City Colleges adds partners to fill job-skills gaps

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Updated: January 13, 2012 8:19AM

The City Colleges of Chicago will announce Monday that it is partnering with private industry and academic institutions to provide mentors, train faculty and develop curricula to help prepare its students for jobs in aviation, hospitality, health care and information technology and other industries that are in need of job candidates.

The program starts with partnerships with AAR Corp., a Wood Dale-based aviation products and maintenance company now seeking to fill 600 jobs for welders and aerospace mechanics at plants in Indiana, North Carolina and Oklahoma, and Rush University Medical Center, which will substanially expand its existing training of a few dozen City Colleges students in radiology, respiratory therapy, emergency medical services and in a cadaver lab. Other partners include Advocate Health Care, Allscripts, Baxter, BNSF Railway Co., Metropolitan Chicago Healthcare Council, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Stroger Hospital of Cook County, UPS and Walgreen.

“If we don’t partner with industries and other institutions to align our degrees and certifications with skills gaps, many of our students will miss what is increasingly their only chance to join the middle class,” said City Colleges Chancellor Cheryl Hyman, who grew up in Henry Horner Homes public housing and attended Olive-Harvey before obtaining her bachelor’s in computer science at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

The aerospace mechanics certificate is to start in Fall 2012. Dates for other such programs and the length of each certificate program have yet to be determined.

The effort aims not only to fill jobs that go wanting because of what’s called a “skills gap,” even amid 8.6 percent unemployment, but also to fill future jobs, Hyman said.

The Chicago area will need 4,000 more truck drivers, 10,000 more computer-science workers and 75,000 more health-care workers, including 18,000 Registered Nurses, in the next eight years, Hyman said.

AAR Corp. CEO David P. Storch said the partnership is part of his company’s efforts to “get young people interested in and excited about aviation as a career.”

“Providing the training and mentors is critical,” he said.

Rush University Medical Center CEO Larry Goodman said Rush wants to provide more health-sciences training sites and opportunities for City Colleges students, and prepare the students for new kinds of jobs that no one can yet predict.

The partnership announcement comes three months after the City Colleges dumped the presidents of four of its seven colleges and issued a mandate to boost the system’s 8 percent graduation rate. The City Colleges enroll 120,000 students, of whom 51 percent seek a certification or associate’s degree.