How Continuing Education at Penn State Equips Todays’ Workers with the Skills They Need Now
When the first iteration of Penn State’s Continuing Education and Workforce Development department launched in 1967, the world — and Central Pennsylvania, specifically — was an entirely different place. And yet, so much has stayed the same.
In 1967, news headlines spoke of both global conflicts and civil unrest at home. Arts and culture were undergoing significant shifts as the hippie movement peaked. All the while, everyday Americans needed to work, and they needed to acquire the education necessary to remain relevant in an ever-evolving workplace.
Continuing Education (CE) at Penn State helped address that need in the 1960s, and it does the same today. The needs may be different, and the format may have shifted, but at its core, CE continues to do what it has always done: equip Pennsylvanians to work in the industries that are most in demand today.
A Legacy of Workforce
Penn State Senior Director of Statewide Continuing Education and Workforce Development Andrea Tessier has been at Penn State since 2014. She recalls her own mother taking advantage of clerical and stenography-related continuing education offerings in the 1960s.
“My mother took a correspondence course, and I remember her talking about how she would get the information in the mail,” Tessier says. “She would do the assignments, and then she would have an envelope and mail it back. [It was] a very long, slow process.”
Prior to Penn State’s adoption of a Continuing Education program in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Higher Education Act of 1965, increasing federal investment in continuing education, particularly targeting low-income, rural, and inner-city communities around the country. Both the need and the desire for such resources were apparent. Baby boomers were entering the workforce, as were women to a large degree.
“Penn State really jumped into that game,” Tessier says. It wasn’t long before Penn State boasted one of the largest correspondence course programs in the country.
Initially, the CE department operated entirely out of University Park. While there was some in-person programming, the correspondence courses were highly popular.
Over time, however, CE began looking at how it could more specifically serve the needs of the communities surrounding each Penn State campus. After all, the workforce and educational needs are much different in DuBois than in, say, Philadelphia. As a result, CE is now highly location-driven.
“Our Continuing Ed folks work with industries that are in their areas, and they learn the needs. It’s industry-fed,” Tessier says. “Our ideal is that we get content from the thousands of specialists at Penn State, and we develop material to meet the needs of our stakeholders … in their particular community.”
For example, Tessier says students at Penn State campuses in northeastern Pennsylvania may be more interested in the plastics industry. In DuBois, the focus is powdered metals. Near Philadelphia, students are looking at operational efficiency and project management as ways they can upskill.
With this campus-specific tailoring of programming, it’s fair to wonder: How will campus closures affect CE?
Last year, Penn State announced the impending closure of seven Commonwealth Campuses: DuBois, Fayette, Mont Alto, New Kensington, Shenango, Wilkes-Barre, and York.
“This threatened to really leave a gap in supporting the upskilling and reskilling needs of these communities,” Tessier says. “[In] some of these communities, their census data shows that [their] population is declining, but there still is a good portion of adults that need to be upskilled and reskilled. So, what we did is we restructured and looked at, ‘Okay, how do we continue to meet the workforce needs of these communities even if we’re not going to have a footprint there?’”
Now, in addition to regional programs, CE also offers a full portfolio of online programs available to anyone, anywhere. Offering programming virtually, Tessier explains, allows team members to more efficiently bring opportunities to the public without relying on resources such as in-person staffing.
Ultimately, with these closures, it’s crucial for Tessier and her team to show communities that they care. They want to remain embedded within the local ecosystem and provide the skills that local employers are seeking at any given moment.
“We’re not leaving,” Tessier affirms. “We’re still here. We’re just here in a different way, and we have the ability to fulfill a need, a true need that you have in your community.”
Meeting Today’s Needs and Looking Toward the Future
No matter the location, some industry trends have affected Pennsylvania’s workforce as a whole, and CE historically has, and continues to, address those trends as they arise.
