Industry-Aligned Learning: How Colleges Can Respond to Workforce Needs - Dr. Lori Suddick, President of the College of Lake County

I am your host , Matt Kirchner . Can you believe it is the last week of the year ? I hope everybody had a wonderful Christmas . Merry Christmas to the audience of the TechEd Podcast .

You know , if I would have gotten one thing for Christmas over anything else , it would have been that we would have finally secured the American dream for the next generation of STEM and workforce talent . We are making huge , huge progress , but we're not quite there yet .

You can rest assured that we will be back again in 2024 , doing all the great work , telling all the great stories of Fortune 500 CEOs , of government officials , of public policy makers and of people leading in the world of technical education .

This is one such episode , an individual who is doing great things in TechEd , in this case at the technical college , the community college level . It's my pleasure to welcome to the TechEd podcast Dr Laurie Suddick , president of the College of Lake County . Dr Suddick , thank you so much for being with us .

When I graduated high school I really didn't know what I wanted to do and knew that I wanted to pursue a helping profession . I wanted to serve and be in service to others . My freshman year of college I took a course that did an overview of various careers and professions in what you'd call helping professions . One of those was speech language pathology .

That is what caught my attention . I pursued my master's degree in speech language pathology and practiced in a hospital medical setting for a number of years , then moved from Michigan to Wisconsin and ended up seeing a job ad for a faculty member at a technical college in the area , started an associate degree program for speech language pathology assistance .

That established my trajectory in higher education . I came by it in an indirect path , but I had a chance to be a grad assistant in college . I liked teaching the undergrads . My minor was elementary ed . It's not that I was always far away from it . I saw the opportunity to reconnect in education . It was just a great opportunity .

From there I became associate dean and then a vice president . Before you know it , you're sitting in this chair and you wonder how you got here .

Just a little bit of a meandering journey , if I might , but one that led you to leading a great institution . I like your focus on helping people . It sounds like a little bit in speech path , maybe a little bit in the healthcare space , Really trying to improve the lives of people .

When we think about doing that , I don't know that anybody does that better than our nation's technical and community colleges , our two-year colleges , creating so many opportunities , affordable opportunities for people of all ages to make career changes , to seek out new careers and new opportunities and really set their lives on the right path .

So you spent your career and education leading to your technical colleges and related institutions . What are some of the best practices of two-year colleges that you can share with our audience ?

People think we grant degrees and that's what we do , but the reality is we're here to create economic and social mobility for people to be in family , sustaining living , wages and oh , by the way , we have the great opportunity to have economic and community impact , and that really is the value proposition of community and technical colleges .

I mean we are local or responsive , we're nimble to the issues at hand and that is really what drives my work every day . I think in my experience there's a few things that I've gathered along the way in this 24 year journey . One is context matters . You have to understand the community .

You're in the demographics , the industry sectors , so knowing what's around you , both through feet on the ground , action and making the connections in the community , is really important . The second thing is building those external partnerships .

So you can't assume people know that what this great resource and asset is that is right in their neighborhoods , and it never ceases to amaze me how many companies or organizations really don't understand the wealth of resource and asset that they can leverage through their community and technical colleges .

So you've got to be out there and build those relationships and partnerships . And third , it's really about building your internal capacity and infrastructure of your college to match that external context and the demand that's out there .

So making sure you've done the right bridge building but that your internal team really understands they're here to serve the community and the workforce and that's what we do and that's why they invest in us and that's how we return their investment to them .

So finally , I would just add for me I'm always thinking about designing for local , regional , state , national . So , especially as we're building out this manufacturing work we do , we have elements at every level of that and to me that is a full holistic ecosystem .

I'm on the board of the American Technical Education Association , which is primarily technical and community colleges , and it's just amazing to see the lives that are changed , and not just the lives of the students but I think that's the most important but the lives of members of the community and so on , by doing those things that you just really focused on and

you talked about building incredible partnerships , building infrastructure and making sure that you have a team and that you've got physical space and you have curriculum and you have learning systems that can support the learning that's so important and the learning that's going on in our technical and community colleges .

And then that other part , which is context , matters , and one of the things I love about the way so many of our community colleges are set up is they really are set to respond to the individual needs of a specific state or even of a specific community employers , types of industry , in needs , economic situations .

All of those differ across different communities , across different regions , and I like the fact that you recognize how important that context is To that point

. I know you spent a lot of time in my home state of Wisconsin . I'm a lifelong Packer fan . I'm not going to give your allegiances away . I'll let you do that if you want to . But now you're there across the border in Northern Illinois . That's a different community in some ways , I'm sure , than Wisconsin , than would be in other states .

