(Part 1 in a series about Madison College’s post-baccalaureate programs)

At first glance Charles Goehring and Samantha Thompson seem vastly separated, both by age and life experience.

Two years ago, Goehring, 60, a Vietnam era veteran with a master’s in wood science had been laid off after spending over 20 years working in wood truss engineering and forestry. Thompson, 25, had just received her bachelor’s degree in anthropology from UW-Madison.

Yet these very different paths have led them to one place. Today, they are students in the same classroom, working toward the same goal: a post-baccalaureate certificate in Madison College’s intensive biotechnology program. Through hours of experience in the Truax campus biology lab, they are honing their skills in applied biology, bridging the gap from theory to practice.

The economic downturn of 2008 saw many laid off from positions they had held for decades. New graduates with bachelor’s degrees also faced difficulty entering the workforce.

As the U.S. races toward an economy where the fastest growing job sectors require skills in science, technology and health care, employers and economists alike have cited a skills deficit as one of the contributing factors to stubbornly high unemployment.

Given these findings, many people have gone back to school to make themselves more employable. While it may seem that going to a community college after undergrad is a step backward, post-baccalaureate programs offer returning students an accessible, affordable option to learn in-demand skills.

Responding to student needs

“We are seeing more students with undergraduate degrees coming here than students we are sending on to complete their bachelor’s,” said Dr. Lisa Seidman, a teacher in the biotechnology program since 1987.

She was speaking not only of post-baccalaureate students, but also students with bachelor’s degrees who enroll in associate degree program courses. Seidman remembers a time when a few of these students would trickle through associate degree classes in order to obtain a specific skills and meet informal requirements set by faculty. When they had taken the courses necessary, she would print them a certificate of completion and say “congratulations.”

Madison College responded to this trend in the mid 2000s by formalizing these course clusters into post-baccalaureate programs. By doing so, it recognizes the unique needs of these students returning to school for a skill-set brush up or career transition.

Students coming from large, four year universities often graduate with little laboratory experience due to large class sizes, sometimes exceeding 500 students. Madison College has a fully equipped lab, offers them smaller class sizes, and more hands-on lab experience.

“If you come here and you’ve got a class of 10 to 20 people, you walk into a lab that’s fully equipped, you’ve got six hours of lab time where a university might have three hours,” Seidman said.

Post-baccalaureate programs in Biotechnology require a four-year degree for admission and the course offerings are specifically tailored to those who already have familiarity in an academic background. Coursework emphasizes biotechnology lab skills. Course content differs from the associate degree level in that it focuses less on theory and offers a business management component.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, on a national level, biological technician jobs are projected to experience a 14 percent growth rate between 2010 and 2020. Wisconsin has become a national hub for the rapidly growing field. The Wisconsin Technology Council offers a local perspective. As its website indicates, “Wisconsin is ranked in the top 10 for biotechnology employment growth.”

This is welcome news to students like Goehring and Thompson.

“For me this is kind of a gamble”

During a break from his class, Goehring remembered all too well the two years he spent unemployed.

“It was gut wrenching.  You have doubts about your abilities, your skills may not be needed, and those were managerial skills,” he said as he recounted his time looking for work and living on less.

Goehring found a way out when he jumped on an opportunity to re-skill when he came across an advertisement for the Veterans Retraining Assistance Program (VRAP) last year.

The program offers educational assistance to unemployed veterans ages 35-60 who were honorably discharged and who agree to go into in-demand fields.

According to 2012 data from the biotechnology program collected on former students who graduated in 2010, 2011 and 2012, 84.6 percent of graduates in the 20-30 year age range found employment within six months of certificate completion. Only 66.7 percent of students in the 51-60 year age range had found employment after the same range of time.

Acknowledging the uncertainty in taking the chance to go back to school, Goehring said, “This is kind of a gamble for me.”

Rediscovering an original passion

Through the post-baccalaureate program, his classmate, Thompson, had a chance to revisit her original interest in the field, sparked by her biotechnology class in her junior year of high school.

While she started her college career with biotechnology courses at the University of Minnesota, she became disenchanted with the school’s requirement of the study being an emphasis within animal science. Early in her college career, she transferred to UW-Madison and changed her major to anthropology.

“I was one of those people in college who liked every single class I took and, as a result, had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do afterwards,” she said.

Driven by a persistent interest in evolutionary science, she spent a lot of time in UW’s skeletal lab.

Thompson graduated in 2010. Following, she worked for UW Hospital in an administrative role. She knew that area of work couldn’t sustain her interest, so she saved her money and last fall, applied to Madison College.

Financial considerations and the opportunity for practical skill acquisition caused Thompson to choose Madison College’s post-baccalaureate over a master’s program in anthropology.

“I applied to a program in New York, but I wasn’t confident enough that was what I wanted to do,” she said.

A matter of access, marketable skills

Madison College Provost Terry Webb explained why more students are taking a look at post-baccalaureate programs like the ones offered at Madison College.

“A community college like this is far easier to access in that respect than it would be to go back to university,” he said. “If what you’re trying to do is build your skill base so that you are a more marketable employee, you would come here.”

A benefit of formalizing the biotechnology courses into a post-baccalaureate program is that, “you can teach differently, you can design the program differently and you can accelerate the program so the students can get done faster,” Webb said.

For students like Goehring and Thompson, who need to quickly re-skill, post-baccalaureate programs are a practical segway to employment.