Jennifer Thornton
Senior Vice President and Chief Program Officer at Business-Higher Education Forum
Thoughtful and passionate workforce development leader with an extensive track-record of leading successful initiatives and delivering results for learners, business, educational institutions...
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- Workforce Development Strategies: Building skills for future jobs
- Education-Industry Partnerships: Aligning education with workforce needs
- Labor Market Analysis Techniques: Understanding workforce trends and demands
- Policy Development in Education: Crafting effective educational policies
- Grant Management in Workforce Programs: Navigating funding for workforce initiatives
Meet the mentor
blog articles
Tricky Workplace Situation Handled
- staff celebrations verbal acknowledgements providing new opportunities for growth or projects public recognition
- We provide businesses with new higher education programs We should interview our business customers to identify their most pressing needs and better understand the challenges they are facing We should ensure we are addressing the right problem and the full problem Ideate on different ways to address the problem Prototype multiple solutions Share several solutions with our customers Deploy the new product
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- I would put together a session with a real problem my organization is facing and have my mentee participate. There are several problems we could work on and I'd find out which one the mentee was most interested in.
- Understanding the customer's needs; Fosters input from many people; Coming up with a meaningful solution; Low-cost/low-risk way to identify flaws with the solution.
- Gather additional information on people who had related complaints. Identify the problem. Ideate on a solutions. Prototype the solution. Get feedback. Implement.
- Recently, I wanted to design a better way to align skill needs that businesses had with courses taught at universities. Businesses and universities both said this was important to them. However, as I interviewed businesses, they felt that universities weren't flexible enough and expressed preferences for working with online providers and bootcamps. Based on this input, we shifted the focus to increasing universities' understanding of business needs, getting businesses to more clearly articulate needs, and giving universities the opportunity to respond to these needs. I am working with colleagues to begin testing a prototype now of the solution now.
- Sandy
- Take on too many things and don't get time to breathe and think. I can address that by saying no. Getting distracted by emails and "work emergenices" when trying to be thoughtful. I can turn my email off for blocks of time.
- I'd have my mentee go through two scenarios - the first where I throw a ton of work their way, and the second where they tell me no to some of the items. We'd then review the process and work product.