So talk to us a bit about what is unique from a workforce standpoint there in Northern Illinois where you're spending your time now .

I had family members who worked in it . And then up in Northeast Wisconsin heavy manufacturing industry and I would say the same exists here in Northeast Illinois .

So one thing I loved is it was very familiar to me but having worked very closely with it in Northeast Wisconsin , coming to Northeast Illinois I was immediately looking for certain things and I saw the external community around us with heavy manufacturing opportunity . It's a very strong , stable economy here in Northeast Illinois . But , as you said , context matters .

It's a different kind of manufacturing . In Northeast Wisconsin it's paper , it's foods and here in Northeast Illinois I'll say the unique aspect of Lake County manufacturing is we are this epicenter of really large , globally integrated companies .

So we have Granger , abbey , abbott , baxter , cdw , uline , these very large industries that support transportation , logistics , supply chain , but then also the pharma industry and high tech . So that's a really unique opportunity to tap into things .

And what I love about Lake County is because we're right at the border of Wisconsin , which is a heavy manufacturing state , and we're a thoroughfare . This is a super highway , the corridor we sit in .

You have to go through Lake County to be a part of Midwestern supply chain , and so that just really puts College of Lake County in a great spot of opportunity to be at the center of helping build the demand for all of the various manufacturing related industries , as well as manufacturing itself .

So I feel like that positioning of us at this border with companies who have a footprint in both states and globally is just really exciting part of the work .

So you think about even 20 , 30 years ago you'd be in Chicago and then you would kind of drive through or seen a Kenosha up to Milwaukee and there wasn't necessarily a lot going on in between those two areas , and now it is just packed with distribution centers , manufacturing centers .

I had lunch in Chicago actually a couple of weeks ago with the executive vice president , a horrible that's built a huge plant in Southern Wisconsin , actually spent time this spring with the CEO of Abbott and obviously that huge presence that they have . Our guest earlier this month was Alyssa Sanders from Baxter runs .

R&D is associate director of R&D from Baxter . So so many of these different aspects that are overlapping and creating just a great region of the country and you're in a perfect spot . I love your background in manufacturing . I've got lots of connections to automotive . I was in manufacturing for years .

I was a tier one and tier two supplier to the big three and others . My wife's father , my father-in-law , worked for GM for 30 years . They lived in Jamesville and it wasn't a question of whether your career was kind of funded by the auto industry .

It was just a question of do you work at GM and what do you do there , or do you work at a tier one or two tier supplier ? But that really creates the heart of an entire economy and it sounds like that's what you had in Detroit and in so many different ways you have that now going on in Northern Illinois and you're right .

The needs of a paper converter , the needs of a metal fabricator . There's similarities , of course , to what you would need in pharma , what you would need in distribution , but there's a lot of differences as well and I'd like to just explore that a little bit . As you look at your region's economy .

What are some of the workforce trends , dr Sadek , and what are some of your industrial employers asking for in terms of skills training ? How's that evolving in this day and age ?

The challenges that exist within that are the same that I hear in other places Not enough skilled talent supply to meet the demand .

So that means companies are literally turning away from opportunity and business because they can't run all of the lines they need to or they can't take all of the jobs that are coming to their door because they simply don't have the people to do that . So I think it's an exciting time .

This greatest workforce scarcity challenge that we're all facing in every industry sector , we saw it coming . The continued low unemployment we saw that . I mean that's great , but we knew that we were gonna have this baby boomer retirement .

There are less Gen Xers coming up behind them and we're gonna hit that high school cliff where we're gonna see declining graduation populations for many years to come , through 2034 . So those are all coming to a head now .

So it is challenging us all to really think differently about what we do and even the strategies that worked 10 years ago in recruitment , retention of your employees , building your talent pipeline .

Those strategies aren't working in the same way , so it's exciting to be engaged in conversation with various workforce partners to talk about what are the new ways that we can tackle that issue . The trends in terms of what people are looking for . Industrial maintenance was the highest demand in our recent conversations .

Welding fabrication is a pretty standard norm precision manufacturing but project management is a skill set that's currently risen consistently as one of the top skills being requested by employers as well . So those are some of the trends that we're reacting to and partnering around right now .

To your earlier point , I remember sitting in groups of CEOs kind of pre-great recession , so like the first 10 years of the current century , I guess and we would have speakers that would come in and talk to us about they call it the football through the garden holes this huge group of people that , in the form of baby boomers , that we're gonna be aging out of

the workforce 10 , 15 years from then , which , of course , now is what we're living through right now .

