The community college that leads the nation on Workforce Pell approvals teams up with its biggest corporate neighbor to build a training alliance with local businesses. Also, two new podcast episodes on how the U.S. should prepare for AI-driven job disruption, and how public-private partnerships in Colorado are building up a systems engineering workforce. (Subscribe here.)

Future-Ready Workforce Alliance

North Carolina’s Forsyth Tech Community College is the national leader on Workforce Pell. Six programs at the college in Winston-Salem have earned federal approval—out of a total of 21 across six states announced so far by the U.S. Department of Education.

Workforce Pell will help fuel Forsyth Tech’s ambitions for the Future-Ready Workforce Alliance, says Paula Chrin Dibley, chief officer of student success and strategic innovation at the college. The employer-led workforce partnership created last October offers customized, work-based education and training.

“This is definitely an important way for us to create new pathways for employers so that they can better support stackable progress for both new talent and incumbent workers,” she says.

Forsyth Tech has been upping its game across a wide range of metrics. The completion rate jumped from 19% to 45% over six years, with no achievement gap for minority students. The college achieved those gains through year-round scheduling, bulked-up academic advising, tapping private funding for student supports, and replacing developmental education with the corequisite alternative.

Likewise, Forsyth Tech five years ago began using the BILT Model, where local business and industry experts take a hands-on role in co-developing academic programs based on the skills students will need on the job.

That work has allowed the college to move more quickly as it partners with employers, says Tamara Williams, Forsyth Tech’s provost and chief academic officer: “We have a pool of faculty who are ready to roll.”

The alliance project builds on that approach, with a focus on flexible short-term credentials, faculty externships, apprenticeships, and other work-based learning opportunities that are customized for businesses. If a company wants to prepare workers for a broad range of job roles—say mechatronics, data analytics, and HR—those programs now will be available as a package, rather than through one-off partnerships across various campus departments. 

“The employer is there creating along with us,” Williams says.

Deep employer engagement changes the calculus in workforce and economic development, says DeRionne Pollard, president and CEO of the American Association of Community Colleges. She says those partnerships can include businesses helping to design a curriculum, sharing equipment and instructors, committing to interview and hire graduates, and staying at the table when the labor market shifts.

“Workforce Pell raises the stakes,” Pollard says. “If federal dollars are going to follow short-term programs, those programs have to lead to real jobs, and only employers who are fully invested can make that happen.”

Shared Ownership: The federal Workforce Pell Grant program has been rolling out slowly across the country, as states determine which programs qualify and submit them to the Education Department for approval. The NCWorks Commission chose Forsyth Tech’s six programs from a larger group proposed by the college, along with 48 other programs at 20 community colleges. 

Those colleges are still waiting on word from the feds about the eligibility of their programs, and it’s unclear when decisions will arrive. The department had said it hoped to announce all of its decisions by the end of the summer.

At Forsyth Tech, college leaders say company buy-in will be crucial for its Workforce Pell–eligible programs and the broader alliance. It helps that the college’s founding partner in the alliance is the biggest player in town.

Reynolds American, the tobacco giant, describes the Future-Ready Workforce Alliance as a collaborative effort to tackle one of the region’s biggest challenges—a shortage of skilled workers in two counties where nearly half of adults between the ages of 25 and 44 lack a postsecondary credential. Reynolds invested in the alliance, and as its inaugural employer member, the company is jointly developing training programs with the college for 200 advanced manufacturing roles at their Tobaccoville Operations Center.

But most importantly, Reynolds is serving as an ambassador to other businesses, encouraging them to join in the creation of a local education-and-workforce ecosystem. Dibley says the vibe shift from that high-profile relationship has helped Forsyth Tech expand its active employer partnerships, including through the fee-based alliance.

A large anchor employer isn’t required to speed up that work, says Pollard. In rural and small communities that key partner could be a hospital, school district, county government, or a group of small manufacturers who pool their hiring needs.

“What matters is shared ownership,” she says. “The partnerships that change a regional economy treat the community college as a co-designer of the talent pipeline, not simply as a vendor.”

Advanced manufacturing is an emphasis for the alliance, which is designed for the region’s high-demand industries, which include health sciences, transportation and logistics, and IT. Training options from Forsyth Tech are designed around the schedules of workers and integrated with their jobs if possible.

Part of the goal of the alliance is to get a more holistic view of the regional talent picture, Dibley says. That could help reduce the poaching temptation among employers while helping to develop a forward-looking perspective on the workforce. Forsyth Tech’s leaders are bullish about the alliance’s potential and hope it can be a national model for how to collaborate with employers.

