Campus Watch logo. Graphic by Andy Mooney, Salisbury Post.

By Hugh Fisher

Kannapolis Citizen

Standing on the front steps of the building that will soon be Rowan-Cabarrus Community College's new Career Development Center, Jeanie Moore, vice president of continuing education programs, has a clear view of construction at the North Carolina Research Campus.

It's not the prettiest view right now — bare steel girders and red dirt from the grading project. But in two years, the view from the front entrance of this building will be extraordinary.

"One of the important things is that we'll be in walking distance of the people we're trying to help," Moore said, standing outside the facility on Dale Earnhardt Boulevard.

Around the building are neighborhoods which housed mill workers and which still house those who hope to take advantage of a stronger local job market.

If all goes well, the new center will be open before the end of the year and ready to continue the task of retraining those workers.

Castle & Cooke, owner and developer of the North Carolina Research Campus, is donating use of space in the former office supply store next to Sherwin-Williams Paint on Dale Earnhardt Boulevard.

The facility measures approximately 9,000 square feet. RCCC maintenance personnel are installing partitions to divide the open space into offices and classrooms.

When finished, Moore said the space will contain about 15 office cubicles, a reception room and two multi-purpose classrooms, one of which will be a computer lab.

The Career Development Center will provide a link between local employers, job training and public agencies, offering displaced or underemployed citizens an easy starting point on the path to retraining.

The office space on Dale Earnhardt Boulevard will be the precursor to a much larger building on the N.C. Research Campus. It will house a variety of programs designed to help local workers take advantage of that project's growth.

"Depending on the demand, we will most likely have what we call our career readiness certification program, a program developed through our human resources development program," Moore said.

These are a series of tests, she said, which allow prospective employees to see how their skills fit in a particular field, and to identify possible needs for skills training or future education.

"Clients can select a program of study or a particular job they're planning to train for, and there are some nationally normed standards for people who have been in those jobs," Moore said.

"Students can assess their skill levels and see if they meet the prescribed benchmarks or not."

Moore said it was possible there might be some General Education Diploma (GED) programs offered at the site if they became needed. "We haven't made that decision yet," she said.

At the ceremony announcing the plans on Sept. 6, RCCC President Dr. Richard Brownell called the center another example of "a phoenix rising from the ashes" in Kannapolis.

"The question we hear most often with regard to the North Carolina Research Campus is, 'How will local citizens benefit from this development?' " Brownell said.

The answer to that question is the thousands of jobs expected to be created, not just by the Research Campus itself but by the growth of services and biotechnology related industries in the Kannapolis area.

Brownell echoed the words of campus founder David Murdock, who has often called the community college's training and retraining of workers a key part of the Research Campus' success.

"We pledge the full support of your community college to this venture," Brownell said.

The career development center on Dale Earnhardt Boulevard will also offer skills training for workers who may not have experience in applying for a job.

"We'll be doing a lot of things involving job-seeking skills, like resume writing, interviewing, those kinds of soft skills courses that we find people may need," Moore said.

"A lot of the former Pillowtex workers never had the opportunity to interview or apply for another job," she said. "And so that will be part of the testing, assessment and counseling that will be offered at the career center.

One more thing that the new Career Development Center will be able to provide will be a sense of ease for the locals who use it.

Moore said that many workers in the aftermath of Pillowtex were frustrated by the large stacks of paperwork that local agencies provided in order for them to receive benefits.

"When appropriate, we hope to be able to share information with local agencies" to help save those employees time and effort, Moore said.

The goal will be to share workers' employment data with other local agencies, such as the JobLink centers in Kannapolis, Concord and Salisbury, to avoid clients having to fill out multiple copies of forms.

"We want to make things much less intimidating," Moore said.

"Our hope is that employers will work through us, as well as the Employment Security Commission, to post jobs and find their workers."

Contact Hugh Fisher at 704-933-3450 or hfisher@salisburypost.com.