Business and Higher Education Partner to Develop a High-Skilled Workforce: A Case Study

The workforce development literature contains little scholarly work on how organizations in a community work together to develop a high-skilled workforce. This exploratory case study examined business and higher education partnerships that were instrumental in creating such an educational infrastructure for information technology in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The findings from this case study provide insight into the chronology of key events and the leaders' characteristics and their interactions. Tulsa's IT workforce-development infrastructure was negotiated one partnership at a time, bridging diverse interests, until a workforce-development system emerged. The infrastructure grew as the result of accident, purposeful activity, serendipity, and negotiated processes and structures. The leaders' differing motivations and energy, their history of collaboration and mutual trust, and their different perspectives influenced the information technology workforce development infrastructure that developed. The insights into inter-organization processes that resulted from the study can contribute to theory building in human performance technology and to our understanding of how to address gaps between desired and actual workforce performance at a community level.