Southeastern Economic and Education Leadership Consortium (SEELC)

Back to Manufacturing Project Outcomes

Defining Features of Project:

• Innovation 1: Develop national standards-based career pathway opportunities. The Consortium sought to accomplish this vision by developing or enhancing programs in welding, machining, and advanced manufacturing, three in-demand industries across all the SEELC communities. Within these pathways, staff at SEELC colleges identified gaps in their academic and training programs around teaching capacity, equipment capacity, program alignment, stacked and latticed credentials, transferability, and articulation agreements.
• Innovation 2: Develop ongoing career support, including post-program assessment of competencies to facilitate immediate work readiness and job placement. The Consortium’s plan to accomplish this vision included utilizing a completion coach and outcomes and data specialist at each college to assist with tuition resources; track students as they go through the program, offering supports to mitigate challenges and coordinating with other resources; and collaborate with faculty to address academic issues to students’ success. Furthermore, the Consortium aimed to support this vision through technology-enabled learning, including procurement of Real Weld systems.
• Innovation 3: Develop a regionally based economic approach to addressing worker skill needs, demonstrating the community college leadership role in economic and workforce development. The directive of each SEELC college under this innovation was to promote the development of a regionally based economic and education collaborative, including developing integrated strategies for working with business, industry, education, and economic development organizations.s.