Onward OKC compact leveraging combined resources of five OKC-area tech centers

Imagine you are an Oklahoma City business owner or executive looking for training classes for your employees through your local career technology center. You contact them only to find out they cannot help you simply because they do not offer that training, or they can’t help you because your business is not located within their specific district boundary. A business’s request to use services at a tech center outside of their designated district could then take up to a month to be resolved.

For years, scenarios like what was described above were not that uncommon between OKC’s career technology centers and business and industry. It was frustrating for the companies but also frustrating to the tech centers who did not want to appear rigid or difficult to work with as perceived by some in the business community. That reputation has sometimes even affected Oklahoma City’s ability to effectively recruit companies to the metro.

Officials with the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber shared with superintendents from all the local technology centers that some of the businesses they were trying to lure to OKC said they were having a hard time working with the tech centers and were frustrated with the whole process. That initial conversation with the Chamber was an eye-opener for the superintendents who then decided to do something about it.

Canadian Valley, Francis Tuttle, Metro Tech, Mid-Del and Moore Norman technology centers began working with the Chamber and each other to get to the root of the problem of why businesses were finding it difficult to access training and services. Most importantly, the schools wanted to find a way to better serve their customers.

“What we figured out is that we had some measures in place that were put there so that each of CareerTechs could celebrate success,” said Canadian Valley Technology Center Superintendent Gayla Lutts. “We would collect data for each respective tech center and celebrate how many classes we had done, for example. But what happened was that that created competition among all of the tech centers, which was not healthy and was not benefiting us and especially business and industry.”

The many meetings and discussions that ensued with superintendents and their business directors led to a culture-changing compact among the five CareerTechs called Onward OKC. Now, instead of competing against each other, the tech centers actually collaborate with one another without any regard to district boundaries, leveraging the combined resources of each tech center to directly deliver the type of workforce training businesses want, regardless of their location in the metro.

Mid-Del Technology Center Superintendent Rick Mendenhall noted how Onward OKC will impact the number of short-term classes the tech centers will now be able to offer adult learners.
“At Mid-Del, as an example, we offered about 110 fast-track classes last year, but through the Onward OKC compact, we are now able to offer about 1,900 collectively in those short-term type courses to put people to work immediately,” Mendenhall said.

With the new compact now in place, the Chamber can explain to potential clients that the Chamber has a real relationship with the technology centers and, with confidence, be able to tell them that they will be able to provide their company with the training they need.

Businesses interested in more information about CareerTech business services in the Oklahoma City metro area can visit the compact website at
onwardokc.com.

This story originally appeared in the May 2022 edition of the VeloCity newsletter.