Our Role
At the Center of Excellence for Aerospace and Advanced Materials Manufacturing, we are a one-stop resource center for education and industry in the state of Washington.
What we have learned is that traditionally, education and industry operate independent of each other. For career-based training, high schools and community colleges will develop and implement training for their students. The problem is that each school might provide different training programs, but they are feeding into the same workforce. Following training, students will seek work, but as you can imagine, they are all coming from a different perspective.
Industry, who serves as the manufacturers of products in a business-to-business sense, or to the consumer market, will seek employees who have been trained from a variety of schools and through a variety of programs. Curriculum (a set of objectives and topics that must be met for completion of a course) may not line up, and the training may not assimilate with the operation of hiring companies.
The Center of Excellence works to unite these two groups with regard to training and education, best practices, curriculum development, labor relations, and partnerships.
We are the central (and neutral) resource in Washington State for aerospace and advanced materials manufacturing.
Throughout this website, you can learn more about each of our functions and the role we play in Washington state.
As an industry resource, we aim to
- Reach out to industries within and beyond the Pacific Northwest and determine how to tie together business and education;
- Connect veterans to industry training programs and communicate job availability;
- Communicate with industry on advantages of hiring veterans;
- Share and collaborate with industry about what is going on in education;
- Work with industry to define the scope of jobs and how that articulates into curriculum development at the community college and high school level.
As an educational resource
- Improve Career Pathways communication with high school skills centers and community colleges across the state;
- Act as a liaison between industry and education, ensuring education is teaching to what industry wants;
- Communicate about training programs in the state and share best practices;
- Present material that industry and education can use to benchmark what is happening in each jobs-critical area;
- To work with the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006 (Perkins IV) which calls for states to offer “career and technical programs of study,” which may be adopted by local educational agencies and postsecondary institutions, as an option to students (and their parents as appropriate) when planning for and completing future coursework.
For both groups
- Develop trusting and open relationships fostered by intelligent assessments, advisement, and recommendations;
- Foster partnerships and sharing.
Our primary role
- To assist in moving the right people toward the right jobs at the right time by connecting industry and education together.
What we don't do
- Direct training
- Recruit students