“The old solutions aren’t working,” says Dibley. “We have to learn from each other.”

—Margaret Moffett contributed reporting for this article.

Workforce Pell’s Slow Rollout Begins

As Workforce Pell officially launches, predictions are becoming reality with only a sliver of short-term programs qualifying in states from coast to coast.

The Cusp Is Back for Season 2

Nobody knows what’s going to happen with AI or how it will play out across the workforce. Yet many people think we should be preparing now for serious job displacement.

Are they right? Is it worth doing if the big AI disruption turns out to be a bust? Who should pay for all this?

These are the questions we’re tackling in the second season of The Cusp, a podcast from Work Shift. The first two episodes drop today—featuring interviews with Mei Fong and Brittany Brown from Windfall Trust and Brooke DeRenzis from the National Skills Coalition. 

We don’t know where this story goes. AI is moving very fast, but please join us as we try to make sense of this extraordinary moment.

Tune in to The Cusp wherever you get your podcasts. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel here.

Issue Brief

Building the Workforce Nobody Knew They Could Join

This brief looks at how public-private partnerships are building up the systems engineering workforce in Colorado. It is the second in a series about a $90M grant program that invested in employer-led workforce partnerships across the state.

Open Tabs

AI Buildout
Investment in AI infrastructure will top $10T from 2025 to 2032, or an average of 3.63% of the annual U.S. GDP, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, an economist at Columbia University, finds in estimates published by the Brookings Institution. The projected buildout would be larger relative to the economy than the railroad, highway, and telecom investment booms. Meanwhile, risks from the AI investment race are migrating to off-balance-sheet financing.

Federal Strategy
A proposed U.S. Senate bill would create a comprehensive federal talent strategy. The bipartisan proposal from Lisa Blunt Rochester, a Delaware Democrat, and Ted Budd, a North Carolina Republican, would establish an interagency working group to align federal policy, funding, and data infrastructure. The Bipartisan Policy Center says it offers a concrete, achievable step toward the central call of BPC’s Commission on the American Workforce.

Skilled Trades
Attrition is high for both apprenticeships and higher ed programs that prepare Americans for the skilled trades, with roughly a third of those who enroll eventually working in a trade, finds the Alliance for America’s Skilled Trades, which includes Ford and Google. Jobs for the Future and the Burning Glass Institute led research for the report and a data dashboard. The report’s recommendations include helping employers to provide workplace learning.

Disconnected Men
Nearly one in four young Americans (23%) reported being disconnected from school, training, and work for a period of at least six months, finds research from RAND. About two-thirds of young men experiencing disconnection reported no in-person time with friends in the prior week. For disconnected young men especially, the findings suggest that education and employment programs alone may miss critical needs around social isolation and well-being.

Public-Private Partnership
The city of Memphis has created a new workforce program aimed at the roughly 45K young adults in the Memphis area who are out of school and out of work. NextUp901 offers free career preparation and paid job training. The public-private project is led by the Collective Blueprint, a Memphis-based nonprofit training provider. It seeks to place 5K young adults over five years on paths to stable, well-paying careers across in-demand sectors.

Work-Based Learning
Chipotle seeks to place an apprentice in each of its 4,200+ company-owned restaurants by the end of 2027, up from roughly three-quarters of those restaurants. The company for a decade has offered a tuition-free education program to its employees through a partnership with Guild. More than 14K Chipotle workers have completed an education program so far, with 57% earning a college degree. Participating employees have a 66% lower annual turnover rate.

SNAP and Training
The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning is seeking to strengthen the infrastructure for community colleges to participate in the SNAP Employment and Training program. Many colleges are unaware they can recover half the cost of services such as career navigation, tuition support, transportation, and childcare through the federal program. ECMC Foundation, Trellis Foundation, and the Greater Texas Foundation are backing CAEL’s efforts.

Measuring Value
A new Postsecondary Value Model aims to give leaders a framework for evaluating how different investments contribute to the production of credentials of value. Developed by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, the model covers six key categories: investment, education, employment, earnings, wealth, and well-being. The model and accompanying framework are part of a larger research project by the center that included a look at the history of ROI in higher education.

Job Moves
Stacia Edwards has been hired as the acting assistant director and first chief workforce officer for the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity. Edwards recently stepped down as deputy provost for the City Colleges of Chicago.

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