The best workforce partnerships don’t always start in boardrooms; they can start over coffee. I was having one of those casual, post-meeting chats when an HR director confided his company’s painful reality: despite investing in two weeks of solid onboarding training, they were losing 54% of new employees within six months.

For CAF USA, a Spanish-owned railcar manufacturer in New York’s Southern Tier, the stakes couldn’t have been higher. When you’re building light rail cars for Maryland’s Purple Line with strict deadlines and bonus structures tied to on-time delivery, you can’t afford to constantly restart the hiring cycle.

What happened next turned into an award-winning partnership that solved the company’s retention problem and created a blueprint for how colleges and employers can transform workforce development together.

An unconventional solution

What CAF proposed had never been done at SUNY Corning Community College, where I served as Executive Director of Workforce Education & Academic Pathways. The company wanted to pay the full-time salary of a college employee, who would work on-site at the manufacturing facility to rebuild training systems from the ground up. The college would cover the employee’s benefits.

When I took the idea to my VP, the response was immediate: “You have to talk to the president.” Translation: this was way outside our normal operations. But in my mind, the position was like an endowed chair at a university, which is how I framed it in my pitch.

Corning’s president, Dr. Kate Douglas, saw the vision right away. “This is great, let’s do this” she said enthusiastically. Within five or six months — impressively fast for a SUNY institution coordinating with a Spanish parent company — contracts were signed and we were searching for that rare unicorn: someone with both academic teaching experience and manufacturing expertise.

We found him in Chris Mulroy, who had relocated to our area after working at Kodak in Rochester. Chris had retrained as a teacher and taught high school, bringing curriculum development skills along with real manufacturing knowledge.

Meanwhile, I suggested a micro-credential concept that would become central to the partnership’s success and brought our Associate Dean of STEM to the table. As an industrial electrician, he had the technical expertise I lacked.

Within 30 days of launching the partnership, I ran into some CAF managers at a community event. Their reaction? “Oh my gosh, we can’t tell you the difference this is already making for us.”

Building trust before building programs

That big win came from something rare in workforce development: a collaborative approach where both parties were willing to rethink how they operated.

The foundation was a long-standing relationship that began long before CAF’s retention crisis. It started small and grew over time. We began our work together by offering Spanish in the Workplace classes so U.S. and Spanish employees could communicate better. We ran Manufacturing Supervision courses. We sat together on a community-wide manufacturing committee. And my team and I showed up consistently at industry events.

When the HR director finally said, “I really need to talk to you about this retention problem,” he already knew that the college could deliver.

The lesson? You can’t network your way to a partnership the moment you need one. You need to be present and helpful long before anyone has a major problem to solve.

Micro-credentials: A foundation for scalable training

As I mentioned earlier, a micro-credential framework was the cornerstone of the solution that helped CAF recover from its retention crisis in record time.

Micro-credentials are short, focused sets of courses that teach specific, job-relevant skills. Unlike traditional degrees that can take years to complete, micro-credentials typically stack together, allowing workers to earn meaningful certifications as they progress towards a full degree.

For CAF, we developed four SUNY-approved micro-credentials tied directly to job descriptions and promotion pathways. An employee could start on the factory floor, earn their first micro-credential, and become eligible for team lead. Then they could move up to supervisor with the next micro-credential. If they kept going, they were on track for an associate degree in electrical or mechanical engineering technology.

Once we established these micro-credentials and saw how well they worked, we realized they could serve other manufacturers with similar skill needs, even if they made completely different products.

And that’s exactly what happened. The four micro-credentials we developed for railcar manufacturing have since been used with a cheese manufacturer and a salt mining company.

Being able to scale those micro-credentials with other organizations demonstrates the multiplier effect of employer-led workforce partnerships done right. With one partnership, we built a regional training infrastructure that benefits the entire manufacturing ecosystem.

4 factors for overall success

In addition to micro-credentials, other repeatable factors contributed to our successful partnership with CAF. These include:

1. Executive buy-in at the highest levels
We were thrilled to have the college president championing the program. She pushed back on reluctant HR administrators and showcased our work at presidential forums as an example of creative industry-education collaboration.

2. Willingness to listen and adapt
Before meeting with CAF, the Associate Dean of STEM encouraged faculty members to be open to new ideas based on what the company really needed. Rather than teach existing courses, our faculty mapped company job descriptions to educational outcomes and adapted the curriculum to match real-world needs.

3. Alignment with regional economic priorities
Manufacturing is a lead industry in New York’s Southern Tier. And because our partnership addressed a critical regional workforce need, we got support from Empire State Development, caught the attention of the SUNY Chancellor, and even drew visits from the district’s congressional representative. When your project aligns with broader economic development goals, doors open faster.

4. On-the-ground presence
Chris, the program manager CAF hired, was on the factory floor daily. He got to know the employees, understand their challenges, and see firsthand what training gaps needed filling. That presence led to additional opportunities the college never anticipated, like project management certification training for supervisors.

What workforce partnerships can achieve

Workforce development is having a moment. Federal, state, and local governments are investing heavily because these programs lead to employment. The opportunity now is to move beyond transactional relationships where colleges offer training and employers hire graduates.

The CAF-SUNY partnership shows what’s possible when you take bold action to build something more substantial. Instead of off-the-shelf courses, we co-created new solutions. We embedded an employee with the factory workers. And we built micro-credentials that served an entire industry, not just one company. This is the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that leads to transformative results.

After three years, CAF paused the program due to a cyclical downturn. But within the last year they reactivated it, hiring another college employee for the same role as they began ramping up for a new slate of contracts.

That’s the ultimate validation: They came back because it worked.