The road to professional and personal enrichment has many paths. At South Texas College’s Continuing, Professional and Workforce Education (CPWE) department programs are built to help learners of all ages and backgrounds learn vital skills to jump-start a new career, switch gears or expand on what they already know.
Administrative assistant Gloria Franklin explained that the CPWE department is important to a community college because it opens the door to even more individuals in the community who look to improve themselves.
“One of the parts that I think we’re essential to the college is if you have someone who already has their degree and they’re not quite satisfied with what they’re doing they can always switch gears,” Franklin said. “We act as a stepping stone for students who don’t have a place to start.”
The CPWE department offers programs from a range of disciplines like language skills with ESL, forklift certifications, real estate to start the process to become a realtor, test preparation to begin higher education, even leisure learning and personal enrichment to turn hobbies into skills or even a small business.
Franklin says real estate is usually the course with the most interest and enrollment.
“If you don’t just want to stay stuck at a job,” Gloria Franklin said. “A lot of times what I hear is ‘college is not for me, education is not for me. I just want to do something to get out in the workforce. But once they get a little taste of it and they realize that college isn’t so different from what we do here. That kind of gets them into the perspective that college isn’t so scary. I think having classes with CPWE on a smaller scale changes the mindset from ‘I can’t do it’ to an ‘I can do it’ attitude.”
CPWE also offers customized corporate training for employers that are looking to sharpen the skills of their workforce. Sometimes that includes customer service training or what is known as ‘soft skills.’
“One of the things we do is phone etiquette or customer service skills,” Franklin said. “If you have a prospective employer that is looking for training for their employers that’s what these classes provide. It provides structured learning for some of these skills that are vital to the workplace. A lot of times we take these things for granted.”
CPWE has even begun to provide training to school districts to serve high school students that are about to step into the world of applying for jobs and college.
“Any employer that wants these trainings, customer service is one of the things that we can do,” Franklin said. “We can tailor them too. That’s one of the nice things about how we do our training. We do go into school districts and we do resume writing. It’s an employability skills package and resume writing is in there. You’re talking about high schoolers. These are classes offered to the school district for free and they do teach them how to be more comfortable and confident in their interviewing skills even if they have no working experience.”