“At one point in the 1960s, manufacturing was huge. The trades were huge. Manufacturing left the country, but it’s now starting to come back, and Pennsylvania is a growing hotspot for manufacturing — but it’s different. It’s not the same manufacturing. So, we offer a program in advanced manufacturing. There’s a lot of robotics used in manufacturing now, so … we’ve stepped up and changed with the times,” Tessier says.
Drone technology, she adds, is also being incorporated into CE offerings, as is AI. CE offers general AI courses, but there’s been a need for more specialized AI programming as well, such as courses revolving around AI in project management, health care, and education. CE is also beginning to develop AI courses targeted to particular companies, helping them form policies and educate employees on the ethical use of AI.
Virtual reality (VR) is likewise becoming a greater part of continuing education — though maybe not in the way that you might expect. Rather than teaching students how to use or work with VR, the VR is becoming a vital training tool on its own.
Tessier explains how, in leadership training, a student could interact with a VR employee. This “employee” might present a problem, the student then responds, prompting the VR employee to respond as well, and so on and so forth, creating an interaction that students can then watch back for critique.
“How did you sit? Were you welcoming? Were you defensive, and what was your response? What was your tone? It really helps [the student] dive into how [to] become a better leader,” Tessier says.
Meanwhile, one need that has remained the same over the decades? The need for professional soft skills.
“We do get requests from the industry, that they have a company with highly specialized, brilliant people, but they can’t write an email. Or, you have a group of people coming into the workplace, and they’re not really sure how to [manage] conflict resolution,” Tessier says. “That need [for] professionalism, proper writing skills — that’s still very strong, and I feel like it’s coming more into the limelight now.”
The department is also looking at creating pathways for those who want to start with a CE course and later work their way up to another higher education credential, such as a bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degree. In nursing or healthcare, for instance, students who may be deterred by the cost and time commitment required for a full degree may be more likely to pursue a higher education path wherein they can start out as a certified nurse, enter the field and then go on to become an LPN or RN, and achieving their BSN and master’s.
“How do we create these pathways so that people can see that it’s attainable?” Tessier asks.
This need for stackable credentials, Tessier says, is a huge opportunity for the future of CE and something that many universities around the country are exploring. How can a student approach their education in bite-sized pieces, such as by signing up for a six-month course, rather than making a four- or six-year commitment?
This, she continues, is particularly important for those who maybe started college at one point and stepped back, or who never explored college at all and are now a little later in life.
Tessier describes a potential scenario: “You’re now 48. You have a career [that’s] pretty mid-level. You want to advance. You know you need that degree, but you have kids … a full-time job. Life is crazy. What can we do to help you reach that goal? We can start with a short course in your field, upskilling you, giving you those skills that you can apply directly to your job, but also we can make that skill [apply] to [your] credit. It gets you in the door.”
“The interest is really exploding because people can see it as something attainable,” she adds, “and with technology changing so rapidly in every single industry, this helps you do better at your job, get that promotion, or find a different career path.”
At the end of the day, the CE department’s commitment to Pennsylvania’s workers shouldn’t come as a surprise. It ties in perfectly with the university’s land-grant mission.
“Fulfilling that land-grant mission is core to who we are at Penn State,” Tessier says. “We live and breathe that. Serving community needs is paramount for us.”
In a way, CE is also providing a connection between the community and the experts at Penn State that might not otherwise exist.
“We are the boots on the ground at the campuses,” Tessier says. “They have great expertise at the university. I would love to expand our] collaboration with all the colleges — you’re doing great research. You have a need in a community. We’ll get that research out for you.”
“Penn State is more than a four-year degree. We can serve so many other needs,” she concludes. Currently, CE offers approximately 150 courses across its ecosystem, with nearly 8,000 registrations. Tessier’s goal is to double that number.
Learn more about Penn State Continuing Education and Workforce Development at continuinged.psu.edu. T&G
Holly Riddle is a freelance writer for Town&Gown.
