Educators often talk about industry engagement in ways that are flawed because they center on the educator as the primary actor in creating economic mobility and wage growth rather than on employers and industry.
Date: Tuesday, Nov 10, 2026
Time: 12–12:30 p.m. PT
This 30-minute webinar will focus on foundational concepts and strategies for creating high-value, high-leverage industry partnerships at scale. It will include specific recommendations to help practitioners understand the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of their regional industry and economic landscape; determine the foundational concepts relevant for segmenting their regional employer marketplace; identify prospective industry champions; build allies through the regional workforce, economic development, and industry actors and intermediaries; and generate industry-led and -organized conversations that center their needs, pain points, and agency in ways that can increase regional economic mobility and wage growth.
Who Should Attend?
- Community college or postsecondary educational leaders, including vice presidents of instruction, workforce development deans and leadership, and faculty
- Workforce and economic development practitioners, including workforce board executives and economic and community development leadership and staff
- Leadership of regional industry or business intermediaries, including industry associations, chambers, and nonprofit intermediaries
Session Discussion Topics
- How fragmented or coherent are regional efforts to partner with and engage industry within your institution? What about beyond your institution in the broader region?
- What would it take to make industry partnership development an institutional-level priority for your organization? How would you change your staffing structure, organization, or resource allocation to make this happen?
- If you were starting from scratch to do this work today, who would be the allies outside of your organization that you could leverage to build a broader industry-centered collaborative or strategy in your region?
Featured Speakers
Randy Tillery is a Senior Director of Workforce and Postsecondary Initiatives at WestEd and has 29 years of experience building and implementing workforce development, community development, and educational strategies to increase economic mobility for vulnerable, low-income communities and individuals. Across his involvement at WestEd, as a community practitioner, and as a community college Workforce Dean, he has led numerous regional industry sector strategies, regional workforce intermediary collaboratives, and new apprenticeship programs that included hundreds of employers.
John Brauer is Director of Workforce Development in the Center for Economic Mobility at WestEd. Brauer’s experience includes implementation of high-road training partnerships, WIOA Title I and III, layoff aversion and rapid response efforts, registered pre-apprenticeship/apprenticeship, Green Jobs, sector partnerships, industry engagement (employers and labor), job-quality design, industry needs assessments, and career pathway creation. Brauer served for 11 years as the Workforce and Economic Development Director of the California Labor Federation and as a labor representative on the California Workforce Development Board.