The In-Between Piece: Workforce development from the ground up

Spruce Mountain Adult Education held its graduation ceremony on May 31. The event drew a crowd to the high school gymnasium; among those in attendance was Senator Angus King. Students sitting to the left of the podium wore green robes, celebrating receipt of their HiSET diplomas – the equivalent of the old GED program. Helping people earn their GED has been the longtime cornerstone of adult education programs.

To the right of the podium was a different group of 15 students, dressed in white. They were graduates of new the Certified Medical Training program, a collaboration between the local adult education programs and the Area Health Education Center, an initiative aimed at alleviating health workforce shortages. FMH and other rural hospitals – western Maine is considered by AHEC to be both rural and underserved – have suffered from a shortage of medical assistants: employees that collect medical histories and vital signs from patients, as well as completing a variety of administrative and clinical tasks. FMH had eight open positions.

Tania Dawson, the director of Western Maine AHEC, said that at an initial meeting to gauge interest in the program drew 63 people. Fifteen adults began and completed the class in a few months; 10 would go on to immediately pass the national certification test, four more will take it this month. Four students, Dawson said at a meeting with Maine Department of Labor officials two weeks ago, had already asked her about pursuing a career in nursing.

Seven of the program graduates have already been hired at FMH. Then the hospital created six more positions to accommodate the rest of the class.

AHEC paid for the graduation ceremony.

The CMA program was successful enough to prompt the creation of another class. This time, 89 people have indicated interest.

“We’ve got people coming out of the walls asking: when’s the next class? When’s the next class?” Dawson said Thursday.

The entire program runs on a combination of public and private resources, with businesses providing instructors, materials and expertise and adult education organizing academic, technological and logistical support. Programs like this have gotten renewed focus in recent years, as local and national focus turns toward adult education to solve workforce shortages.

Robyn Raymond is the director of the Spruce Mountain Adult Education program. Her counterpart in Regional School Unit 9 is Glenn Kapiloff, the former director of the Foster Career and Technical Education Center.

Lately, neither of them has been in their offices much.

The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, which offers federal support for job seekers training for new employment, previously focused on colleges. More recently, WIOA began shifting resources into adult education programs, pushing them from primarily academic institutions into the realm of workforce development.

“We’re that in-between piece,” Kapiloff said. Adult ed, he said, could provide people with a relatively inexpensive introduction to a potential career, as well as connecting them with employers looking to hire.

For example, there are Maine institutions that offer Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning programs, but those programs can be time-consuming and relatively expensive. The adult education programs ran two introductory HVAC classes over the past year. The last one, a two-month course, cost participants $175 and was taught by an experienced technician with Valley Gas and Oil in Kingfield. The program is an overview, providing introductions to systems, industrial terminology and safety; it doesn’t replace a longer program at community college or technical institute. Still, Kapiloff noted, two students in each cohort had job offers before the class had even ended.

The local programs provide a low-cost sampling for students, Raymond said. “If they are taking a local class, they aren’t spending large amounts of money and then determining they don’t like it or can’t complete it.”

Raymond has seen what can happen when people are forced to rush into programs. When the Verso Androscoggin mill went through its initial round of layoffs, former employees had only a brief period of time, tied to their unemployment benefits, to declare what college or training program they would enter. Some longstanding employees then ran into trouble when they hit the limits of their decades of experience at Verso; Raymond recalled one student that was asked by a professor to prepare a digital slideshow who then went and searched for literal, photographic slides.

In addition to being cheaper and more accessible, local workforce training programs allow adult education to bring other resources into play to help students succeed. For the CMA class, Raymond said, a teacher from Spruce Mountain helped develop an applied math for medical professionals class for some of the students. Through College Transitions programs, educators have learned the importance of providing students a primer in current computer programs. There’s also the general category of employability skills: being on time, how one should conduct oneself in the workplace, etc.

