GODFREY – To better serve the community, Lewis and Clark Community College has split its former Corporate and Community Learning division into two separate departments – Community Education and Workforce Education, Solutions & Safety Training (WESST).
Community Education will continue to offer non-credit courses for children and adults, while WESST will focus on a wide variety of workshops and seminars designed for the professional sector, including an enormous curriculum of supervisory, managerial, leadership, communication, teamwork and other soft-skills courses.
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“We are excited to have a name that better represents what we offer our clients,” said WESST Director Kathy Willis. “For example, we provide safety training for thousands of workers each year with the aim that they will be accident free every day and go home healthy and well each night.”
In service of this goal, WESST recently partnered with Phillips 66 and TekSolv to provide the safety orientation process that enables contractors to enter the gate at the Wood River Refinery.
As before, L&C remains a full satellite of the Houston Area Safety Council and is the only one in the Central Midwest to offer the OSHA-approved topics and safety badging of the Association of Reciprocal Safety Councils (ARSC). This enables local contractors to obtain a globally-reciprocal certification without having to travel.
The ARSC training alone draws participants of more than 750 contractor firms to the college from Chicago, Missouri and Indiana.
WESST also provides a job assessment service as a human resource solution. This service features almost 900 job-title-specific tests to evaluate the knowledge of a candidate for an open position.
“Everyone tries to be the perfect choice when filling out an application or resume,” Willis said. “The scoring system, however, gives a busy HR department additional information about a candidate to help them read between the lines of a resume and objectively assess what a person actually understands regarding the body of knowledge for a position.”
Other courses routinely provided by WESST include CPR/AED/BBP/1st Aid; OSHA general industry and construction; food service sanitation review; confined space, fire, ice and water crew rescue; Medicar, SHRM classes, PC applications, industrial fire brigade, and IDOT's flagger training.
“If you don't see it in our catalog, call us because we can offer a program wherever and whenever a company wants it, in addition to customizing courses to include a business’ policies and procedures,” said Dawn Zedolek, program coordinator for WESST.
To learn more, call (618) 468-5787 or visit www.lc.edu/workforce_training.