At the time , we didn't recognize that we would have a pretty significant decrease in the birth rate , right About that same kind of 2009 , 2010 , 2011 time , creating the enrollment cliff that you referenced earlier , and so it's really kind of a double whammy where we have more people leaving the workforce and fewer people coming into it .

So you kind of get hit on both ends , driving all kinds of interesting AI backed solutions , automation backed solutions and workforce training certainly as well . I also credit you for this huge investment in the Advanced Technology Center , and this is something that you recently opened there in Northern Illinois and would be interesting .

It's centered around manufacturing programs , of course , and it's designed to meet some of the workforce needs that you just referenced . But tell us about this impressive facility . How can you describe that for our audience ?

It was evident to me we had a very heavy manufacturing base and as I evaluated the programs that we have and the facilities that we had and the number of graduates we were producing , we were woefully underproducing , under structured in order to do what our local community workforce needed us to do .

As an example , I came from a college that we probably had close to 15 welding faculty and welding facilities throughout Northeast Wisconsin that were run by the college . I came to CLC and we didn't even have our own welding lab . We did not employ a single welding faculty .

So we were renting space from a local high school tech campus which had some welding lab space which meant we would deliver welding only in the evenings after the high school was done delivering , and that was all the capacity we had . So that had to change .

And so when you go big or go home , I think , and so I established a speed to launch strategy in Illinois it's not easy to get capital construction done in a fast way . So I passed a vacant Lowe's property every day on my way to work and I just kind of had this little dream that that would make a great advanced technology center .

So I had a great dean of engineering at the time who was also aligned to that dream , and so we engaged the National Coalition for Advanced Technology Centers to support us in working with workforce to figure out what the real needs were .

Meanwhile I worked with my board of trustees to make the investment in purchasing that building from a developer , and so if you've been in a Lowe's , you know the size of that . So it's 142,000 square feet , which we expanded to 180,000 square feet by putting a second level mezzanine in the space we did . It's a multi-phase project . We've completed phase one .

Phase one is 70,000 square feet , so I could still put three roller rinks on the other side of the unfinished space right now . But based on employer input and demand of skills needed , we launched two specific spaces .

One is the Industrial Maintenance Technology Program , which is a beautiful body of space that has amatrial equipment all the way throughout and it's a space that we've integrated apprenticeships , dual credit delivery , our traditional programming in a very flexible way and we've become in the process and am a trial regional training center of excellence .

The other space that we launched was welding and fabrication , and that's another beautiful space that I now have 42 self-contained welding booths . So we went from zero to 42 .

I could host SkillsUSA , I think , and that would be a great dream and it has all of the equipment needed for the various fabrication aspects of work , so lades , press breaks , robotic welders , all of the grinding room and all of the features that we need .

Additionally , there's about 10,000 square feet of an atrium space that we're using to engage employers , community leaders , legislators . We just hosted a manufacturing breakfast a couple weeks ago .

We just hosted Metallica Scholars Initiative and the American Association of Community Colleges , so it's a space we can now convene others in , and so that phase one project was about $34 million of investment . Some of it was the college's seed money . We had a bond for about $20 million and then about $5 million was fundraised .

So it's been exciting , and I think there were a lot of people who doubted we could get it up and running as quickly as we did , but within a year and a half we had it operational .

NCHTC and , of course , jay Craig McAtee has been a former guest he joined us at Automate , I think last year and my dear friend , paul Perkins I was just with Paul last week in Phoenix but Paul , the president of Amatrol , and certainly people like Kent Powell and Jason Everett I mean just great , great organizations that we've got tremendous respect for .

There's a lot of good people doing a lot of good things in technical education and we're certainly not just focusing on those as saying they're the only ones , but there's some great shining examples and you've certainly found some great partners and also responded really well to those trends that that survey outlined Things like industrial maintenance , things like welding

and fabrication and so on and really being responsive to the community . That's so important to listen to employers and get their feedback and understand what their needs are and then build our programs around those needs . That's how we do market analysis . That's how we build great programs in technical education .

I know an organization that shares that philosophy is the Smart Automation Certification Alliance . So they spend a lot of time talking to employers , talking to manufacturers and others saying , when you're hiring industry 4.0 talent , when you're promoting talent within your organization , what is it you're looking for ?

And then promulgating standards around what those employers are telling them . I know you're a big advocate for SACA . I'm on the national board for full disclosure , so I am a big advocate as well . Again , lots of great people doing things in the certification space , saca among them and , I think , leading in many ways .

