Regional Workforce Development and Job Placement

Project Description

Building a workforce development community of practice for the region so colleges can learn and work together to strengthen their systems, structures and relationships, leading to more students getting better jobs and colleges having improved outcomes.

Round 4 Application

Year 1 - Regional Funds $200,000

Year 2 - Regional Funds $220.000

Year 3 - Regional Funds $90,000

Project Contacts

Carrie Portis, Project Manager hosted by Cabrillo Community College, C: 510.504.7152, crportis@gmail.com

Gerlinde Brady, Project College Sponsor, Dean CTE & Workforce Development, Cabrillo Community College, gebrady@cabrillo.edu

Updates and Resources

On this site are meeting notes from our activities and resources on topics identified as interests by Bay Area colleges. If you have a topic you want to add, a resource to contribute or a resource you need, please contact Carrie Portis, crportis@gmail.com.

Job Developer Meetups

We come together as "job developers" so we can learn and collaborate to strengthen services for students and support each other in our roles. Our work is grounded in our Tenets of Equity with a focus on students that are disproportionately impacted by systemic racism. A “job developer” is a loose term that includes people who support career readiness, job placement, work-based learning and employer engagement. All are welcome at our meetings, and we presently meet monthly on a Friday afternoon for an hour. To see what we've done in our past meetings, please see the links below, on the slides, an additional link to the meeting recording will be on the first slide, or identified as a separate link. If you are interested in joining, please contact Carrie Portis at crports@gmail.com.

These are our prior meetings, with links to the notes, that also include at the top of the notes to the meeting recording:

Job Placement and Employer Engagement Technology Platforms

We support colleges’ interests in identifying the best platform for them to strengthen and manage their career readiness, job placement and work-based learning activities and coordinate employer engagement. While each college or district is making their own procurement decision, there are opportunities to learn together. To support this learning, we hosted two forums on technology platforms of interest to the colleges, notes and recordings are below. Additionally, we are supporting two user groups as colleges begin implementation of Handshake or Jobspeaker. If you would like to be in either of these user groups or would like more information, please contact Carrie Portis at crportis@gmail.com.

  • Handshake Forum, including university and employer panels, May 1, 2020 - recording and Q&A/ breakout room notes

  • Jobspeaker Forum, including presentations by Allan Hancock, Bakersfield, Cerritos and Merced colleges, May 13, 2020 - recording and Q&A/ breakout room notes

Resources (on Best Practices, On Campus Employment, Job Descriptions, LinkedIn, Employer Engagement, Design Thinking for Outreach and more)

These resources and workshop meetings notes are on interests identified by the colleges. If you are needing help with these or other topics please let us know, and please pass along any resources you find helpful.

LinkedIn -Resources and handouts from LinkedIn and colleges to assist you in helping students use this platform

Best Practices: Recently commissioned studies by colleges to identify best practices in organizing career services at colleges

Job Descriptions: Sample job descriptions to help colleges as the create or redesign jobs. Feel free to send along yours to add to this resource

On-Campus Employment: Resources provided by Bakersfield College on how to integrate on-campus jobs into their workforce development program. Note: This is based on using the Jobspeaker platform but can be adopted to other systems.

Centering Employer Engagement on Student Needs: On December 12, 2019 the RJV hosted a workshop by Network Kinection at Gavilan College. We had over 30 attendees and teams from over six colleges participate and look at how they can reorganize their employer and student engagement Here are workshop notes and handouts.

Designing for Students in Unprecedented Times: In the summer of 2020 the RJV hosted a series of workshops with Virginia Hamilton on how to apply Human Centered Design (HCD) Thinking to college career services. Three teams took part in the workshop series and decided to focus their design work on addressing the problem of outreach for both enrollment and career services. Here are workshop notes including the larger community opening and closing sessions with recordings in the front of the notes. In addition, Virginia provided many design thinking resources that are included as separate links.

Student Journey Mapping: In August 2021, we hosted a two-part workshops helps colleges implement an “outside-in” perspective (using User Experience techniques) that strengthens student engagement in career readiness, enhances career development services, increases internal alignment within and among the career development services at the colleges and enables cross-college sharing and learning. If you would like help doing your own journey mapping, please let us know.

Workforce Development Structure Project

"What if we could see how each college is now organizing themselves, and how they are set up to deliver work-based learning? This would help inform my college on the decisions we need to make. " - Belen Gonzales, Job and Internship Placement Coordinator, Hartnell College

In responding to this need, we are charting workforce development organizational structures and identifying best practices, particularly around equity practices, use of data and self-identified strengths. This project is in process, and if you would like to participate in being charted or joining a meeting where colleges share their structures, please let us know. Below please find a template for how to chart your organization, a presentation on this project for National Council of Workforce Education (NCWE) October 2020 conference and the college presentations we have done to date.