Jefferson Reid
Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, MS·Education Research
Community and technical colleges train much of the regional workforce. However, their advisory committees often meet only twice a year, involve employers lightly and rarely look ahead to future hiring needs.
- Fields
Education Research
Social Science
- Topics
workforce development
community colleges
technical colleges
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Replace a traditional advisory committee with the Business and Industry Leadership Team (BILT) model, in which employers co-lead course updates, for at least one academic program at each partner college.
- Develop and evaluate institution-specific strategic plans, supported by a BILT consultant, to grow and sustain regional industry partnerships for workforce programs.
- Identify recruitment and outreach strategies that bring underrepresented individuals and businesses onto BILT teams.
- Build a replicable, scalable framework for running BILT at community and technical colleges through a five-college community of practice, with outcomes judged by a third-party evaluator.
More about the research
As a result, course content can lag behind what employers need. This collaborative project asks whether a deeper model of employer partnership can make two-year college programs more responsive to regional workforce needs.
Why it matters
Community and technical college students could graduate with skills that better match what regional employers will need. They could also gain more access to internships, apprenticeships and mentoring. A tested, replicable framework could help other two-year colleges build stronger industry partnerships and play a larger role in their regional economies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Shannon Beasley
Middle Georgia State University, GA·Education Research
Build partnerships with industry experts and government agencies to identify the skills and knowledge needed for STEM jobs across four diverse institutions in the SUPER Partnerships Collaborative.
Timothy Miller
Saint Francis University, PA·Education Research
Build innovation capacity at each of five primarily undergraduate institutions, developing campus structures for industry partnerships, entrepreneurship, experiential learning and research suited to undergraduate-focused colleges.
Andrew Watkins
Case Western Reserve University, OH·Education Research
Develop a shared curriculum for the first two years of computer science across 15 Ohio colleges, and use it to create formal articulation agreements so community college credits transfer cleanly.
The school
Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College: 1 labs on PI Pages.
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