For community colleges to forge more meaningful ties with employers, they first have to have a handle on how they currently interact with business partners. That’s trickier than it sounds, as the many points of contact colleges typically have with employers makes the right-hand, left-hand problem a common one.
To improve its communication and coordination with companies, the Kentucky Community and Technical College System in 2021 began a process of systematically tracking employer partnerships across its 16 colleges.
“Knowing how a company is working with various departments and colleges prior to engaging in meetings allows KCTCS to strategically deepen existing relationships and identify gaps,” says Jessie Schook, the system’s vice president of workforce and economic development.
The project to create an employer “asset map” has been a substantial lift, revealing complex, multifaceted relationships. For example, a major healthcare system recently shared that it has nearly 300 different touch points with nine of the system’s colleges.
The system spent a year finding those types of contacts, with each college conducting a survey on employer partnerships. Getting buy-in wasn’t easy, as some viewed the mapping effort as more compliance red tape. But the data-collection process begun in 2022 sparked needed operational changes, Schook says, and the campuses soon began seeing results—like one college that found 20 new leads for employers seeking customized training.
“Some colleges are setting goals for all members of their engagement teams to support one connection per month with a new company,” says Schook, “increasing the scope of their partnership portfolio and holding each other accountable.”
The system uploaded what it learned into a Salesforce database. And just having that information in one place has made a difference.
For example, faculty and staff members across the system now can see the roughly 560 companies that support students with tuition-assistance programs, and they can reach out to those firms to join the system’s Education First Employers program.
As the project unfolded, its leaders tapped research from the Strada Education Foundation to develop a framework for categorizing relationships with employers. Part of the goal was to define partnerships that are truly transformational, as well as ones that could be developed further. The system now updates that data set each quarter.
The effort isn’t just about storytelling with data, says Schook.
“While it’s great to understand who you are working with and how,” she says, “ultimately this process lays a framework for actionable data that can advance departmental and faculty goals.”
The effort has identified roughly 110 employer relationships that cross colleges, with likely many more emerging in the future. That information helps the system determine how many companies have regional or statewide footprints and identify opportunities for stronger multicollege-employer collaborations.
Schook says that as the employer-asset map moves out of its first design phase, the system hopes to start using standardized measurements: “If we can articulate anticipated outcomes up front, we are creating an employer-friendly partnership model that expands opportunities for our students.”
For community colleges that are interested in creating a similar data system, Schook suggests starting by getting to know relationship managers on campus and their needs. And she says access and ease should be key factors in any tech-enabled approach to tracking employer partnerships.
The Kicker: “If it becomes too cumbersome to submit and view data, no one will use it,” says Schook.