The federal government believes the IT Workforce Accelerator Program deserves an additional two years' worth of funding to keep it going.
The U.S. Department of Commerce's Economic Development Administration Good Jobs Challenge is providing another $4.8 million towards the program, which is a unique partnership between Illinois Central College, Bradley University, Eureka College, and Peoria-area employers to address shortfalls in the region's skilled IT workforce.
The program was established in 2022 with nearly $15 million in funding. To date, it's churned out nearly 800 newly credentialed workers.
ICC president Dr. Sheila Quirk-Bailey said the program is making inroads.
"We are, from an outcome standpoint, ahead of schedule, so we are more than halfway there," she said. "We are exceeding the pay people are making once they receive these credentials."
ICC was the only institution that got funding from both rounds of the EDA Good Jobs Challenge, and the only community college in the cohort.
Quirk-Bailey said there are well-paying jobs open in the Peoria area, but not enough people with the right credentials to fill them. She said about 65% of jobs require some kind of post-high school credential, but only about 43% of people in the area have one.
There's several approaches to bridging that gap in IT Workforce Accelerator. For instance, a Peoria company might have a team trained in one programming language. But when they switch to a new system that uses a different programming language, they laid off the existing team and looked for new employees who were able to use the new system.
"And through this grant, we said, 'hold on, why don't we take these people and credential them so they can be those? They're long time employees. They like working for you. You guys have the relationship that all works. And it seems so simple, but that's not the way the system worked," Quirk-Bailey said.
For both educational institutions and employers, that required a shift in mindset. Quirk-Bailey said with IT, they're encouraging training existing employees to move them up into better-paying jobs, and filling those vacancies lower on the totem pole with newly trained employees.
"So now I filled two slots for you that you couldn't fill. You kept a long term desired employee. And people are now starting to think differently about how they staff and how they maneuver, which I think once they do that, it just makes the region stronger and makes them stronger as a company," she said.
Many of the credentials (or microcredentials) can be obtained after an eight or 16-week course. Quirk-Bailey said the new grant is going to focus on developing more apprenticeships, and ultimately, building a model that can sustain itself after the grant money runs out.
"We found is when we can sponsor somebody, whether they're already an employee and they're closest to sponsor them to move up or sponsor someone who is moving into it, we can sponsor them get that education through an apprenticeship, because an apprenticeship means they have to go into the company who sponsored them for a certain amount of time. So that way you take the federal government out of it," she said. "From a company standpoint, it's worth them to pay that money, as opposed to going months or years without people to fill those positions."
