In 2010, ADTEC turned back nine other finalists to win the Bellwether Award for Workforce Development in recognition of its strategic alliances to promote community and economic development. ADTEC will be up against nine new challengers, all previous Bellwether Workforce Development award winners, this time. Obviously, another national award would be a feather in the cap of the eastern Arkansas consortium, but the Legacy nomination alone shows that our efforts continue to be recognized from coast to coast.
The ADTEC consortium includes Mid-South Community College in West Memphis, Arkansas Northeastern College in Blytheville, Arkansas State University-Newport, East Arkansas Community College in Forrest City, and Phillips Community College of the University of Arkansas in Helena-West Helena. We created the collaboration in 2005 to ensure the provision of a broad continuum of education focused on generating a skilled and educated workforce for the region. The institutions came together after a major automotive manufacturer jilted our region for the second time. At that time, our workforce took the brunt of the blame for the project going elsewhere, but that wasn’t the real reason the project ended up in another state. We all agreed, however, that to make sure we never faced that criticism again we would begin building a model that would put us in a position for the future.
As a group, we want people to be able to get great jobs up and down the river, so we created a model that says it doesn’t matter where you live, you can access the same level of training. We share resources and plans and are not competing against each other, so our model makes the best use of the available resources. The ADTEC model also says it doesn’t really matter where industry locates in eastern Arkansas. If companies like a steel mill want to locate in our area to bring thousands of great jobs, they are going to pull a workforce from the entire region.
We want our educational model to be based on what it takes for industries to make money. What do they need in terms of skills, capacities, and talents in a workforce so that they can be profitable? Companies depend on great employees. If they don’t have them, it doesn’t matter where they’re located; they can’t make money. In today’s technologically-intense workplace, the skills of the workforce are the biggest part of a company’s bottom-line consideration. We want to make certain we are prepared to be competitive with any region in the country.
Our model says we need to be working on everything from what happens to students while they’re in high school all the way through the opportunity to access a baccalaureate degree. Who dreamed of a system that says students must wait until they graduate high school to start working on their college programs? To us, if a kid is in high school, we want to get him or her in a higher education/training program. The idea is to create a new model for education so that we can create a new economy. Economic development and education are inextricably linked. If you don’t have a relevant educational model, you will never have a strong economy. For us in eastern Arkansas, we have not always invested in education as we should. What we’re trying to do is retool that model so that we can create a viable economic development opportunity for our region and our people. - See more at: http://www.midsouthcc.edu/blog/adtec-continues-to-make-national-news/#sthash.IKB6NFYC.dpuf
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