Eastern Idaho Technical College offers workforce training where people can explore new careers and improve or gain skills. Businesses can also take advantage of the workforce training by collaborating with EITC to create customized programs for any of their employee training needs.
Ken Erickson, EITC’s workforce training manager, said the workforce training program not only gives students a way to test out classes before committing to a particular subject, but it also provides entry-level job training for those who need help gaining basic skills to join the workforce.
“I rattle off all these statistics about how many students we serve and all of the programs we have and the numbers, but to me and I think everyone in our program, it’s more about changing people’s lives,” Erickson said. “We see every day people coming in without jobs, without skills – a lot single parents wondering ‘How am I going to make it in this world?’”
As shown in EITC’s 2015 catalog, the workforce classes range from emergency medical training to business, truck driving to photography, and computer training to real-estate. They also offer entrepreneur classes, which Erickson said help many avoid pitfalls when starting their own businesses.
In addition to individualized job training, EITC works with several different companies on their specific job-training needs.
“We can often help [businesses] upgrade the skills of their workers at a real viable cost,” Erickson said, adding that they work directly with the companies to create a program that specifically fits that company’s needs. “We really pride ourselves on going out to the community, asking what their training needs are, and if we can provide the training… we can bring companies in and let them train at our facility at a very reasonable cost.”
He said trainings they have arranged in the past include an environmental health and safety program for the Idaho National Laboratory, fire service training for the State of Idaho, and different certification trainings for companies like Wheeler Electric and Hendrickson Towing.