Organizational Change and Stakeholder Engagement in the California Career Pathways Trust at a California Community College.

Abstract Organizational Change and Stakeholder Engagement in the California Career Pathways Trust Fund at a California Community College By Luis Barrera Castañón Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership The economies of the US and California have experienced a significant shift from dominant industrial-based production to more technology-inspired forms of production and manufacturing. Workers need different technical skills and competencies than they needed in previous decades. The gap in skills has created challenges for employers. California state legislators approved investments of over $500 million to decrease the skills gap by funding the California Career Pathways Trust Fund, which awards grants to establish or strengthen career pathway programs in high schools that connect with community colleges. The present qualitative case study was implemented to explore the perspectives, attitudes, and lived experiences of 12 participants: three students, three faculty, three administrators, and three local employers connected to Oceanside Community College (pseudonym) regarding (a) their role in the organizational change process, (b) how the sample groups were engaged in decision-making, (c) the engagement of institutional leadership, and (d) the outcome of the career pathways implementation as an organizational change process. Results showed that organizational change is not easily explained through an eight-stage process, although several stages were present, and others were not. Organizational change is much more complex at a community college, and implementation was directly related to practice and procedure. Additionally, the community college system was undergoing several organizational change efforts simultaneously, which as a totality amount to an organizational change process but taken separately created complexity in observing the direct link between stakeholder engagement and grant outcomes. The primary finding showed that stakeholder engagement in the design and implementation stage involved only faculty and administrators. Although this represented half of the identified stakeholders the organizational change effort was successful, while simultaneously lacking several stages in Kotter's eight-stage organizational change framework. This finding suggests that other organizational change efforts may have helped to advance the grant outcomes and their ultimate success at Oceanside Community College. The primary recommendation is to conduct a large-scale study that looks at all organizational change efforts that took place in California starting with the California State Plan for Career Technical Education of 2008 and track its impact from policy to practice to better understand organizational change.