Community colleges in the United States have become major providers of human resource development services, particularly through offering workforce development training to local employers. The addition of workforce development services to community colleges is a fairly recent phenomenon. Some see workforce development efforts as diluting community colleges’ historic mission of providing affordable and accessible opportunities for students to transfer to 4-year institutions. The addition of online training has created additional stressors, because of increases in costs, opportunities for outsourcing, and increased opportunity for serving those outside of the local community. Using an organizational theory framework, this conceptual article addresses the competing emphases in the community college mission and attempts to understand how various types of institutions overcome internal and external barriers in introducing online workforce development through organizational change initiatives.
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