North Carolina’s community colleges are using creative strategies to recruit career and technical instructional roles. Golden LEAF Programs staff see firsthand these real challenges in the workforce preparedness projects they manage. Whether the Golden LEAF funds awarded support a new advanced manufacturing lab, a nursing expansion, or a skilled trades facility, one reality consistently surfaces: buildings and equipment are only part of the equation. Qualified instructors are often the critical ingredient.
The central issue is straightforward. In nearly every high-demand technical field, private industry offers higher salaries than education. For colleges, the obstacle is attracting and retaining qualified and experienced practitioners when compensation alone cannot compete. With Golden LEAF-funded projects, Programs staff regularly observe colleges reframing this hiring challenge into creative solutions.
A rural northwestern community college is taking the opportunity to hire second career instructors. These educators are retired or semi-retired from the private sector and are ready to mentor the next generation of workers in their field. The instructors are getting the best of both worlds: retiring from high wage jobs to work in a system that offers stable schedules, state retirement, health insurance, and paid leave with often a shorter workweek. In this case, the colleges benefit from seasoned professionals who bring real-world experience and firsthand knowledge of the challenges these new workers are likely to encounter in the field.
Program Officers also see flexible staffing solutions woven into program design. One southeastern college, rather than relying on traditional full-time hires, switched to using adjunct instructors who continue working in industry, with evening and weekend teaching schedules that accommodate full-time private industry professionals. This model helps reduce hiring barriers and allows programs to launch even in tight labor markets. Allowing flexibility in the instruction schedule becomes a clear answer in hiring instructors who are not ready to leave their higher-paying job but want to enhance their income and/or give back to the next generation of workers. Additionally, this college is sharing instructors with their K-12 school systems. In fact, all the applied technical workers at this college have full-time jobs and their instructor position serves as a second income.
Additionally, some larger colleges see hiring difficulties even with flexible schedules. A Piedmont-Triad college not only had to change the plan from full-time hires to part-time instructors, they also had to offer hiring bonuses as an incentive. With a strong employment market, the availability of qualified instructors is low. Creative use of funding, like providing bonuses, is a viable option to increase the applicant pool. Colleges often pool resources from multiple funding streams, including state funding, county appropriations, philanthropic funding, and other sources, when possible to enhance salaries. Additionally, they have seen that they have had to double part-time wages to recruit and retain their skilled professionals.
Perhaps most promising from a long-term perspective is the “grow your own” instructor strategy that our Programs staff have recently encountered. One southwestern community college is working with the local school system and a university to help fill high-demand vacancies in an essential industry. To address the shortage in instructors, there is an intentional effort to encourage these students to consider teaching as a future career. By outlining a path that includes industry experience followed by a return to the classroom, institutions begin to build a sustainable, locally rooted faculty pipeline. This solution addresses not just today’s vacancy, but tomorrow’s workforce leadership.
From the Golden LEAF Programs staff vantage point, career and technical education hiring challenges are not isolated concerns. They are recurring themes across workforce development in all areas of North Carolina. The consistent lesson is that successful community college projects address both needed infrastructure and equipment and the people to run the programs. Colleges that enhance compensation strategies, embrace flexibility, cultivate future instructors, and build strong partnerships are better positioned to sustain the programs essential to local industry and the economy.