Exploring Perceived Benefits of Collaboration: A Study of Employee Advisory Boards in Workplace Development and Career & Technical Education Programs in Community College Programs.

Employer engagement is a critical component of success in fulfilling the community college mission. The contemporary community college, charged with creating, providing, and sustaining relevant workforce training to the middle skills sector, needs to regularly interact with employers to understand their training needs. That interaction should be collaborative in nature, providing benefits for all parties involved. The employer-college training relationship should provide a transformational opportunity for both the business and the college program, not merely a transaction between vendor and client.
This mixed methods multi-case study uses a sequential explanatory design to identify any perceived benefits and best practices of utilizing employer advisory boards in workforce development and career and technical education programs in community colleges. The interactions of three factors – collaboration, resource dependency, and human capital – are proposed as a framework for determining perceived value of employer advisory boards in this study. The study was conducted through the lens of community college participants in the state of Michigan.
Four guiding themes – relevance, relationships, partnerships, and accountability – emerged from the findings in this study. Five conclusions and implications of this study were presented, the conclusions summarized here:
•Relevance, Relationships, Partnerships, and Accountability are critical to the development and sustainment of successful collaboration.
•Little is done currently to formally control and document processes for employer recruitment, employer acceptance criteria, or employer service term limits on employer advisory boards.
•Some alumni participation on employer advisory boards could prove beneficial with respect to hiring of future graduates. However, no alumni presence, or over-saturation of alumni on the advisory board may have detrimental effects.
•Meeting membership, structure, and operation greatly influence the value produced by employer advisory boards.
• When seeking to create a collaborative environment, recognize advisory board ownership and advisory board leadership are not the same thing. A summary table of proposed best practices derived from the research was presented, outlining guidelines for advisory board recruitment, composition, meeting structure, and operation. The proposed best practices create and sustain an employer advisory board that
encourages collaboration through effective workforce development partnerships between colleges and employers.