Members of the Kansas National Guard learning welding and machining will now have an opportunity to apply that knowledge toward an Associate of Applied Science degree at Salina Area Technical College.
An agreement signed Friday by Salina Tech President Greg Nichols and Kansas Adjutant General Lee Tafanelli allows service men and women who are learning Military Occupational Specialty 91E at the Kansas Regional Training Institute in Salina to be awarded credits through Salina Tech’s Welding Technology and Machine Tool Technology programs. They can then take additional electives and general education classes through Salina Tech and earn an associate’s degree.
The partnership is referred to as “Synchronous Training and Academic Credit.”
“The goal of STAC is to streamline the educational experience for service members, providing a portion of their military training and academic credit concurrently, enabling them to progress toward an associate’s degree while still serving, and expediting their potential for promotion,” said Lt. Colonel Shy Warner.
The agreement got its start in November of 2016, when Salina Tech invited soldiers from the Regional Training Institute to participate in the college’s Veteran’s Day event, and discussion started on other ways the two organizations could cooperate.
Staff from the National Guard and Salina Tech spent several months comparing the curricula of the two institutions “to match what you do as Army professionals to what we do as educational professionals,” Nichols said.
Nichols added that this partnership “is really near and dear to my heart,” as his daughter earlier this week enlisted in the U.S. Army, and when she completes basic combat training will go to Fort Lee, Virginia for training in Military Occupational Specialty 91E. The 91E MOS is called an “Allied Trades Specialist.”
“This is a great day for the Salina Tech family, and it’s a great day for the Kansas National Guard family, because we are able to work together to provide our service men and women an opportunity for further advancement, so if they do choose to leave the service, they can get a job immediately,” Nichols said.
“This is a great day for both Salina Area Technical College and the Kansas National Guard,” Tafanelli said. “This is what we are striving for across the entire state as we build these partnerships for the future.”
“As we look at the men and women who serve in uniform, oftentimes they have tremendous skills that they’ve been able to master through their years of service to state and nation,” Tafanelli said. “With these partnerships, we can take the experience they’ve learned and earned while serving their nation and apply that to their educational goals and acquire a skill or certification … giving them the credit for what they learned in the military side, and just focusing on those things that perhaps they didn’t get somewhere militarily.”
“Getting that certification puts that individual back in our workforce, back to an employer, much much quicker, and it extends the resources that were given by Congress, through the GI Bill, or from our state leaders for tuition assistance,” Tafanelli said. “We’re able to stretch those dollars and maximize them. But more importantly, it gets our service men and women the skillsets they need to be competitive in the job market, to make them contributing members to society.”
While Friday’s agreement only applies to one Military Occupational Specialty, Tafanelli said plans are already underway to expand the partnership to additional specialties.
“We’re starting with the Board of Regents, and looking at all of our occupations and how do we tie those to skillsets our employers need, so that we can match our service men and women with the needs of the employers in the least amount of time as possible and give them the quality employees they’re looking for.”