So tell us about your approach and your philosophy around third-party credentialing , around , specifically , the Smart Automation Certification Alliance . Why are those credentials so important to your programs ?

that matters to the employers hiring our graduates . And so the SACA credential is a great example of where industry has said these are the standards that we're aiming for . Honestly , that makes an educator's work easy because now we have a metric and a standard and performance skills that we can integrate into the curriculum and training Bye .

Importantly , integrating those credentials into what a graduate from the college will leave with tells an employer that , beyond the classroom learning , beyond the theory , these are individuals who have the hands-on skills to a standard that you have defined as high quality and excellence . And so for our graduate , it's a win-win for all .

For the employer , they know what they're getting . For us , we know what we need to deliver . But for the graduate , it sets them ahead of others in the field of competitive hiring and puts them on a great career path to engage in the field that they have .

And I like personally . What I like about the SACA credential is , I mean , as we have these new emerging technologies , this industry 4.0 , which is really exciting to think about , because I feel like the pace of what we're even talking about in industry 4.0 is advancing at a faster pace than historically as we went through other phases of the manufacturing world .

So I think the credential just really demonstrates the expertise and the high quality that these graduates are going to come from and I hope employers see that as a win for everybody .

That part of it is really really important is listening before we decide what it is that we're going to teach . And then the third thing is the fact that it is genuinely third party . I mean a lot of credentials .

When I was in manufacturing and I spent 25 years in manufacturing I didn't even know what a third party credential was , and then , eight years ago , I come over to education and there's literally like 900 of them and , like any other product , there's a lot of differences in terms of what they bring in , and I love the fact that SACA is a true third party

credential . I also love the innovation on the part of people like Jim Wall , the executive director of SACA , and your alma mater , the University of Wisconsin-Stout , where you did your doctorate work . We had Chancellor Catherine Frank on with us not too long ago talking about this new automation leadership degree .

She was joined by David Ding , their associate degree , or associate dean , rather , at the University of Wisconsin-Stout .

So really , really innovative approach to not even a two plus two , as we like to call them , sometimes two years of technical or community college , two years of university , but in some cases could even be a two plus one or a one plus two plus one type of degree .

Lots and lots of on ramps and off ramps , but really , really interested in the work that the University of Wisconsin-Stout is doing in automation leadership .

You mentioned earlier , Dr Setic , this whole idea of employers looking for things like project management , and I would add to that digital transformation and understanding lean manufacturing and understanding how to work as a team and organizational development and all of these kind of things , Kind of as the frosting on the cake , if you will , for all of the work of

integrating these manufacturing technologies that you've been talking about welding , automation , mechatronics , industrial maintenance systems , fabrication equipment and so on . One of the most high demand career choices and career pathways that employers have right now is asking for people that understand how to integrate all these technologies and implement them in manufacturing .

So talk to us about your relationship with the University of Wisconsin-Stout , your plans to offer pathways to this bachelor's degree for your students at College of Lake County .

But the reason why I went there was because it was a university that was a polytechnic focus and so , given that at the time I was working within a technical college system , uw-stout has just always been a great partner to the technical career fields and the two-year colleges and I would say here at College of Lake County it is an emerging relationship .

I have introduced the college to UW-Stout In particular . It is sometimes difficult to achieve an equal valuing of the transfer credentials that the community college provides , to have equal value to the career credentials that we provide . I'll be very honest .

I feel that sometimes one is valued higher than the other and this isn't a matter of what's more important liberal arts or career . Both matter . Employers will tell you that .

But we have to have career paths for students that value the credentials and the credits they've earned at a community college in their applied associate degree , and so a partner like UW-Stout gets that at the front end .

They also value reduced time and cost to degree completion for students that means that they're willing to look at credit for prior learning , prior credits completed .

If we have students who've completed SACA credentials and they have SACA built in , they're going to value that too and that's our easy way to communicate to them that we are setting our curriculum at the same standards that they are .

So a partnership with someone like UW-Stout provides College of Lake County the ability to truly create that career pathway from our high school dual credit all the way through the university in a way that accelerates the pace that individuals can complete those credentials and that also helps us tell the story to the community that there are really amazing career path

opportunities and careers with trajectory and advancement opportunities in these fields , which I don't know where it happened , but somewhere along the way that message got lost .

I feel like we're reintroducing our communities and our parents and our counselors to the fact that these are astounding careers and individuals who start as a machine operator can in fact become the president of a company . That is a real story that plays out time and time again .

