and fifteen tony executive brian you are playing the commitment to increase the percentage of the county's workforce over the next five years with a college degree recent results from the initial mercer county telling alignment survey indicate a positive outlook for your company or organization to play it in temporal role in achieving th with dr wong president of mercer county community college who is leading the charge as chair of the new mercer county partnership for education attain focus on two related directives of the college expanding innovative partnerships and investing in organizational and professional effectiveness we are back here in the c suite with my first special guest doctors in paying one she's the president of mercer county community college but also the chair of the mercer county partnership for educational attainment so dr wong right before we went into the break  started to talk about some collaborative opportunities but i want to get into some more of the specific findings because you just recently completed a report that michiru maybe because it's a pretty comprehensive report i read it was well nominal  if you could talk about the three recommendations you included in that report i think they'll be really helpful for the viewer will be great and it is a lot of work but it's great work and i enjoyed working with so many wonderful wonderful committed the dedicated the people all across the county so the report that really incorporated the feedbacks that i received from across the sector all the businesses so the number one is to emphasize really meaningful substantive partnerships between government agencies businesses and educational entities the number two it really focus on in no of changes of business practices and procedures and policies that will facilitate educational attainment across the board and number three emphasize better and smarter collaboration you delays asians in published city of all resources we currently already have throughout the county so these are the the gist of the key recommendations but i have to say that there are many wonderful wonderful practices already in place but we have a lot of room for improvement so i give you one example for example about fifty six percent of the businesses who participated in the survey reported that they offer benefits to their employees for further education so it's like a tuition reimbursement or tuition assistance whatever they call it but it is a benefit to employees however only thirty six percent of the benefits offered were utilized you're not taking advantage of so much of our question in the survey is why didn't you why didn't your education is an investment in yourself and in the company and your own future and your family's future and the answer we got is i'm too busy i am otherwise committed and of course i look  at it at this report and i said that got to be better ways to do this so i looked at my own college first and i said what happened to my college i have educational benefits to issue reimbursement program and only less than fifty percent of the benefits were taken advantage of by employees so i immediately called the meeting and i ask why you know and so they said the same thing you know where too busy and then i realize that you know most of these people are starting their career so they're starting their family at the same time they have children or those who need a new skills have being employed for a while and now they have aging parents to take care of so they're working full time they have children or aging parents to take care of it we have time so our policy as of now as of last week was that you have to take classes besides your full time job outside nine to five schedules so we change that policy which changed their policy would give the power back to the local managers and say manage your shop without compromising the services to students to staff to the community find look at the challenges that people are facing people are facing challenges at every level that the young professional the ones who are working for many many years but then those or again who are called the susan professionals they're trying to figure out i'm not quite ready to retire right what do i do now what do i do next or the other skills that i have relevant enough and if not maybe are recognized i need new skills we want to turn in here is another category of people there was mentioned and discussed many times in our process of this study is that there are are long term unemployed people and that group of people because the jobs they held for many years were gone due to technology advancement so they needed to gain the new skills but because they have been long term unemployed or they couldn't feel they could go bad but the truth is they can they can come at least to our college because it's open to admissions and if you haven't been employed that means you are eligible for federal financial aid so important yet that again there yes it's called the  will pay you five thousand nine hundred dollars a year and our tuition is less than five thousand a year so we'll pay for tuition for you to come but also if you have been working for so many years that means you have experience thomas edison state university offer credits for life experience so you can go take an exam and get credits for your life experience if you're a veteran you're listening out there we have a wonderful service for veterans our college just was named in this past year in the fall number one in the country amount all community colleges eleven hundred plus of them as number one military friendly thomas edison the serving military for years they have a huge population of veterans so we have articulation agreements with thomas edison writer t c and j and we're about to enter into agreement with princeton very soon so you get all this thought you're sure it's right and it's an example of how to collaborate that's where i think people talk about it often we don't really know how do you take it off this piece of paper and actually put it into practice how do you get the right people at the table why don't you leave i will give them examples how to do that the idea of partnership really really came from the changing of the landscape of american higher education because higher education is no longer enough to just produce a diploma students need the job skills they needed to have both technical and soft skills and a higher education provides both so we for example in our college we have a computer science program but our computer science program graduates are not having current skills and the c science field requires the skills that we don't teach so a company called the domain computers and i we reached out to them and they open welcome us to say oh yes we want to work with you so now long story short they are not only offering paid internships to our students they help us modernize our curriculum so our students learn what they need to know when they leave us to look for a job so most recently we're engaged in a conversation to have the domain computers invest on our campus to develop a start up academy so our students who are not only learning just computer technology skills but also business communication customer service marketing accounting bookkeeping all of that so they will send us the state of the art