A matter of degrees | A novel program between Cianbro and Eastern Maine Community College could become a pipeline for better-educated trades people
Photo/Courtesy Cianbro
Mike Bennett, director of the Cianbro Institute, hopes to boost recruitment through the company's partnership with Eastern Maine Community College
A new collaboration between Cianbro Corp. and Eastern Maine Community College may be used as a model by the construction company to create similar programs at its offices in Maryland and Connecticut.
In early April, Pittsfield-based Cianbro and Bangor-based EMCC announced that Cianbro employees could apply workplace training toward an associate’s degree at the school. The collaboration — first conceived of a year ago — allows employees to earn on the job over a third of the 60 credits necessary to obtain an associate’s degree in applied science in general technology. Cianbro employees interested in the program will submit a portfolio to the school containing work-force training certifications, and the school will evaluate the submission and grant the applicant up to 24 credits. Tuition for the degree, which with the credit deduction totals just over $3,000, is paid by the company.
Mike Bennett, director of the Cianbro Institute, the company’s recruitment, work-force training and development department, hopes the program will help Cianbro attract and retain the best talent. “The bottom line is it’s a collaboration of business and industry with education, working together really with the same ends and means, which is developing the skill sets we can put to work in the state of Maine,” says Bennett.
The collaboration is the first of its kind for the company and the school, and Bennett says Cianbro will next look at establishing similar programs with the technical departments of schools at its other regional offices in Baltimore and Bloomfield, Conn. Cianbro’s work-force training for carpenters, pipe fitters, millwrights, pipe and structural welders and electricians can be applied to the general technology degree, which encompasses a number of trade skills. Bennett says the degree may help workers advance faster in the company and, in turn, he hopes Cianbro is able to better compete for projects with a more skilled labor force. EMCC expects to enroll between 10 and 20 of Cianbro’s roughly 1,300 Maine workers in the associate’s program over the course of the 2009-2010 academic year, a participation rate that would cost the company upwards of $61,000 under its full tuition-reimbursement promise.
“[The program] brings enrollment in and it brings a certain level of revenue in,” says Joyce Hedland, president of EMCC. “But I think, more importantly, it helps to forge the partnerships with business that make this institution strong.”
Hedland hopes the Cianbro collaboration will enliven trade courses, because of the unique perspective she says working trades people can bring to the classroom.
So far, Bennett says he has fielded several inquiries about the program from Cianbro employees but none have registered yet. The company is planning how to market the program to employees, and is looking at establishing similar partnerships out of state before the end of 2009.
Launching the program with EMCC was a year-long process, says Bennett. “I’d like to think that it might move a little faster now that we’ve demonstrated how this could work.
“It’s a retention strategy and it’s a recruitment strategy,” he explains, “to know that we’re willing to develop these efforts to help our people.”
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