In February 2020, we reported KRA/EPG/MedCerts Collaboration Celebrates CMAA Graduation, an event made possible when representatives from KRA, MedCerts, and Employ Prince George’s (EPG) discovered a shared objective: providing sustainable, industry-driven occupational-skills training (OST) for Prince George’s County TANF and SNAP jobseekers.
The chance meeting, at the 2019 Annual NAWDP Conference, evolved into an innovative, successful collaborative pilot program that was to be featured through Blended Learning for Jobseekers with Barriers to Employment at the 2020 Annual NAWDP Conference in Orlando, which was cancelled due to COVID-19.
On May 19, 10:00am (PDT), Melody Daniel, KRA/PGWorks Program Manager, and Sandy Mead, MedCerts National Director of Workforce Development, will get another chance to co-present—at the 2021 Annual NAWDP Conference. Highly relevant to the “Educating and Training Our Future Workforce” track, they will focus on The Power of Pandemic Partnerships for Blended Learning, maximizing lessons learned from continuing to operate an effective OST in a virtual environment.
Daniel commented, “The workshop will present the unique collaboration between KRA, MedCerts, and EPG, which has had an extremely positive impact on the lives of many individuals in the PG County, Maryland area. We were able to adapt and adjust our program, and continue to offer full wrap-around services under extreme pandemic-restricted conditions.
Ms. Mead and I will discuss how we were able to pivot from an intensive in-person service-delivery model to a fully virtual-service system, and provide strategies to engage and support participants, whose barriers to education, training, and employment were exacerbated by the pandemic. We will also share program results to date, and offer best practices that can be replicated in other programs serving similar populations.”
Please join us for this informative and insightful presentation!