equipment and bring their experts on to the campus and my faculty and our lab will be modernized and they were together students will have a real life experience and the company guarantee their job since you that's a win win across the board and again it's just showing by example couple of things as we're going to start to wind down the show that i want to make sure we touch on in terms of other opportunities don't  continuing education oh absolutely got nonprofit runs from programs that your universe the community college you also have small business programs so again everybody i want you to really take heed to the things that are available to  you without breaking the bent or that's important that important so let's talk about a couple of the things as we start to wind down the show if i am a business it's out there looking right now so for example let me use us as an example student that because when i was sitting in that room i said you know what we can help there's something that we can do so let's reach out to the partnership i want people to know take action if there's something that you can offer to the the workforce that we're talking about maybe there's a skill that you provide we offer media workshops for example bring those ideas as this table this is perfect opportunity for you to do that you know submit a proposal whatever it is that you can do we offer a lot of training in technology and media all the skills that this is needed right now if you're not leveraging media and video marketing right now in your competition you are totally loser but i also want people to know even if you don't have an idea but do you have a need to feel come feel very comfortable biz that's the whole point of what we needed to have a repository that where people can register their needs pick up people can register their best practices people can register their expertise so that we really be a best matchmaker and i also reached out to to you know governor's office the county exact of office and mayor's office  to say how can you be part of this because businesses are looking for real locations they go to the labor department first they go to governor's office first they go to the part of education first so we want the whole collaboration to come together i tell you the show is forming by we're doing we're coming down to the end of the show i want people to be able to reach out to you and when one thing before we wind down on this think about other partners of the other business is let them know about this so for example here in staging exactly as we talked to review studios here we're taping this is going to be a phenomenal opportunity down the road for students to come and do some learning get some hands on experience whether it's student learners or adult learners let  know let's talk about the contact information so if i'm just listening to this show what should i do next to our world out to you can reach out to me directly and my e mail address is a very simple it's w a n g j c as in charlie c as in charlie c as in charley dart you excellent thank you so much this was a phenomenal so i knew it was going to fly by everybody this is just the beginning of an ongoing series we look to this as a business outlook series i'm going to have you back again we're going to do this again we'll invite other partners and we'll keep the progress a go and that's what we can offer to this entire episode thank you for doing this and i so thrilled that we can partner together looking forward to it thank you again for your time q thank you to everyone for tuning in special things to riverview television studios thanks to all of our sponsors for helping to bring this show and we look forward to seeing you and the conversation is alive lee and very engaging the it's quite impressive we have a wonderful resource here that is not fully utilized for the cause the we just talked about for those of you who are interactive hands on media workshops created specifically to help you skyrocket exposure for your business show or next  it's a great opportunity to learn firsthand about the latest trends meet other local professionals and visit staging exacts dot com for a list of upcoming workshops and other special offers introducing simply supreme be sure to sign up for specials and great deal video marketing can skyrocket traffic to your website and your business from i catch ing promotional ads and client testimonial to web in our training series that showcase your expertise give your brand  community and so we're here for almost maybe something so i want everyone to introduce themselves and i want you to know about the level of expertise that we have right here in the region and some of the clients that they are looking to serve as a we going to start here with mr cancer please just introduce yourself talk a little bit about your business and we'll read your clients can ok thank you well if you're a leader or if you aspire to be a leader you know the challenges that you face every day with managing your time to develop yourself to develop the skills of the individuals on you team and the whole team to be as effective and successful as you possibly can well my name is ken sure i'm with sher coaching and i use my thirty years of experience focus on people developing and learning development as well so coaches are important broad scheme of things because we focus on individuals customizing and career development just for that i'm john griffiths good memory company a script of training so i work largely with major corporations not exclusively some somewhat smaller mid size typically and mostly with business leaders in those corporations the thing i love doing is helping people do what they want indeed to do better so that encompasses a lot i do so much through training leadership development training various kinds a lot of it around communication i also do a lot of communication consulting and executive coaching so with executive coaching an example might be there would be a behavior that is maybe used to serve you well or a mindset that used to serve you well that isn't serving you well so so well today and i can help you replace that behavior and do things that sort of remove the underbrush from what you do and by that i mean what are the things that steal the power from what you have to offer from your greatest gifts rescue accidental leaders and dysfunctional teams by helping them with three key challenges connecting communicating and collaborating and it's often those three things that prevent them from really reaching their full potential at work getting all that they can out of thirteen i mean really having success six success through looking for ways i do that is by really helping them understand what really is deep down what is really their passion what are they looking to achieve because i believe the it i'm not there to to give them my answers i'm there to pull their answers out of them by doing that allowing them to really reach the expression they want to get to the results they want in their business and in their life so there you have it everyone this was a cross section of just some of the professionals that are going to meet here today at the new jersey international coach federation i want you to go with them i want to find their reach out to the organization every single person that i m