Published February 2005

University Center makes
finding training easy

By Kimberly Hilden
SCBJ Assistant Editor

Since opening in February 2002, the University Center at Everett Station has become an education hub for Snohomish County, offering degree and certificate programs from universities and community colleges throughout the region.

Now, the center has a tool to help residents and businesses link up to those educational opportunities with the unveiling of its Resource Utilization System. The system, which can be found online at www.universitycenters.info, enables prospective students to connect to educational opportunities in two ways:

• By connecting to a database of available educational programs and learning institutions.
• By electronically submitting an inquiry for a customized educational/training program search, which is sent to a student services representative at the University Center.

For companies seeking customized training or consulting for their employees or enterprise, the Resource Utilization System, or RUS, allows them to electronically submit an inquiry to a corporate training representative.

Costing more than $40,000 to implement, the RUS is a collaborative effort between the North Snohomish-Island-Skagit Counties (NSIS) Higher Education Consortium, which operates the University Center, and the Snohomish County Workforce Development Council.

“At the University Center, we were looking for a way to take a more direct role in helping residents access the different kinds of educational and training programs available,” said Larry Marrs, executive director of the NSIS Higher Education Consortium. “We approached the Workforce Development Council to develop a system that would include all post-secondary resources in Snohomish County.”

The WDC was enthused by the prospect, Marrs said, funding about $20,000 to help develop the RUS.

The system fits in with the WDC’s mission of work-force training, said Linda Waring, the council’s director of business services for sectoral initiatives.

“We found that there was a need within our business community to develop customized training, and we don’t always have customized-training dollars, but the community colleges (often) have training dollars that we don’t always know about,” Waring said. “We needed a way to cover a lot of territory ... and we talked with Larry and came up with this terrific idea to maximize resources.”

With the contract from the WDC and between $20,000 and $25,000 of its own funds, the University Center put a team to work developing the RUS, with staff members scouring reference materials — telephone directories, the WDC’s listings of training programs and other source materials — to create a post-secondary education database.

The result includes a store of educational institutions that range from Western Pacific Truck School, which offers training in forklift operation and truck driving, to the University of Washington, which offers a number of undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Community colleges, technical schools and private institutions, such as City University and Henry Cogswell College, also are represented.

“We’ve had quite a few hits with people interested in exploring different programs and who have contacted us on the customized component,” Marrs said.

The RUS rollout has, thus far, been a quiet one — but that’s about to change, Marrs said, noting that a marketing campaign is in the works.

“We’re developing a contract with (the WDC) right now to get the word out about it,” he said.

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