News & Events
City Tech Center Profiled in New York Times Article
The City Tech Business & Industry Training Center (BITC) was among the workforce development programs offered by The City University of New York profiled in an October 2 New York Times feature, “At CUNY, Giving Workers a Leg Up,” by reporter Joseph Fried. The article explored the “universe of programs providing job training and work skills improvement” currently available on CUNY campuses citywide.
These programs, Fried notes, are financed by more than $100 million per year in grants and contracts from government agencies, private businesses, labor unions and foundations and “make CUNY a major player in work force development in the city.” Students include employees from virtually every area of the public and private sectors, union members, and “welfare recipients interested in moving into the ranks of the employed.”
Fried goes on to report that while other CUNY colleges offer such programs, City Tech has operated its Business & Industry Training Center for more than 20 years. Last year alone, BITC trained and tested 2,975 students and its 211 courses and workshops, funded by 11 grants and contracts, enjoyed an 89 percent retention rate.
“Work force training programs have expanded on campuses across the country in recent years,” he adds, “as more colleges and universities have found them to be revenue producers and a way of contributing to their communities. But the increase at CUNY has been especially sharp, according to a report last year by the Center for an Urban Future, a Manhattan-based nonprofit group that examines economic development issues in the city.” An earlier Urban Future report called BITC "one of CUNY's leading job training and business assistance centers with a strong set of programs that many employers have come to rely on." BITC is an operation of City Tech’s Division of Continuing Education.
The Fried article spotlights BITC’s training program for New York City Transit employees. The center’s courses for these employees, which take place twice a week and students take on their own time, are paid from a fund established by New York City Transit and Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, according to BITC Director Yelena Melikian. The program is designed to enable participants to learn about intricate computer systems and to meet the changing demands of their jobs as the transit system become increasingly computerized. City Tech's electrical engineering/telecommunications technology and electromechanical engineering technology programs are partners in the project.
The growth in work force development programs has been spurred by rapid advances in technological development and the need for organizations and their employees to keep abreast of these changes in increasingly competitive local, national and global markets. Across the years, BITC’s customer-tailored programs for businesses and other concerns as diverse as AT&T, Depository Trust, Domino Sugar, Independence Community Bank, Mount Sinai Medical Center, Verizon and Webb & Brooker Real Estate Management have been successfully meeting the specific training and retraining needs of these and other clients. As the pace of technological change increases, the training and retraining programs that BITC offers and the clients who need them are likely to increase as well.
Adapted from “At CUNY, Giving Workers a Leg Up,” by Joseph Fried, The New York Times, October 2, 2005.10/21/05
