A Conversation With … Jim Abramovitz

What is the Business Solutions Team at Ozarks Technical Community College?
The Business Solutions Team is a division of OTC’s Center for Workforce Development. It’s myself, Sherry Coker, three business managers and an administrative secretary.

Our goal is to reach out to businesses locally, in our 12-county area, and help them with any training needs or difficulty they have in their companies.

We offer everything from professional development to professional management skills.

What sort of problems are you helping solve?
A lot of companies think when they have a problem, manufacturing especially, it is something to do with the process or the parts and materials that are coming in. Then, they usually pass that and blame it on the people. Usually it’s more complex than that. We come in and do an analysis of what they think the problem is and we try to pinpoint other areas that might be contributing to that problem. Then, we provide training solutions to help.

There is no silver bullet as far as training. You can’t get something off the shelf and go through a class saying it’s going to improve all your problems. We help them develop metrics to measure improvement as time goes along.

What companies are you working with?
We deal with roughly 150 companies. Many of those we have been dealing with for the past eight or 10 years. One of our major focuses is manufacturing, but we also work in health care. A lot of small companies we can provide very low-cost training in areas they feel they are deficient in.

How is this team funded?
Some companies pay and some are getting money from the Division of Workforce Development and the Missouri Works Training program. We have 32 companies this year we are serving that got grants from DWD totaling about $800,000. We have three business managers who work with these companies directly. We also bring in consultants with more specific skills. Otherwise, we can administer the fund for them to someone else. We get a 15 percent administration fee.

How long has the Business Solutions Team been in place?
We actually announced the team shortly before we moved. It was a focus that already existed in a lot of ways, but after I took over as executive director, we basically reorganized. I have the (Continuing Education) division, and Sherry Coker, who was director and is now business development director, that’s her forte. We decided we needed to focus on business solutions. The strong focus was about a year ago. It evolved out of what we already do. We focused, branched out and expanded.

Why move the CWD to the Missouri Career Center?
We moved in as of July 1, officially. We had been in conversation with Mary Ann Rojas, who is the head of the center, and we already worked together on so many things. She was planning to put on roundtables, manufacturing, health care, (information technology), and business and finance. We felt we could be part of that and became  part of the team and sponsored some of those meetings. The opportunity to be here, in house, has been tremendous. We’ve been called into meetings right here on site, where before, we probably would have found out about or Mary Ann would have followed up, but now we are here. We have the opportunity right away.

Also, for the CE division, a lot of the courses we offer, especially through health care, come through the career center. They send a lot of students to us as well.