As a special addition to our member promotion services, the Chamber is now offering a free Featured Member Profile, which will be printed in the Chamber View and posted on the website for a month, then moved into a prominently-placed online archive for the remainder of the year.  To win this free publicity, just drop your business card into the Featured Member Fishbowl at each monthly Networking Mixer and be present for the drawing.  For more information, call the Chamber, 410-719-9609.

Featured Member

CCBC Career Development and Counseling Services - October 2008

Building the Campus-Community Connection:
CCBC Career Development Director Seeks to Match Student Workforce with Local Business Needs

Chat even for a brief while with Mark Williams, CCBC’s Director of Career Development and Counseling Services, and it becomes very clear: This is a man with a dream.

His mission?  To fully realize CCBC ‘s role as a community college by building relationships between the three campuses and their surrounding business communities.

In the world he envisions, CCBC provides students with real-world job skills and off-campus opportunities, while local businesses open their doors to an eager workforce, willing to learn.

Student interns support the local business and nonprofit community with paid, for-credit, or volunteer help, while health care professionals in the area support CCBC students through the on-campus clinical and counseling services.

As a further outreach, successful role models from CCBC speak at local middle schools, planting seeds of hope and ambition in at-risk students who might not otherwise have considered college a possibility.

Fulfilling this vision is a slow, passionate, patient process, as Mr. Williams tells it…just one part of the comprehensive career planning and personal development services already provided by his office. Seeing that most job placement was on an ad-hoc basis, either matching students with on-campus openings or placing them off-campus through faculty connections, he began the initiative very soon after accepting his groundbreaking position with the college.

It all began with a service project: in January, 2008, 15 students from the three CCBC campuses took a week-long trip to New Orleans to help the post-Katrina recovery effort. “They worked at shelters, built playgrounds, and participated in the cleanup,” says Mr. Williams. “It was the first time our college had done anything of the sort, and we resolved to continue this effort, doing more things closer to home.”

 CCBC was already a member of the Baltimore County Chamber of Commerce and partnering with the Office of Workforce Development. Mr. Williams began the new outreach by renewing a relationship with the Dundalk Chamber to create job opportunities in local businesses ,. When “between 20 and 30” not-for-profit organizations had opted into the program, he says, “it was time to bring it to the west side of town” by establishing a new relationship with the Catonsville Chamber.

“The Chamber is the first line of outreach,” he says. “We plan to go out to mixers and other events to market our needs, network with business owners and develop a database of the businesses willing to offer jobs or internships. It’s a slow process of creating relationships; I’m hoping to establish perhaps five or ten partnerships in the first year, and then build from that point.”

 “Our students come in looking for all types of opportunities – paid, unpaid, for-credit and volunteer,” he adds. “We are open to opportunities across the board.”

As a Catonsville Community College alumnus who pursued his baccalaureate and Master’s degrees at the University of Baltimore and Bowie State University respectively, Mr. Williams has spent most of his career supporting students through career counseling and academic advising. A Catonsville resident himself, he has a deeply personal commitment to fostering connections between the college and local businesses.

“We want to offer another line of support to the community,” he says.”If we can help to build real-world working relationships between our students and the community, we really will become a community college.”

Catonsville business owners who are interested in providing job opportunities to CCBC students are invited to contact Mr. Williams at 410-455-4334 or mwilliams@ccbcmd.edu.

 Past Featured Members