The number of students enrolled in Bates Technical College’s carpentry program has just about doubled over the past year. Bates has had to hire more faculty and has begun offering an evening course to meet the demand.
Dr. Brett McCarthy, the associate dean of instruction for Bates, said with that growth, the college needed more resources.
That’s where funding from the Washington State Board of Technical and Community Colleges comes in. The college was recently awarded a grant from the state agency that will help Bates purchase $97,000 worth of new equipment for the carpentry program.
“This grant and other grants that we've received over the last year or so have really made us be able to step up and to compete with other colleges, other training programs, and give our students the tools, literally speaking, that they need to be successful,” McCarthy said.
Twelve Washington community and technical colleges were awarded this funding from the state at the end of July.
The state board awards $1.5 million annually to institutes of higher learning from its Workforce Development Fund. The intent of the dollars is to give schools support for things like buying new equipment, changing curriculum and retraining instructors to match industry needs.
“ There's always a need for reinventing programs to keep up with the state of the art and industry and to keep up with the needs that our busy students have,” said Carolyn McKinnon, a policy associate with the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges.
Clover Park Technical College, another recipient of the funding, will be using the dollars to expand its accelerated industrial mechatronics program, which brings in employees already in the workforce for an accelerated course.
With rapidly changing technologies, Claire Korschinowski, the dean of Instruction for Advanced Manufacturing and Aviation at Clover Park, said the program looks to upskill workers.
“We're going to have to adapt to be able to stay relevant in the workforce,” Korschinowski said.
The accelerated course, in which students earn five college credits over two weeks, works through company partnerships. Businesses send in a cohort of their employees for retraining, advancing skills and learning how to use new technology.
Clover Park has run this program for two years.
“ We kept hearing from industry partners that we're not fast enough. That they need technicians, they need engineers quicker,” Korschinowski said. “So we developed this accelerated industrial mechatronics model, which really is our courses in the same manner that they would be over your two to four year traditional way of thinking, but condensed.”
The $150,000 in grant funding Clover Park received will go toward marketing and communication efforts to connect with more businesses and expand the program, as well as resources for the program itself.
“ This grant then allows us to set up that environment where people can practice their skills and abilities and get those reps in,” said Carl Wenngren, a mechatronics and automation instructor at Clover Park
Students work in cohorts in lab settings, learning in a work-based education model tailored to individual company and employee needs. The mindset of the program is to foster lifelong learners in employees, whose new skills may make them more dynamic as technologies change and they may have to shift industries, Wenngren said.
For example, with the tech sector seeing a recent rise in layoffs, Wenngren said those employees may be able to transfer skills to other jobs.
“The same skill set there, with a little bit of massaging, is very relevant and extremely needed in, let's say, industrial software, maintaining, creation, building and industrial programming, those kinds of things,” Wenngren said. “There is a huge shortage of people.”
McCarthy said the focus at Bates is to purchase tools that students will use when they’re learning on job sites.
“ It'll give them the ability to go beyond the footprint of just the campus,” McCarthy said. “That mobile lab is going to make it possible for students to get out there and do those things that they would otherwise not be able to because of the fact that they didn't have the equipment that they needed.”
The Workforce Development Fund, in its current form, started in July 2010. The funding amount hasn’t changed in the two decades that the agency has awarded it to colleges, except for an addition from a separate fund called Invest in Washington. This year, that added $82,000 to the pool.
Invest in Washington is a sales tax deferral, which began in the 2024-25 fiscal year, for when a manufacturing company builds a new plant in Washington. Some of the money that companies would have paid in sales tax for the purchase of things such as construction materials, goes into an account that can only be used to train production and manufacturing workers in the state.
Any of Washington’s 34 community and technical colleges can apply for the funding. The state board assembles a review committee of business, labor and education representatives who decide which projects receive funding.
“ There are definitely limitations,” McKinnon said of the funding. “Every year, we see about double the request for money. So about $3 million is requested in the applications for the $1.5 million that we have.”
The agency refers colleges over to other funding sources, such as the state’s High Demand Funding program.
McKinnon said the agency is seeing more applications for projects in industries such as renewable energy skills training and for electric vehicle repair.
