How can you help Jane and her team
- pinpoint key community educational or training needs;
- identify the target audience who will be available to meet those needs; and
- pinpoint any barriers that impede employers or employees from participating in educational activities?
Your Assignment:Review the case study and come up with your recommendations, identifying gaps as well as laying out a plan to help Jane's team and department succeed.
Post a final two-page summary of your key points and your recommendations, emphasizing the relevance to the needs assessment process.
Case study:
The community in question has many organizationsof various sizes and types, employing many different occupation groups. The community hasa limited number of educational providers who can offer educational services.
Jane Trainer serves as the Workforce Development Director at Nittany Community College. In this role, she is charged with providing a variety of programs to meet the workplace learning needs of the community sectors listed above. Working with her staff of six WLP specialists, they offer repeated programs and new programs based on employer requests and needs. Each year the department conducts a survey to ask employers what topics, subjects, and content will be needed in the coming year. Based on that assessment, Jane offers a variety of programs to meet those needs. To date, the number of participants involved, measured in training days, has increased steadily until just recently. Programs are offered at low cost to employers.
Lately, Jane feels that she is rarely able to focus the department's attention on key needs in the communitybecause the sheer scope of different organizational needs makes it difficult to take a comprehensive and unified view of what those needs are.
The typical contact for Jane's team is the individual responsible for learning and development in the employer's organization. That individual may or may not be the ultimate client, which usually is an executive or manager who makes the decisions around funding, people, and time investment associated with the program.
Jane has noticed that enrollments have declined, programs have had to be cancelled, and employers are backing away from offering some of the traditional programs that have been successful in the past. Several members of her staff overheard rumors that local employers have been questioning the value of the programs offered by the college. These concerns have left Jane and her team wondering what to do. After all, all of the training has been based on the survey results and the programs are offered at such a low cost.