There is power in partnerships, power for our customers – both our students and Georgia’s businesses – and strength for our system. With this issue, we begin a continuing series whose components will appear over the next few volumes as we bring you stories from throughout our state, stories of how our system of technical colleges engages in partnerships all over Georgia that, in a sense, build our system as they become our outposts in Georgia’s vast network of business and industry strength.

Depending on just where you are in our system, you may be very aware of our extensive partnerships or the knowledge may be rather minimal. I would like for every member of our system statewide to appreciate and understand the foundation of our system’s pro-business-partnership philosophy, why it is important to us, and what partnerships and potential partnerships exist for us in their community and in others.

As our system was first developing into what it is today, I took several study tours that were critical to the development of this important cornerstone of the philosophy of our technical college system. The first, underwritten by the German Marshall Fund, gave me a thorough grounding in the German Dual System. Basically, this is a three-year apprenticeship program that includes one- to two-days a week of classroom instruction with virtually all of the technical and skill training provided in industry settings, with much of the training done in classrooms and labs provided within plants and businesses. A second, a benchmarking trip with a group of technical college presidents taken to study practices of the Dual System that might enhance our delivery system, convinced us that one of the most significant features of that system, the strong connection to the business community, could be most valuable to us. From this came a resolve that we would ensure that our equipment and programs were kept up-to-date, that we would build strong connections with our customers so that we’d understand what they needed from us, and we would design our programs so we would teach appropriate skills that would meet our customers’ needs.

On a similar trip to Japan a few years later, where we studied the way that Japan’s system of technical education works, we observed that their system, too, is profoundly reliant on the business community as a location for, and a partner in, the education and training process. The successes, economy, and efficiency of these systems further strengthened our resolve and led to more extensive development of industry-based programs, such as Advanced Manufacturing Technology. The more deeply we committed to this approach, the more our connections to business developed into a focus on meeting the needs of our customers. Finally, this has grown into partnerships that, as you will read in comments from one of our partners highlighted in this issue, “are more like family.”

Beginning this series by focusing on the Columbus area’s major healthcare organizations was a natural. The Columbus area is a place where business, education, and economic developers know how to work together to help their community grow and prosper. I hope you will be as delighted as I was in the results of the interviews with the CEOs of Columbus Regional Healthcare Systems, Doctors Hospital, and St. Francis Hospital. Please read what they have to say in these pages, and then go onto the Web and read the complete interviews. They tell the story of how the partnerships work – and what they mean to their organizations – better than I ever could, and I want each one of you to understand, through these insights into the operations of three of our important customers, just what our efforts ultimately mean and how they benefit our state.

Another important business presence in Columbus is AFLAC, a leading provider of insurance sold on a voluntary basis at the worksite in the United States and the largest foreign insurer in Japan. AFLAC insures more than 40 million people worldwide. AFLAC is a Fortune 500 company, ur system and it is a fine company, indeed. In January 2002, Fortune magazine named AFLAC to its list of “The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America” for the fourth consecutive year and in February 2002 to its list of “America’s Most Admired Companies” in the life and health insurance industry. Our work with AFLAC provides a recent example of one way our technical college system develops relationships with companies, relationships that enlarge in scope and depth over time and become true partnerships.

Because AFLAC had been adding a large number of new employees in Columbus, Quick Start, our internationally recognized training program, had been working extensively with AFLAC, designing and delivering training to meet AFLAC’s needs. To work effectively in the AFLAC jobs, employees needed a thorough grounding in the insurance environment, in computer and communication skills, in customer service, and personal-effectiveness skills. Quick Start’s training professionals, through on-site research and otherwise establishing close connections with the company, had developed many and varied materials specific to the industry. By utilizing this valuable resource, our system was able to develop, within an impressively short timeline, a pilot program that will soon result in a certification program that will be available first at Columbus Technical College and then statewide and produce candidates for jobs in the insurance industry and the medical community statewide.

This is basically the way most of our major workforce- development certification programs, like Certified Manufacturing Specialist and Certified Customer Service Specialist, came into being: an industry demonstrates a need and a future for qualified employees with specific skills, Quick Start’s expertise and base of knowledge is drawn upon to design and develop appropriate training, and the technical colleges take the program from the pilot and move it throughout Georgia. AFLAC’s needs drove the initiation of the effort and gave us the necessary information, but it ultimately benefits the industry statewide. This is a model I believe in, and it is a model we have used to efficiently and cost-effectively begin a transformation of the way people are prepared for success in the workplace.

When you drive by a manufacturing plant, a hospital, a call center, any place that is part of the economy of your community, I want to know that you see something that we – and you, personally – have investment in, an entity whose future may depend, in part, on your efforts, an organization that has a connection to and an investment in, your technical college and our system. These partners employ the students we train, and they work with us to ensure, right at the local level, that our programs and services are what they need to be to keep their operations running successfully today and into the future.

These partners are part of our technical college community; our connection to them is essential to the vitality of our system.