The programs that Raymond and Kapiloff are setting up rely on partnerships between adult education organizations and local businesses that need employees. Some of that groundwork can be accomplished through their partners in the Franklin County Network – a collection of school district adult education programs, community colleges, economic development organizations and businesses. Greater Franklin Development Council, for example, often has interacted with businesses even before they’ve arrived in the area. The local chambers of commerce are points of contact for hundreds of businesses.

However, that still leaves a lot of legwork. One recent complication, both adult ed directors said, was last year’s layoffs that impacted Western Maine Community Action employees at the local CareerCenter. In the past, Patty Ladd, a manager at the Wilton center, helped link programs with businesses and would-be employees. Now, Raymond and Kapiloff said, there isn’t anyone to fill that role.

FCAE and Spruce Mountain Adult Ed, which had partnered before, found themselves working closer and closer together to avoid duplicating efforts. As their programs began tackling more and more workforce development initiatives, they found that jointly offering classes made sense. One adult ed program might have six HVAC students, while the other might have seven, for example. It lets both programs use their combined facilities: the CMA class was taught at Spruce Mountain, while the Mt. Blue Campus has an entire wing of Career & Technical classrooms and labs.

Even more collaboration is anticipated in the near future. Across the state, adult ed programs are being organized into nine hubs. Franklin County’s programs expect to be working closer with their Somerset County counterparts next year.

With some earlier successes like the CMA and HVAC classes, Raymond, Kapiloff and FCNet are now considering more than a dozen possible workforce development classes. It is a system, Kapiloff said, that hasn’t been replicated in this scale and with so many partners anywhere else in the state.

Trisha Mosher, the new executive director for the Franklin County Chamber of Commerce, told DOL officials at a recent meeting that she used the workforce training programs as a selling point for businesses.

“I can say that adult education has a program,” Mosher said, “or they can build a program.”

This fall, the adult education programs will be partnering with Origin USA and LaBaron Bonney Co., manufacturers of martial-arts wear gear and antique automobile upholstery, respectively, to offer an industrial stitching program. It will be taught after hours at Origin USA’s downtown Farmington location by an existing employee who will be paid through adult education. Origin USA and LaBaron Bonney are looking for employees locally, of course, but in the process of setting up the class, Raymond and Kapiloff learned about a third business in Lewiston that also needs stitchers.

As part of a heavy equipment class taught in conjunction with E.L. Vining & Son, Kapiloff said, the instructor brought a video camera and taped one student operating the equipment, in what amounted to basically a lengthy job interview.

The average age of surveyors in the state of Maine is 47 years old. Adult ed has been talking with Main Land Development about offering an introductory program to interest some younger individuals. Businesses, Raymond said, need to consider looking 10-plus years into the future and the average age of their work force.

Other planned programs range from automotive technicians to informational technology training to masonry to electrical wiring.

One major asset the classes are leveraging is Foster Technology Center. In addition to having specialized facilities, teachers at Foster Tech can serve as adult education instructors, paid for with a stipend out of the adult ed budget. A Composite Manufacturing class could be taught out of that laboratory at Foster Tech, for example, partnering with local companies like Winterstik and Cousineau’s Wood Products.

Additionally, teaching an after-school adult education class provides opportunities to have Foster Tech students take advantage of the program. At Kapiloff’s request, the state will now be counting those fill-in students as part of RSU 9’s Career & Technical education program even through they’re taking classes after school, meaning those students will be funded. That’s critical, Kapiloff said, as the extra slots can help alleviate Foster Tech’s waiting lists for popular programs like Composites and Nursing.

For now, adult ed is looking for two things: people who need jobs and businesses that need people. Anyone interested in the new workforce development programs is encouraged to contact their local adult education  program: Mt. Blue at 778-3460 or through email, Spruce Mountain at 897-6406 or through email. Spruce Mountain holds open orientations every Friday at 9 a.m., while FCAE has periodic events.