of mercer county community college who is leading the charge is chair of the new mercer county partnership for education attainment hosted by you're watching it in the c suite on princeton community television hello everyone and welcome to in the c suite where we bring your tips tools and resources for small business owners entrepreneurs and other professionals who are thinking about starting their own businesses we are here today continuing our business outlook serious about a year or so ago mercer county executive brian hughes introduced a new initiative to help bring the counting workforce to get their college degree over the next five years or so increase that percentage by one percent in order to achieve that he put together a new commission called the mercer county partnership for educational attainment and he has leading the charge of that new initiative dr jinping long she also happens to be the president of mercer county community college she joins me again here today and we're going to pick up where we left off on our business outlook series so without any further delay we're going to welcome dr long to the show thank you for having me i'm so glad to continue this dialogue i'm excited about bringing people back up to speed on kind of what's happening with the initiative so thank you for being here thank you for having me so you know what let's start at the beginning for people who may not have kind of caught the first part of our series want to give people a little bit of an overview dr wong of what the partnership is really charged to do and then a little bit about your role well i first of all i was very grateful that our county executive gave me this wonderful wonderful task it gave me and a great opportunity to meet with a lot of business leaders and business owners and government agency members and to fellow higher education institution leaders so it's a great way for me to be introduced in this region i'm new to this region so the blue ribbon commission is really really such a wonderful way to promote mercer county as a wonderful home for businesses and also for future businesses if you are listening out there and thinking about where you want to move your business is i really urge you to stay on and listen in to see what you can get out of this and maybe you have some ideas too and we would love to hear from you so what the commission was charged to was to really examine where we were and find ways to get where we needed to be which is hughes vision of increasing college attainment by one percent over the five year period to put it very specifically to create a two thousand five hundred more degree holders farmer and i am here to say we will definitely achieve that goal and it's not only doable i think we can exceed it and the only thing we need to do is the we work together which that's why it's called a partnership and so we  did a survey in partnership with that two chambers make sure the chambre of commerce in princeton regional chamber of commerce and they helped us to kick off the survey initiative and how we distribute it in and with their help we have more than two hundred thirty businesses took the time to fill out the surveys and i have to thank those businesses who did it because it's a long certainly we want to get a very detailed information and down our we got very detailed information as we had hoped so the basic findings probably wouldn't shock anybody who are listening you have a very positive outlook for the next three to five years very very positive you're very hopeful your business will grow so that's a great thing and you really probably doesn't share our shock any of those of you who are experiencing the difficulties out there and at the same time you also express are there more than forty percent of those new hires will require new skills so that's very interesting so you're not only looking for people you're looking for new skills and but ironically about sixty plus percent of  are currently not participating in the partnership with higher education institutions and if you don't know mercer county is so fortunate to have five high quality higher education institutions there are vastly different you have internationally renowned a research institution princeton university here and then you have a one of the kind open door admission that admits everyone in anyone at all ages at all skills levels and with all kinds of objectives to get an education mercer county community college and  i happen to be the present there and i know our students age ranges from sixty to probably eighty six everything and everything in between and that we do a degree  credit we do workshop we do skill training we do everything and if you want to know what we can do for you please do get in touch with us and then we have a problem we the countr most advanced online education institution thomas edison state university they offer all kinds of degrees for working adults and that's their niche they serve working adults and most recently they opened a nursing building which is going to be really convenient for those of you who don't want to leave home and want don't want to leave your part time jobs but yet want to get a nursing and degree you can get one from our we have an agreement with thomas edison so if you want to save money you can come to mercer for the first to three years and then you move on to our thomas edison to finish your fourth year it will be really really very affordable for you and we are adjacent to each other literally you can walk down from our campus to thomas addison so it's really very convenient we also have a very high quality private university right or university right here and it was something new to me too i did not realize that right or universities business program is such a high quality you know  they are comparable to rutgers business program and they graduated even more graduates in the last year there and rutgers new brunswick yeah so it's a really shocking to me but i'm