When Roma Ouk moved from Southern California to Scottsdale, Arizona, to get a fresh start, he decided to go back to school. The first thing he had to do was scrape together $270 and fill out an eight-question assessment online.

When he passed with a perfect score, he got into a three-credit boot camp at Mesa Community College run in partnership with Boeing, the aerospace giant.

The nine-day, 36-hour course, taught by Boeing employees, teaches students how to assemble, modify, repair, and test the cables and other equipment that create the “central nervous system” of Boeing’s airplanes, helicopters, and drones.

Ouk, 33, emerged with an industry-recognized credential known as acable and wire harness assembly certification and an earning potential about 15 percent above what he was making as nurse’s assistant in his hometown of Long Beach, California.

Mesa Community College’s partnership with Boeing is one of several models that could be replicated if a bipartisan bill to help finance community college workforce training for short-term credentials makes it through Congress.

The Assisting Community Colleges in Educating Skilled Students to Careers Act — or ACCESS to Careers Act — is designed to increase the number of students who earn these types of credentials and the number of colleges meeting the needs of local employers. It could provide states with up to $2.5 million a year for up to four years to develop policies around this type of workforce training and provide community colleges with grants of up to $1.5 million each to carry out the programs. Its sponsors, Sens. Todd Young, a Republican from Indiana, and Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, are both staunch advocates of short-term workforce training programs; they reintroduced the bill in May, after a February 2020 version languished without success.

The combination of students changing the way they consume postsecondary education and businesses desperate for skilled employees has led to a new wave of strategic business partnerships — with or without the proposed federal grants. Rachel Vilsack, a senior fellow at the National Skills Coalition, said she’s seen an increase in partnerships that allow businesses to signal their needs and work directly with community colleges to meet them. The increase has also been sped up by the pandemic, she said.

Read the full article about business partnerships with community colleges by Olivia Sanchez at The Hechinger Report.