It’s been said time and again: the demand for green building jobs is on the rise. But identifying a need turns out to be a lot less complicated than filling it. In the fall of 2009, discussions began at
Lansing Community College about what the school and their partners could do to make sure their students could be ready to fill those new green building jobs.
“Probably the single biggest, most overarching conversation,” says George H. Berghorn, Dean of LCC’s Technical Careers Division, “was the need to connect academic programs directly with real jobs that are available and in demand for program graduates.”
Those conversations led to the development of the Building Smart: New Career Pathways in Building Science program, which is now being supported with a National Science Foundation grant of $727,348. The development of the program begins this fall, and the Berghorn, who is the principal investigator of the project, hopes to have a pilot program of 30 students begin in 18 to 34 months.
New Career Pathways is a collaboration between LCC and a variety of schools, organizations and businesses. This reflects the program’s focus on teamwork.”
“We teach students that modern, high-performance buildings must be viewed as a system of systems,” says Berghorn, “meaning that the interactions among different building systems is important to understand, not just the individual systems themselves.”
The program will offer students hands-on experiences and seeks to better integrate the STEM subjects in to green building technical education.
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