NMC reaches out to community

Some 23 representatives from various sectors in the community trooped to the Northern Marianas College’s Focus Group Session yesterday to air suggestions on how the institution can keep its training courses and programs competitive to the needs of a growing and diversified island community.

The purpose of the discussion held at the Pacific Gardenia was to obtain community feedback from major employment sectors on how NMC can improve its programs, courses, technical assistance, research studies, and other services to enhance the workforce skills of home-grown workers.

The Saipan forum was the first in a series of sessions to be conducted on Tinian and Rota, where the combined results of all three discussions will be used as a basis in the creation of an NMC comprehensive community development plan.

Community leaders yesterday floated to NMC the idea of providing more specific trainings on various fields of study, specifically the strengthening of the college’s nursing and pre-law programs, as well as focused trainings on secretarial work.

Business owners and managers also suggested that the college invest more efforts in articulating four-year degree courses with reputable US mainland universities.

It was also the desire of community leaders to pave the road for professional associations to be always at par with high standards expected of their respective fields through the process of certification and re-certification.

Dr. Stanley J. Spanbauer, former president and vice president of the Wisconsin Fox Valley College, facilitated yesterday’s focus group session.

The expert was tapped by NMC President Jack Sablan as an executive consultant to several of the college’s development projects, including the creation of a needs assessment study targeted to gauge the general desires of the community’s workforce needs.

“I have a special feeling about this because we have developed a nice program with the business industry in our region, and it has a tremendous impact in our college and community. The project has paved the road for economic development for our community. And we received several awards in recognition of the kinds of programs that were developed as a result of that,” said Dr. Spanbauer.

According to the expert, the focus group session is a good start of hopefully a series of continued open communication with the business and government sectors towards the enhancement of the local labor force.

“The college has done a wonderful job with its “full time” programs for people who want to get their associate degrees, but collaboration between agencies need to be enhanced in order to create more proactive rather than reactive solutions to the workforce concerns in the Commonwealth,” Dr. Spanbauer said. (MM)