But it's a partnership like UW-Stout that creates that seamless transition , a cohesive transition for the students and then for the employers , builds those bachelor prepared individuals where there will be additional leadership , management and just that holistic aspect of an educational journey that will build off of what foundation they're bringing with them from the associate

degree . I'm excited for it . I would say we still have some work to go , but I know UW-Stout and I know CLC and I think we'll be great partners together .

For our listeners that's not just a story that we like to tell . I've seen that firsthand time and time and time again during my quarter century in manufacturing . I like to say manufacturing is that place where you can start out sweeping the floor and end up running the company , pause anywhere along the way and have an incredibly sustaining family supporting career .

Or and this is important get a huge head start with a technical diploma or an associate's degree from your local technical or community college so that you don't have to start out sweeping the floor and not that there's anything wrong with starting there , but you can start way ahead with a great degree and some great experience .

I like the idea of really dialing into . Let's make sure , as students are doing their work at their associate degree or their technical level in there to your college , that we're finding ways to articulate those credits in a meaningful way . You know sometimes we talk about , you know , credits to nowhere .

You tell a student yeah , you can take this course and it'll count when you get to the University of Philly and the blank . And then they get there and they get credit for it , but that credit doesn't count toward any kind of a degree .

That's not fair to the student and I think well you know the kind of partnerships that you're talking about with organizations like the University of Wisconsin , Stout and others .

Really try to expedite that path to make sure that we're eliminating the waste in terms of making sure that whatever students are learning , whatever credentials and whatever degrees they're earning actually count toward something that comes next , or just create these great on ramps and off ramps .

Which is where I think education is going is that we should be able to go in and out of the workforce and as technology changes , you mentioned Industry 4.0 and how quickly that is changing the world of manufacturing . Certainly , that's not just manufacturing , it's every space within our economy . We're going to have to be a generation of lifelong learners .

You know , gone are these days where you can get your degree , go into the workforce and never have to go back . Those days are gone . We're going to have to learn throughout our entire lives .

We're also going to have to continue to build great partnerships , not just in education but really across the economy , with employers , with certainly with educators , with public policymakers , with workforce developers and so on , and I know you have a bit of a vision for a regional manufacturing alliance . Talk to us about that .

With this low unemployment , manufacturers are a little afraid to release their folks to go for formal education , so now we have a space where an employer can upskill their team right there and then advance them as they're hiring in the floor sweepers , because it's harder to find those more advanced skills the floor sweepers you can grab .

So it's been really exciting to see employers begin to understand that and that is exactly what we want to start to accomplish through the manufacturing alliance is this is about economic growth and the retention and attraction of employers to Lake County .

They're not gonna stay here if they can't achieve the talent supply , and the community college and community colleges regionally can really be a resource to help that happen . But we can't do it alone . So that means you really need a lot of people who have different strengths , assets , resources to leverage toward that .

So the alliance is aimed really at achieving increased promotion and awareness around the great opportunities and career pathways in manufacturing . So it serves to bring in the youth , their parents , the counselors as a demonstration space .

But it's really about bringing the entire ecosystem together so educators , k-12 to university , the employers , the workforce partners , so workforce development board , economic development and then various agencies together to really tackle root cause issues through strategic and aligned strategy .

And at that manufacturing alliance breakfast we just had , we probably had 20 companies in there that said I've never been here and I didn't know what college of Lake County did , they'd never met a workforce development board member . So that means they really don't understand what's available . I find they're very insular , as they should be .

They're focused on their company , but what they're doing is building strategies in a very isolated way . Meanwhile everyone else is building the same strategies . So this is about bringing everyone into the same space and collectively . Different than an association . I keep repeating this is not an association . That's like a membership where we all love what we do .

This is really about sitting down , rolling your sleeves up and tackling the pipeline issue in a broad and systemic way . If we're successful , the future leaders in a decade's time will look back and say thank you very much for doing that , because now we have first , second and third graders who now understand these are opportunities available to them .

So it is , I have to say , not my own idea . Sometimes the best thing we can do is replicate evidence-based successful models , and so I am replicating a model from my 19 years up in Northeast Wisconsin .

The NEW Manufacturing Alliance is a group that the college I worked at was a part of , and so I saw the value of strategically coming to the table with my other higher ed partners , the K-12 partners , but most importantly , with the workforce partners , and really putting good broad strategy in place .

