 NJBIA and County Colleges Partner to Promote Customized Training
NJBIA encourages you as an employer to work with the State's community colleges to satisfy your workforce training needs. Through partnerships with community colleges, you can obtain grants from the New Jersey Department of Labor & Workforce Development's Customized Training Program to help pay for workforce training. NJBIA helped launch this program in the 1990s, and it has helped train thousands of employees.
As partnerships between businesses and local community colleges have grown in recent years, the community colleges have become a central player in the State's economic development efforts. They initiated a highly successful Consortium for Workforce and Economic Development to further enhance their ability to serve the workforce training needs of employers.
The Consortium serves as a "one-stop" contact for New Jersey businesses seeking workforce development solutions. The Consortium draws upon the vast resources of the State's community colleges to develop and deliver customized training. These resources include 63 campus locations, more than 1,700 certificate and degree programs, and thousands of highly qualified instructors with practical industry experience.
NJBIA currently is working with the Consortium to help the Association's members access the workforce training they need. The Consortium will develop training customized to meet your needs, and it will even write your New Jersey Customized Training grant application at no cost to you as an NJBIA member. This is a value-added benefit for NJBIA members.
In 2006-2007, industry-specific grant competitions will be held for pharmaceutical and biotechnology; science and technology; information technology; logistics; energy; finance; and hospitality/tourism.
The grants will allow companies to establish customized training programs with the help of New Jersey's universities and county colleges as well as vocational-technical schools. Successful applicants will have to provide at least a 50-percent match for the total direct costs of the training. You may get help applying for the grant from the Community College Consortium, or contact Bob Bowman at the Consortium at
1-609-393-9000.
Read Editor Anthony Birritteri's New Jersey Business Magazine article about the Consortium. |
