Economic Alliance Offers Skill Training.

New businesses in need of help with employee recruitment and training, as well as established companies searching for resources to upgrade the skills of their staff, now have a coalition of educators, administrators and business leaders to turn to for assistance.

The Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley has just launched a Training Alliance program, which will serve as a one-stop resource center where business owners can tap the expertise of qualified teachers and administrators from the four Valley-based community colleges.

Ken Phillips, director of education and work investment for the Alliance, said the organization will serve as the principal marketing agent for the four community colleges, and provide assistance in obtaining state funding to help pay for part of the training.

The Alliance's job is to also identify the right facility to provide the training based on the type of business and its location. The four colleges involved in the program are Los Angeles Pierce College, Glendale Community College, Los Angeles Mission College and Los Angeles Valley College.

Valley College took on the first project under the new program last week. The college was selected by the Alliance to recruit applicants and provide customer service training for 200 staff positions at the new Target store opening in Van Nuys July 31.

Lennie Ciufo, director of job training for Valley College, helped Target officials identify new recruits and set up a three-week customer service training program which, he said, would likely be needed for roughly 70 of the 200 new hires.

Ciufo said the training won't end with customer service. Employees will continue to receive additional training as they progress to ensure that they are qualified for advancement to other positions within the company.

Costs for employee enrollment are the same as for anyone enrolling in the community college system: $11 per unit, with options for courses leading to credential programs.

According to Phillips, businesses have, in the past, often been left to their own devices to find suitable training courses for their staff, which can eat up resources.

"It used to be that a business that was looking, for example, to provide some additional training in something like workplace diversity used to call a college and they'd get sent the entire college course catalog," said Phillips. "But that didn't really give them much to go on. And, business (owners) have long thought of their local community colleges as a great place to send their own kids, but not necessarily their employees for training."

Phillips said, though there are programs at GCC, for example, that offer similar skill and recruitment training for local business, this will be the first time the four colleges have ever worked together to custom-design courses for individual employers.

In some cases, more than one of the colleges could work together and, if a company doesn't have enough employees to meet the minimum 20-student enrollment requirement, two or more companies could join together in a single program.

"What is terrific about these new partnerships is that, with the exception of Glendale College, the presidents of each of the colleges are all new to their positions, as are we," said Phillips.

"Vocational training is certainly at the forefront of what we are hoping to accomplish here, but we also intend to keep on providing employees with post-employment training, because we are trying to find them jobs with futures," said Ciufo.

Ken Patton, dean of workforce and economic development at Glendale College, said, although his campus has long been involved in providing job training assistance for local businesses, this new program offers up an opportunity to expand on those services through the collaborative efforts of neighboring colleges and their staff.

"We are the largest contract training college in the state, and we've been doing more than $5 million in training programs for more than a decade," said Patton. "So we bring a ton of experience and expertise to the new program."

He said GCC is particularly strong in providing customized contract training for the manufacturing and computer design sectors, adding that the Training Alliance won't work to replace GCC's existing contracts, but rather provide a strong base from which each of the four colleges can work from in unison.

"We will continue to keep up existing relationships with our clients, but when you put the four of our colleges together you have an opportunity to enter a new market," said Patton. "What we are looking at is being of service to help with companies that we currently don't do business with, saying,-- 'Here we are together; we are bigger and better."'