Rural Advanced Manufacturing Partnerships Toolkit: How North Carolina's Rural-Serving Community Colleges Leverage Partnerships to Meet Advanced Manufacturing Workforce Needs

Abstract

The advanced manufacturing sector is a key driver of North Carolina's economy, requiring a skilled and adaptable workforce to meet the demands of rapidly growing and evolving industries such as aerospace, biotechnology, and renewable energy. Across the state, and particularly in rural areas, developing a sustainable pipeline of talent for the advanced manufacturing workforce is more critical than ever to the continued economic growth and resilience of entire regions and communities. Every day, North Carolina's community colleges respond nimbly to employer needs in advanced manufacturing by serving as local and regional hubs for education and training. Collaborating with a wide variety of cross-sector partners, these institutions reach and support talented students of all ages and backgrounds and promote economic development and vitality through the services they provide to--and develop alongside--business and industry. Through a series of conversations with college leaders and a scan of publicly available information, RP3 has identified dozens of examples of partnerships involving the state's rural-serving community colleges and mapped these back to a series of collaborative strategies being leveraged by colleges in response to advanced manufacturing workforce opportunities. While not unique to rural contexts, partnerships like these are especially critical for the state's rural-serving institutions, as collaboration maximizes the range of resources to which these colleges and their communities have access. A framework for partnership strategies is summarized in Table 1 on the following page and explored in more detail throughout the toolkit. Whenever possible, the authors have provided links to additional information and/or related coverage about each partnership featured in this toolkit. While more than 45 rural-serving community colleges are represented in the pages that follow, this toolkit is not meant to be an exhaustive inventory of rural-serving advanced manufacturing partnerships; instead, the authors hope that by lifting up selected examples of successful partnership models, they can raise awareness about and promote additional support for these partnerships and the many others like them across the state. [This report was created in partnership with EducationNC (EdNC) and myFutureNC.]