The City Colleges of Chicago (CCC) is committed to providing Chicagoans pathways to mobility through industry-aligned career education programs. To achieve that goal, CCC established an industry-specific Center of Excellence (COE) at each of the seven colleges in its system. The industries selected are the backbone of the Chicago regional economy and offer projected job growth in occupations that offer family sustaining careers.
The COE model puts two customers at the center: the student through a focus on easy access, navigation, and supports; and employers, who provide key input into the CCC programming to ensure that curricula develop talent with the skills and experiences needed to be successfully hired, retained, and promoted in a job. The COE model serves these two customers by requiring a deep focus of College resources, planning, and programming on the assigned industry. At the heart of that work is understanding of the assigned industry and its needs through consistent and comprehensive review of labor market information coupled with sustained and strategic engagement with industry representatives.
CCC recently partnered with the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to develop a COE Playbook and connecting tools, to advance on the ground implementation of the COE model. The Playbook provides an operational road map for Colleges and include guidance, expectations, and accountability measures, to the Colleges in 4 key areas: • Leadership and Vision • Industry Engagement • Equitable Student Access and Recruitment • Measurement, Assessment, and Continuous Improvement.
The tools support the CCC Colleges’ implementation of the model and include labor market snapshots of projected skills demand coupled with a crosswalk of existing College programming; a performance dashboard including COE student outcome data (which can be disaggregated by special population groups), and a high-level process guide for employer engagement (and its documentation in Salesforce).
This workshop will share the process used to develop the Playbook, its key features and tools, and approach to rolling out this work across the City Colleges of Chicago system. The AIR team will share the Playbook’s evidence-based practices around strategic and effective employer engagement throughout the presentation while the CCC practitioners will share how this work has provided a tangible tool to achieve the vision of a system empowered to deliver for students, employers, and the greater Chicago community.
