Our Mission
The MTWC will increase awareness of career opportunities in the transportation industry and promote development of high-skilled, high-demand transportation workers by facilitating partnerships and improving communication and sharing across workforce development organizations.

 

Strategies, Goals, and Actions

Strategy 1: Build and Sustain a Network of Transportation Organizations and People

  • Connect the Midwest transportation community by:
    • Maintaining a database of stakeholders.
    • Creating email and social media campaigns.
    • Offering webinars.
    • Fostering Midwest communities of practice.
    • Facilitating working groups.
  • Collaborate with other regional centers to build the National Network for the Transportation Workforce (NNTW) by:
    • Developing content consistent with other centers to build a national database of resources.
    • Promoting all regional centers activities on the MTWC website.
  • Work closely with the MTWC Advisory Board to identify new trends, challenges, and initiatives across the region by:
    • Ensuring new development and practices are promoted and shared.

Strategy 2: Facilitate Partnerships

  • Provide opportunities for partnership development between workforce stakeholders: public and private industry, educational institutions, K-12 to post-secondary, unions, and professional and student organizations by:
    • Convening meetings with a cross-section of workforce development stakeholders.
  • Facilitate twenty partnerships by December 2016 by:
    • Meeting with individual organizations to understand common interests and goals.
    • Tracking partnership development and outcomes.

Strategy 3: Utilize a Data-Driven Approach

  • Understand transportation workforce issues and gaps in the Midwest by:
    • Utilizing MTWC compiled educational resources to develop career pathways analysis.
    • Utilizing new sources of data to develop pipeline statistics.
    • Producing demographic projections for the Midwest.
    • Producing visualizations of data.
  • Understand transportation workforce development stakeholder behavior by:
    • Producing analytics on Social Media Channels.
    • Refining outreach strategies on Social Media Channels.

Strategy 4: Promote and Create Workforce Development Initiatives

  • Promote initiatives that address gaps in information, demographic representation, and underserved populations.
  • Advance workforce development movement on MTWC focus areas of career awareness, career pathways, stackable credentials, and promoting and sharing best workforce development practices by:
    • Implementing a “Success Stories” Campaign.
    • Pursuing funding to carry out initiatives.

Strategy 5: Maintain the MTWC Clearinghouse of Transportation Resources

  • MTWC website will be a first-stop for transportation workforce resources: programs, activities, and best practices in the Midwest by:
    • Developing processes to collect and update resources.
    • Engaging stakeholders to provide resources that may not be on the internet.
    • Promoting successful practices as featured content.
    • Initiating a Clearinghouse Campaign to review and add more resources to the clearinghouse.

Strategy 6: Serve as a Backbone Organization in the Region

  • Implement a Collective Impact strategy to transportation workforce network building in the Midwest by:
    • Providing continuous communication to transportation stakeholders.
    • Leveraging partnerships for new initiatives.
    • Convening meetings.
    • Meeting with stakeholders to find common ground.
  • Establish a sustainable center that serves all transportation stakeholders by:
    • Pursuing funding to meet cost-share and post-FHWA grant funding.
    • Working with MTWC Advisory Board to develop a plan for funding.

Strategy 7: Champion Transportation Workforce Research

  • Build the literature of transportation workforce research by:
    • Collaborating with the NNTW partners on proposals.
    • Collaborating with TRB, AASHTO, industry and other stakeholders to identify, develop, and draft research needs statements.
    • Undertaking research projects.