Industry Partnerships Overview
Industry Partnerships are the cornerstone of Pennsylvania's new, industry-led, demand-driven workforce development strategy. This new approach focuses on creating a skilled workforce through industry-specific training and education programs for incumbent workers developed in cooperation with companies in the Commonwealth.
Industry Partnerships bring together multiple employers in the same industry to identify and address common workforce needs. These partnerships provide companies with a more cost-effective way to provide training to their employees with funding from the Commonwealth to reduce the costs of training so that even small employers can participate in high-quality training.
Fast Facts
- There are more than 90 Industry Partnerships across the Commonwealth that engage more than 6,100 businesses;
- More than 53,000 workers have received skill training that helps them to move up career ladders;
- Workers who have participated in training have seen their wages rise nearly 13% over a two year period;
- Most businesses (75%) have seen an increase in productivity as a result of their involvement with Partnerships
Lancaster County has been a leader in developing industry partnerships from 2002 when the Lancaster County Workforce Investment Board received a grant to work in the health care industry.
We now operate industry partnerships in food processing, industrial maintenance, metal manufacturing, plastics manufacturing, printing, and construction. We participate in the logistics and transportation partnership run by the South Central Workforce Investment Board and the biotechnology partnership run by the Life Science Career Alliance.
Several of our partnerships have become Centers of Excellence...Production Agriculture, Long-Term Care Practice, Packaging Operations, and Radio Frequency Identification where the mission of incumbent worker training joins school to career pipeline development, local research and development, technology transfer activities, and entrepreneurial development as a way of connecting to local innovation systems.
