Tuesday Stanley - Building a Bridge to a Thriving Economy
Executive Doctorate in Higher Education Management, Ed.D., 2005
Workforce development is all about institutional nimbleness, argues Tuesday Stanley, GRD’05, president of Westmoreland County Community College, based in Youngwood, Pennsylvania.
“Community colleges are well poised to get information from employers and train employees and have a continual cycle of feedback throughout,” says Dr. Stanley. Working with about five hundred companies, Westmoreland often creates new course content to meet the demands of these local and regional employers. For example, one company wanted its design engineers to understand the skills of the assembly line technicians. The college came up with a class in a matter of weeks, Stanley says. In another case, Westmoreland supported a company’s training needs due to a shift from traditional to additive manufacturing, or 3D printing.
“We don’t even know what the jobs of tomorrow are going to be. We’re changing our curriculum all the time because the needs are changing all the time,” says Stanley, who gained a strong grounding in leadership in Penn GSE’s Executive Doctorate in Higher Education Management program while serving as vice chancellor of San Jacinto College in Houston, Texas. Since 2014, she has helmed Westmoreland, which enrolls 4,500 students plus 28,000 learners in non-credit classes.
The college has programs for traditional industries like trades and healthcare that still anchor its region, as well as emerging fields such as additive manufacturing and robotics. Its 73,500-squarefoot Advanced Technology Center, opened in 2014, serves as an industry accelerator and offers an array of industry-aligned courses within technology-equipped classrooms and specialized labs. Three start-ups lease space at the center and provide students with internships and jobs.
“We don’t even know what the jobs of tomorrow are going to be. We’re changing our curriculum all the time because the needs are changing all the time.”—Tuesday Stanley, GRD’05
Thanks to the technology center and the college’s success in placing graduates in industry positions, Westmoreland was selected in 2019 to deliver a high-level robotics technician training program as part of a $1.8 million federal grant to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The college also has programs with employers who sponsor students to learn industry-specific skills. In return, graduates, who are often adult learners, are expected to commit to work at the companies for a few years.
While workforce development may be a buzzword right now, community colleges have long played an important role in preparing the workforce, Stanley notes. “Community colleges have been in this space for decades,” she says. “It’s really about helping the businesses and the residents of our community be able to fit together so that the economy thrives.”
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