3 City Colleges to prepare students for jobs in growth industries

SHARE 3 City Colleges to prepare students for jobs in growth industries

BY FRAN SPIELMAN

City Hall Reporter

Three more City Colleges will prepare students for more than 80,000 jobs over the next decade in three growth industries — information technology, advanced manufacturing and the culinary and hospitality industry, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Wednesday.

Companies that specialize in those areas will partner with the colleges to help write the curriculum, teach and mentor students and, hopefully, place them in jobs when they graduate.

Daley College will make the switch to advanced manufacturing with the help of Solo Cup Co., WaterSaver Faucet Co. and Arrow Gear. Students will be trained in computerized numeral control machining and factory machining. Both require a heavy emphasis on math to direct and maintain computer-guided heavy equipment.

Workers in those fields can typically earn anywhere form $10- to $23-an-hour to start.

Daley is currently the only school in Illinois with two high-tech welding machines that gives students access to hands-on training.

Kennedy-King College will train students for 44,000 job openings in the culinary and hospitality industry with help from Washburne Culinary Institute alumus Jimmy Bannos, owner of Heaven On Seven and Purple Pig restaurants.

Wright College will train students for 24,000 job openings in the burgeoning field of information technology.

Students will focus on one of three career paths: software and web development, cloud management or networking technology and security. Private industry partners include Motorola Solutions, Google and Cisco.

“Companies are continuing to look to Chicago as a city with top talent and a place where they can grow and develop in the coming years, and our College to Careers program is an innovative way to ensure Chicagoans have the skills and education they need for the jobs of today and the careers of the future,” Emanuel said in a statement.

Earlier this year, Emanuel announced plans to build a new $251 million Malcolm X College and 1,500-space parking garage in the shadows of the United Center to create a state-of-the-art facility to train students for careers in health care.

Olive-Harvey will focus on transportation and logistics and build a new, $42.2 million Transportation, Distribution and Logistics Center to train students for 28,000 jobs over the next decade in those fields.

The 200,000-square-foot building will replace 112,000 square feet of temporary classroom space adjacent to the main Olive-Harvey building.

In August, the mayor also announced that the University of Illinois at Chicago would reserve 50 openings-a-year in its online nursing program for City Colleges students and graduates to attend at half the cost of normal tuition.

The innovative program will pave the way for students to earn a full bachelor’s of science degree in nursing while paying tuition for only 30 online credits at UIC. That’s because UIC has agreed to grant qualified City Colleges students and graduates with associates degrees in nursing a total of 33 university-level credits at no cost.

City Colleges teachers have also agreed to a new contract that includes a 10 percent pay raise over five years, phases out step increases for experience and phases in merit pay based on student outcomes.

They include student graduation and certification rates, the number of students who transfer to four-year universities and the number of students who land jobs in their field of study.

All 600 faculty members will be judged as a group based on those criteria. If they make progress in those key areas and achieve the maximum performance, they will share an additional $500,000 or roughly $883-per-person.

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