Continuing Education (CE) staff are the hardest working, most committed professionals we know. Each and every one of you is a true hero, committed to helping people of all ages reach their personal and professional goals. This could be maintaining professional certification, improving skill sets to meet the demands of today's workforce or simply trying new things for personal enrichment.

As heroes, you face formidable challenges. You are expected to be financially self-supporting, generate additional revenue and head counts for the institution, and do it all with a limited number of staff and a finite amount of time. What do you do? As the campus problem solvers, you rise to the challenge, work smarter (with your ACEware software partner), and develop new community, state, regional, and national programs to increase registrations.

Developing new programs while implementing existing programs is daunting. How do you grow new programs when you're struggling to maintain the programs you already have? There are many opportunities, but below are three partnerships to develop and nurture.

Faculty and Departments: Your on-campus content experts should be your greatest allies in program development. Many academic, credit-bearing courses can be broken up and delivered as smaller noncredit classes. Departments are feeling the budget woes and may be glad for their faculty to have an opportunity to receive additional income for content that has already been developed. Consider bundling these courses into a professional certificate or badge (with the help of ACEware's Course Packaging module). Your registrants will appreciate the opportunity to have this content in smaller chunks and, who knows, it may just lead to increased credit course enrollment. It's a win-win!

Note that policies on faculty overload payment will vary from campus to campus but there are many types of arrangements to be made that benefit the department, your unit, and your students.

Businesses: Get to know business leaders in your community and listen to their needs for employee growth. You may be able to supplement a business's existing professional development program or help them develop a new program series. You are in the position to quickly design "on-demand" classes to meet their immediate needs. You know the content experts (from your faculty partnerships) and your ACEware software supports the quick course and registration set-up for these programs.

Third-Party Providers: To further expand your course offerings beyond the expertise of your faculty and community members, consider partnering with course providers such as ProTrain and ed2go. These partnerships extend your course offerings with little overhead to your unit and, as an added bonus, they'll help with marketing! ( Do remember to maintain your college and department partners - avoid competing with them!)

ACEware is proud to have developed an import option to capture, without duplication, the courses and students from both ProTrain and ed2go. A webinar on this import feature is in our webinar archives.

Your efforts to develop new partnerships and programs can be documented with your ACEware reports. You'll demonstrate what we already know - that CE units are vitally important to the campus and community.

How do you cultivate partnerships to develop new programs in your CE unit? Send an email to [email protected]. We'll share your ideas in our next newsletter.