Jim Snyder is Director of the Northwest Education Cluster, a regional school improvement industry trade group based in Portland, Oregon.
(Edbizbuzz encourages other regional and national school improvement industry groups with a web-based presence to join our growing community of quarterly guest columnists - contact editor@edbizbuzz.com.)
Things are relatively quiet up here in the northwest this summer but the NW Education Cluster has been active in reviewing our 2007-8 goals we established back in September 2007. We are using the results of these goals as a way to move forward for the upcoming year. I thought I would take this opportunity to review these goals and share our direction for the upcoming year.
At the July 15th meeting of the Oregon Cluster Network the NW Education Cluster shared the progress to date of the 2007-8 goals. The Cluster has been making strides in supporting educational businesses and the local workforce initiative. Our next meeting on August 5th will showcase some of this work. The table below outlines our goals and progress to date:
(Click on Picture to View)
We are also investigating what the next steps would be toward ensuring that Oregon educates and trains its workforce to meet the demand of Oregon’s industry clusters. This will be part of the topic at the August 5th meeting hosted by the cluster member company, Saltire Software. There will be three presentations: a representative of one of the local business schools (Willamette University’s downtown Portland MBA program) will explain what they do, and how to work with academics; Joyce Cresswell will discuss the Saturday Academy and its goals; and Phil Todd will talk about Saltire Software and introduce a presentation by their Saturday Academy intern on the work they are doing.
Lastly, the cluster has also launched a web survey on the cluster to establish and examine the educational services market here in the Northwest. The goal is to produce a first attempt a publishing a comprehensive public report on the market, where the cluster is, and where its members would like it to go in the next year or so. I will post the results of this survey in the next guest column in 3 months.
