If you think Eric Stewart’s title is long and involved, it’s nothing compared to the duties of his job.
The 42-year-old is the point person for the development of the long-awaited Career Connect Center, a technical education center for Kalamazoo County high school students that’s under construction off Sprinkle Road. When it opens in August 2025, the 167,000-square-foot building, which is visible from I-94, will house more than 1,400 students in 23 programs, from automotive repair and welding to machine tooling and culinary skills.
But what can’t be seen driving by this hulking construction site is the colossal effort involved in making the center a reality. The process includes receiving input from 19 advisory boards, designing a functional yet flexible facility, determining the programs to offer, developing curriculum, hiring staff, creating student services to help students overcome barriers to their education, and figuring out how to transport 1,400 students from all over the county to the center. And did we mention that KRESA’s existing precursor program, Career Technical Education, is still being run at 14 locations across the county?
“It’s a well-choreographed dance that we’re trying to pull off here, and you should see the project sheets — they’re incredible,” says Stewart. “It feels like turning an aircraft carrier around. You’re operating the current system, which has been successful for a lot of people in this community, but you’re shifting it. You’re moving everybody’s cheese entirely.
“What has gotten us through has been the solution orientation of everybody involved, whether they’re an individual contributor rolling up their sleeves doing the work or someone who’s investing in it financially or someone who’s hosting young people at their job site or any number of things. Those challenges have been made all the easier by that.”
How did you get to where you are today?
It’s funny, because we talk with kids every day about these non-linear career paths. I had every intention of working in public policy when I got my bachelor’s degree (he graduated in 2004 from Western Michigan University with a degree in political science). While I was in college, I worked for Kohl’s department store in loss prevention and was uncomfortable with some of the work — we caught a lot of young shoplifters. I went to the court system and said, “We gotta do something other than give kids offenses. They shouldn’t have a record for stealing jewelry.” I got really involved in a diversion program at the Portage Community Outreach Center, working with young people, getting to understand their barriers and helping them navigate some of what’s going on in their world a little bit. It was a really successful program.
Then I started working for Portage Community Outreach Center and Emergency Assistance doing housing and eviction assistance while I went back to school for my master’s in public administration. I worked with a lot of folks who were facing a lot of barriers in life, and I wanted to do something more proactive. I heard about KRESA’s Youth Opportunities Unlimited (YOU) program working with young folks and adults in workforce development. I was hired on there in a leadership capacity and oversaw the YOU program and KRESA’s workforce development arm.
In 2017, KRESA started looking at career development for those at a younger age. We looked deep at the data and didn’t love what we saw: The system was working, but only for certain kids. We needed to do better for students, knowing we needed to produce more skilled labor for business and industry. In 2019, we went out to voters to pass a millage to redesign career technical education. I was hired to be assistant superintendent and lead that work. I started right at the beginning of the pandemic but have been a part of this project since 2017.
When it’s complete, who will the Career Connect Center serve?
The building has a broad mandate. The commitment we’ve made to the community through the millage is, first and foremost, to be the best career center in the nation for high school students. From 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., it’ll serve Kalamazoo County students primarily in their 10th through 12th grade years from nine local school districts, public charter academies and private high schools. But since its inception, we’ve had this concept that we call “never go dark” — it would be a huge bummer if 3:30 every day, the lights shut off and don’t come on until the next morning. We’re investing a lot of time, money and resources to make it awesome, so we asked: How can it come alive as a community career center after hours? How can we work with partners like Kalamazoo Valley Community College to help some of their goals come to fruition? How can we work directly with employers to train their employees to use the equipment? We have tons of interest in that, which has been super exciting for us, all the while keeping our eyes on the primary goal to be an awesome career and tech ed center.
This effort began in 2017, and a lot has changed in the work world since then. How are you keeping the plans for the center up to speed?
We have 19 different advisory boards, one for each of the different industry and occupational areas that we cover. There are 238 individual advisors that comprise those groups. We meet with them four times a year. We’ve traveled the nation to see how to do this well and researched places like Singapore and Switzerland, which are further along in career training education. What jumped out to us early is this facility had to be designed to evolve as business and industry evolves and in a way where this year what might be a machine tool program in five years could become a more high tech manufacturing lab. We did labor market analysis that isolated the high-demand, well-paying occupations now and the projected demand in those industries over the course of the next five years. We committed that every few years we’ll redo the analysis, and we’re going to be open to what the data tells us. Now, obviously, there are financial elements to that. It’s not cheap to retrofit a manufacturing lab with new equipment, so we’ll be actively pursuing partnerships with employers to stay relevant to business and industry.
What has surprised you most in this work?
The passion. There is no shortage of passion in this community about what this could, should look like. I come from workforce development, where a lot of times it was, like, “Oh, you guys should do this, but, you know, I’m a little busy,” and they walk away. Not here. I’ve been blown away by how people have leaned into the project.