finding it out it's so exciting then are we have a very selective public four year institution and you know our new jersey college of new jersey college of new jersey and they have such a wonderful wonderful way of programs and particularly in education area you know so we have such a wonderful a ray of higher education institution that businesses can take full advantage of and you know when you started at the top of the show mentioning that not only do you think it's doable it it we have to talk about the collaboration of those five institution are totally grandsir yeah i mean i think and i think that's what attracted me to it i happened to be at that breakfast here when you provided the survey results to us as the business community and i left there so excited about the potential outlook and i want to talk a little bit about this now that everyone now that you've laid out we're colleges talk about the opportunities for local businesses absolutely partner we absolutely and and that's that's businesses don't mean computers and they said willy and we want to because we can find a qualified employees and i said you're in computer business and you cannot find and say yes we actually under serve our customers so when the customers come to us we tell them sorry we can't survive because we don't have the people to serve all of your needs so we are mercer county green card and domain computers are in collaboration to set up a tech start up academy on our campus and that will allow our students while in the programs of our computer science and businesses to get a paid internship job on campus with the domain computers and that will not only help those students really really learn learn hands on experience which is a critically needed before they will be hired but also really modernize what do we teach so that the college teaches exactly what the business experts tell us we need to teach our students what age group going to be do you know what the age but we also i'll have mid career people who used to do certain jobs and those jobs no longer exist and then they come back they come back in the say let me return myself so that i p myself to be hired to earn a gainful employment salary that i can support my family i had a one man who used to do certain work and then when he got laid off  he came back and he now is involved in civil engineering program you know so you know we serve all ages in if you are out there listening and you think gee maybe i'm too old to go back to school  and you know you mentioned is this was a nice segment of the population that you highlighted at their service this what i call second tier career professional arce the seasoned professionals out of the around for a while that are looking to upgrade  you so if you need it to work while you study that gives you an opportunity so you will be employed by the domain computer and set up at the academy so you actually employed by the academy while you are studying i would those that we're going to take a quick break here dr wong when we come back and i know that example that you just use you use that example yourself to look at the college and say wait a minute what are we doing with our yes employees so i want to talk a little bit about that when we come back from the break and then let's talk about some specific opportunities and then what's kind of on the horizon that cell sounds great excellent everybody please stay tuned for this wonderful conversation marketing can skyrocket traffic to your website and your business from i catch in promotional ads and client testimonial to whether in our training series that showcase your expertise give your brand a boot exacts dot com today get your show me here get your business on the map and now back to the show we are back here everyone in the c suite with dr jinping one she is not only the chair of the mercer county partnership for educational attainment she also happens to be the president of mercer county community college and so that one where before the break you were starting to talk a little bit about employers looking within to figure out opportunities for training their employees and i know you and i had talked about this a little bit off one i want you to see of the story you did this within your own institution want to talk about absolutely so one of the survey finding is a very interesting and how everybody over eighty percent of the businesses told us that they value education but only thirty six percent of the businesses are offering to wish an assistance to their own employees and what's more shocking is that i'm on those businesses dig deeper and ask say why didn't you write you know they give you the money they're asking you to go better yourself why didn't you do it and the answer is shockingly simple i don't have time i'm too busy and then you feel look further you wonder how true how simple it is so i went back to my college and i asked how many of our employees are taking advantage of a tuition assistance program and we were one of those you know organizations that didn't have a hundred percent participation by far when not even half of it so i said to my cabinet is what can we do and we all realize  employees who are at the lower level of employment who tend to need this educational lift are the ones that with either small children or senior parents so or both they are sandwiched so they don't have the time after the work to go invest in their own education so our cabinet you know unanimously agreed there we need to lead by example so we decided we're going to change our existing policy no longer require our employees to take the time from their own time but we are allow employers with supervisors approval to take a class during the regular business hour from nine to five while they are already at work  the way we do it is we told a supervisor we actually offered a workshop training the supervisors to how to approve it and make sure they're at the services that individual department offer to