How Community Colleges & Their Workforce Teams Are Improving Employer Engagement

Preparing students for today’s workforce is not as simple as helping them finish a degree or earn a credential. To really move the needle on students’ career success, colleges need strong, equity-centered partnerships with employers. That means building partnerships that go beyond one-off hiring requests and instead create more opportunities for students to obtain and stay employed in good-paying jobs.

Through our ACE-UP Community of Practice–which brought together 15 teams of community college leaders and staff to advance how they engage equity in work with sectors and employer partners–we saw firsthand how colleges are tackling this challenge. One learning we took away from our time convening and coaching the community is how colleges are building capacity to improve their employer partnerships: the internal and external mechanics that help make these partnerships more impactful for students.

This kind of engagement is best understood as an ongoing, developmental process rather than a checklist or hierarchy. It involves essential internal work to strengthen foundations before building new or improved relationships with employers. This groundwork provides the scaffolding and buy-in needed for colleges to move partnerships toward meaningful improvements.

Strategies for Improving Employer Engagement

Creating Cross-Functional Teams

Colleges begin strengthening their employer partnerships by building the groundwork internally. Much of this building centers on convening leaders, staff, and faculty to set direction, creating structures, and making early connections.

Catalyzed by the opportunity to join communities of practice like ACE-UP, colleges are establishing new cross-functional teams to set shared priorities for employer engagement. These teams are using data on students and employers – for example, data on student outcomes, or data on advisory board participation – to identify gaps in how they are meeting students’ needs for career development and employment.

In-person convenings can be especially helpful for strengthening these foundations. In June 2024, we brought together all ACE-UP Community of Practice participants for a lightning decision jam: a fast-paced, expertly facilitated exercise that helped institutional teams sharpen and strengthen their problem statements. Whether in-person or online, our role has been to create space for collaboration and goal setting across academic, workforce, and student services staff.

Refining Advisory Boards

Internally, colleges are using equity and placement data to refine advisory boards, ensuring representation reflects the students they serve and that employers on boards are providing paid work-based learning opportunities and actively recruiting and hiring students. Many colleges have had to rebuild their advisory boards after COVID-19. Joining communities of practice like ACE-UP helps colleges access professional development and peer learning, exposing teams to knowledge and strategies from the field and other practitioners.

Increasing Involvement with Employers

Externally, colleges are refining their touchpoints with employers, including creating multiple tiers of engagement for employers to pursue the investment needed to improve recruiting, hiring, and retention practices. To support these multiple touchpoints, colleges are hiring job developers and employer engagement specialists. These staff build and maintain relationships with employers, with the goal of generating more opportunities for career exploration, work-based learning, interviews, and hiring for students.

Using Labor Market Information with Employer Partners

Colleges are also working on innovation in their employer partnerships, particularly with employers who are bought into improving their role in recruiting and hiring students – especially those from historically marginalized groups – into jobs and careers. Understanding and using data and best practices is a big part of what colleges are doing in the process of innovating solutions.

For example, colleges are collecting and using labor market intelligence to understand hiring, career pathways, and good jobs in their region. They are using this data to consider changes to program offerings. This includes co-developing new, high-demand credentialing and degree programs—not one-off trainings, but sustained pathways that meet student, regional, and employer needs.

Many two- and four-year colleges, including those in our community of practice, have also engaged Achieving the Dream as a resource. ATD is helping college teams come together around innovative solutions for transfer and career pathways, course planning, and wraparound services. By taking part in a community of practice targeted at strengthening employer partnerships, colleges are continuing the work they started while homing in on the challenge of using student and equity data to drive improvements with industry and employers.

Scaling with Workforce-Oriented Ecosystems

With the right industry and employer partners, colleges are looking to institutionalize and scale improvements via workforce-oriented ecosystems. For example, colleges are working to translate best practices in employer engagement used in one program or sector to the rest of the institution, reaching more students and employers across programs. For many community colleges, their employer engagement muscle is stronger in one industry—such as healthcare—than it is in others. A community of practice can provide space to help colleges break down silos and identify best practices that should be transferred across industries and programs.

Colleges are also participating in and leading regional collaboratives that strengthen employer partnerships, scaling promising practices while advancing regional ecosystems for improvements. For example, multiple colleges in a region may come together to form a shared workforce division. Colleges are also engaging in sector-based collaboratives, including leveraging models like Next Gen Sector Partnerships, to harness collective strengths and resources across a region.

Funding is an incredibly important resource at this stage, providing the support necessary to identify and either institutionalize or scale best practices. With funding to bring in third-party organizations to support improvements, practitioners are more able to lift their heads up from the day-to-day job of serving students and instead focus on innovating how they engage employer partners to the benefit of students. For example, CSW is currently partnering with multiple community colleges to provide strategy for mapping out the pathways that connect students’ training, education, and careers, using competencies as a common language between colleges and employers.

Strategies for Moving Forward

Colleges continue to face challenges in how they engage employers, especially when it comes to making improvements that center and meet the needs of students from historically marginalized groups. From our time leading the ACE-UP Community of Practice, we’ve seen that while this work is complex, colleges can make gradual, meaningful improvements that strengthen job and career readiness, recruitment, and hiring for students.

If you’re a college leader or part of a workforce team looking to improve employer engagement, it may help you to consider:

• Do we have a cross-functional team positioned to identify and implement improvements?
• Are we treating employer partnerships as spaces for refinement and continuous improvement, not just one-time transactions?
• How are we using student, employer, and equity data together to uncover gaps and guide collaborative decisions?
• How are we and our employer partners holding each other accountable for equitable student employment outcomes, including access to career pathways and good jobs?

For more information, download our action guide for improving college and employer partnerships, or visit the ACE-UP website.

You can also hear all about this topic at the 2025 National Council for Workforce Education (NCWE) conference, in our session, Catalyzing Student-Centered Partnerships: Lessons Learned from the ACE-UP Community of Practice taking place Wednesday, October 8 in Norfolk, VA.