That alliance is part of the reason why Northeast Wisconsin now has engineering programs . Prior to that , they were all in the southern part of the state so all the talent went away and stayed away , and so it was about advocacy and movement to really ensure that there were engineering graduates being produced in Northeast Wisconsin .

So I'm taking a great model of the NEW Manufacturing Alliance and replicating it here in Northeast Illinois , and so we've been leveraging the relationships and partnerships with the NEW Manufacturing Alliance to educate and inform my team and the workforce leaders here about what this looks like and how it's different than other strategies that have been tried in the past .

There's so many employers specifically that are huge , huge fans and , like so many regions in that area and I'm not picking on that particular area because we see this all over there was so many cases where manufacturers and educators were existing in a bit of a vacuum and in some cases probably I'm not specifically there , but in others pointing the finger at each

other for some of the problems and with some really solid leadership and vision , numa has managed to create just really , really good relationships between employers and public policy makers and workforce board members and economic developers and workforce development folks , and really across the board . So it is a great model and credit to you for replicating that .

If you could turn the clock forward 10 years , Dr . Suddick , what would your vision be ? What would you have hoped to have accomplished over that period of time ?

But you go north and you go through Milwaukee and up to Green Bay and that's heavy manufacturing sector . You head east , you're heading toward Detroit , we've got Indiana .

I mean this is kind of a great playground to build in and I think 10 years from now , what I really hope is that the Lake County Regional Alliance is connected to the Milwaukee , to the Green Bay , and just connecting these regional alliances in a way that we see that it's likely many of the individuals in any of our spaces are going to move to the Midwest

somewhere , and so the talent that's sitting in Illinois , while it may not stay in Illinois , could I direct it productively to northeast Wisconsin or to Milwaukee or over to Detroit ?

So I hope that , as we get established there , I think are alliances all the way along that path , and I would love to have a connection , because now we've got a mega alliance , and I'll give a quick example , if I can .

My youngest son really wasn't sure what career path he wanted to do . He's a young guy . So I said you know , manufacturing is a great place to start , even if you don't know . But he was here in Illinois , grew up in Green Bay . I said you know what ? Here's a website . It's Numa . I know every company on here . They're great . You go find your job there .

So he did , and so this Illinois talent , a 21-year-old kid , is now productively working in a manufacturer up in northeast Wisconsin . It was because of my knowledge of Numa that helped supply that one I hope , good employee , and so that kind of triggered the idea for me that we have a way to connect together across this whole thoroughfare .

You use the word ecosystem and there really isn't any other words you can use for that . Every single manufacturer . None of them exist in a vacuum , right ? If I'm a metal fabricator , I need somebody to help paint parts . I need somebody to finish parts , to heat , treat parts , to plate parts , to build machine tools , service all that equipment .

So we have this incredible system of manufacturers , of tier one and tier two suppliers of contract manufacturing . It really is unparalleled anywhere else in the world and , to your point , we have a huge opportunity to leverage that for the betterment of the entire region . We could do an entire podcast episode .

I think Dr Sadek just done that topic , but of course we have to move on to our last question here .

It's my favorite question pretty much every week because we learn so much from people when we ask it , and that is as we close out our time today , if you could go back in time to the time when you're a 16-year-old individual growing up , you're in suburban Detroit , your whole life is ahead of you and you could go back and give that person one piece of advice

, based upon everything that you've learned and all the great opportunities and accomplishments that you've had over the course of your life . What would that piece of advice be ?

What you're doing is good enough and has the potential for greatness If you let it go early enough , at a time where it can still organically grow and actually get better because of the inputs to it rather than the sphere of it .

Has to be perfect before it goes out , and what goes along with that is this willingness to just be vulnerable that you don't know , and it's okay that you don't know . I think that first gen habit of it seems like everyone else knows all of these things and you don't .

It can cause you to restrict and come into yourself rather than just opening up to the fact . Okay , well , I don't know . Ask the questions early , leverage the network and resources around you , because that is how you get to the next phase faster , I would say .

The other thing I would hope to tell myself is stick to your values , stick to the hard work you do and always stay open to learning as you do , because those are the things that really work .

And then make sure you're sticking to your values , understanding the importance and the value of hard work . Both of those are so very important .

I think the result of our conversations , Dr Suddick , today have been absolutely phenomenal great advice for community and technical college leaders , for anybody trying to promote regional collaboration around manufacturing , for anybody who is looking to the future of technology and trying to figure out how to upskill the next generation of the workforce .

You are doing all of those things , doing them all with confidence and with style . I want to thank you so much , not just for your important work , but for spending some time with us today on the TechEd podcast .