students and staff on campus will not be compromised as a result so this actually had this sparked their collective support from employee to employee and everybody says ok you go this time you go  i'll cover for you and i'll do this i'll do this our dues and employee themselves are so grateful for this opportunity and they themselves create some kind of mechanism so i have an employee wrote me in a lovely note after we implemented the policy and she said dr i won't let you down you know today was my first day of class i went there and before i went i did and this is this i set up my e mail message and my phone message and when i came back i just you know walk through all of my messages and i will stay as long as i need to finish all the responses and i won't let you down and my class was a great and i said how cool is th and you know the reason i wanted to bring that up dr long because i think sometimes employers want to do it you are one of the syrian example this is how you can and you actually can do it move the road works the way that's really your employees who are looking that only helps your business if they if you can help them figure out the rules for you hard to do that they're going to bring those skills that it's not only that but also it's a moral boost absolutely it's a moral boost and more productivity then you're not doing it and so on the future of our labor market requires new skills whether you acknowledge it or not i here and you know you said this at the beginning of the show twenty five hundred people or so over the next five years but the other part of that initiative is once businesses do relocate to this area you want them to stay part of retaining their businesses retaining those employees yes that is hand in hand it's actually important for implore for employers to know then mercer is open for business because we invest in our workforce because a lot of times the business go to places where there is a tax incentive but tax incentive is not forever it's going to run out and when that run out what are you going to do if you don't have a viable and well educated workforce and the workforce is the key to your business success so those of you who are thinking where should i go i encourage you very very strongly to work at  mercer because we jus graphically we are perfectly located in between new york philadelphia washington d c it's just no better place however workforce wise new jersey is  number six in the country in terms of education attainment and we have the workforce but the education attainment from the past do not guarantee the educational workforce for the future we need to continue to invest to keep our workforce i think to educate here wanted to make sure that we highlighted that adhesive and that's an overarching umbrella for this initiative and that's why i think the county executive  really yeah he's a very visionary in our foreseeing the critical role workforce plays in business success you know as we start to talk about that why don't we bring people up to speed on kind of what's on the horizon yes for the industry so now we're looking at how to move from here to where we want to be so the next a step i met with the county executive or chief of staff not long ago when mapped out our next step the county executive has it embrace the recommendations of the commission report and it will be forming test forces and if you out listening and  interested please do let us now because we want you to be involved we want you to shape the future of our workforce and be part of this design how do we get there and so he is going to organize a special event where everybody will be invited and then we will get the task force established and we are partner up with a some higher education institutions and go for the grants and we will be partnering with the businesses to establish partnerships and we also will be our partner with media like you organization to really forward better and a smarter coordinated a network of resources because one thing this survey also shows we have a great resources in this region but they are not very well coordinated and they are very and not very well are utilized and publicized and therefore we're not being very smart and you know help raise their visibility into his business owners you don't have to fly solo this huge initiative is underway here opportunities to get involved and we can keep you abreast of what's going on as we move forward so in the mean time before we actually have a clearance house where people can register their best practices their success stories as well as their challengers before we get there please do get in touch with us so i will tell you how to do their it's very simple send us the e mail send me the e mail at this time until we set up at the clearance our website my email is very simple it's to kind of yeah right along with the journey and really so talk a little bit about that before we want to it is our it is our hope that as part of this commission's work we would be able to shown at the five institutions website at the county website at the two chambers website and hopefully connect with the state you know and a i talk to them as well their interest i talk to the governor's office  interested everybody is interested so i think we can do it we just need all of you to be part of this i'm so excited thank you for being here i'm glad that we could play a role in helping to raise the visibility this is an important opportunity not just for the education situations all the businesses absolutely right here already and those there are planning to come so if you for your time i thank you for having me it's a pleasure to be here my pleasure thank you everyone for tuning in you about the mercer county partners of educational attainment or anything you heard on this show please feel free to visit our website at states an exact start that staging it's x dot com thanks so much for tuning in and we look forward to seeing you again in the series we