields, social science, and others); or program-specific
skills.
Career Decision-Making and Educational Planning—CCSF must implement effective career decision-making and educational planning, keeping in mind that students may receive these services over and over throughout their lives, as they move in and out of work and school. A multi-tiered system will help ensure that this goal is met. The system includes: recruitment, intake, career decision making, educational planning, job placement, and lifelong learning. These components ensure that students will experience a coherent set of activities which correctly inform and reinforce one another.
Connecting Activities—This refers to employers and educational providers working together on workforce education systems. An example of a connecting activity is a current CCSF project called the Bay Area Transition to Careers Center—an effort to strengthen and coordinate the college’s capabilities for facilitating internships and broad partnerships with industry, other education providers and community-based organizations.
Career Clusters
Career clusters—groups of related workforce education programs
which require common foundation skills and core competencies—are an
important feature of current efforts to reform workforce education.
Career clusters address the fact that industries and careers are rapidly
changing and that students often know little about career options or how
their interests and skills match different pathways. As students
master core competencies in a cluster, they can access their skills and
select appropriate occupational areas within the field.
The Task Force has recommended two clusters for piloting the first programs— ‘Health Care and Human Services’ and ‘Hospitality and Tourism.’ Additional identified projects to be developed include: ‘Emerging Technologies and Communication Arts,’ ‘Transportation,’ and ‘Banking and Finance.’
Infrastructure and Support Systems
Creating an integrated workforce education system will require significant
changes in the college’s support systems and infrastructure. Key
items to be affected include:
So, where do we go from here? The Workforce Education Task Force has identified five goals for strengthening workforce education throughout City College.
(1) Promote a collegewide commitment to a new workforce education
plan. The first step has already been taken with the completion
of the CityWorks plan. A statement of support from the Board of Trustees
was given on December 14th, 1995.
(2) Establish a collegewide infrastructure to support the plan.
This includes an institutional commitment of human and financial resources
over a five year period.
(3) Establish a working model of the CityWorks plan. Pilot
clusters have been selected and are now being developed. This will
enable the college to focus resources on a limited number of projects and
allow campus constituencies to test and improve the model before it is
established in other clusters.
(4) Promote the highest levels of student success, student learning
and teaching excellence. This involves monitoring and measuring
student progress as they move through the new curricula and adapting curricula
as appropriate.
(5) Disseminate CityWorks to other CCSF Departments and Schools.
A careful, incremental approach to disseminating the CityWorks model will
avoid making the same mistakes over and over again and will provide the
opportunity to modify the model for specific areas. Note:
The goal of the CityWorks plan is to complete the dissemination phase within
five years of the completion of the pilot programs.
The information you have just read represents a summary of a much
larger and more complete report. For a copy of the complete CityWorks
report, including specific strategies and action items, competency definitions,
and CityWorks program worksheets, contact the Office of Research and Planning
at (415) 239-3014 or the Office of Vocational Education at (415) 550-4440.