Customer Appreciation Night at MCC-BTC

The MCC Institute for Workforce Innovation and Business & Learning Solutions is hosting its annual Customer Appreciation Night at the Business & Technology Campus. MCC is proud to honor its long-standing business associates from the Kansas City community, such as Ford, GM, Honeywell, Harley-Davidson, Cerner, and many others. Meet the people who make MCC and MCC students a success.

Institute for Workforce Innovation – new hires

Margaret Boyd, executive director of the Institute for Workforce Innovation (IWI), is pleased to announce that IWI now has filled three key positions. These positions will facilitate increased resource generation, provide more services to students and clients, improve communications, and measure and evaluate outcomes from IWI’s divisional initiatives. Each of the people assuming these new roles are current MCC employees working within IWI so they are ready to jump in and provide leadership to their respective areas.

Carolyn Brown will serve the district as performance director for resource development, responsible for identifying federal, state and local grants. She will also identify viable funding opportunities, facilitate development of proposals, and support implementation for any funds awarded.

Kevin Kelley will serve as performance director for community development, responsible for identifying and developing new opportunities for training with area employers. His team will process all new ideas for IWI, conduct preliminary research, and design curriculum that meets employer requirements. He will also participate in identifying partnerships and grant opportunities to support new ideas.

Elaine Mondschein will serve as performance director for workforce development. Her team is responsible for expanding and continuously improving non-credit workforce development programming and associated support services, building and enhancing partnerships with funders and community agencies engaged in workforce development, and extending linkages with K-12 educational and workforce entities.

A major function of these new roles will be to collaborate within MCC to maximize the use of available resources to better meet the needs of IWI clients. Each of these positions is accountable for the revenue generated by their respective teams.

A final position, the performance director for business development, is being advertised. This position will lead the Business & Learning Solutions unit and be responsible for generating contract training opportunities with area employers. The hiring committee will be reviewing candidates in the coming weeks with hopes of filling the position by mid-November.

3-D design and prototyping seminar at MCC-BTC

About 40 people attended the seminar “3-D Design- Bring Your Ideas to Life” at MCC-Business & Technology on June 10. The half-day seminar was cosponsored by Computer Aided Technology Inc. (CATI). Hassan Zarabi, BTC engineering technology instructor, and John Nichols of CATI demonstrated SolidWorks software capabilities and 3-D prototyping equipment. Rapid prototyping allows companies to create models from 3-D drawings in a matter of minutes on prototype printers. "Concept to product" is the buzzword. BTC has developed a new lab to teach this technology (pictured above).

Debbie Goodall, BTC president, and Steve Dowell, MCC-Business & Learning Solutions performance consultant, introduced the concept of developing a manufacturing consortium with area companies interested in working with MCC in the manufacturing technology and engineering technology labs. Children’s Mercy Hospital was among the organizations that responded. Representatives said their biotechnology researchers would like to use BTC’s prototyping capabilities in cardiac research.