“I'm Tim Hardy and I'm honored to serve as president of the South Carolina technical college system. I'd like to talk about our 2024 system outlook. Our technical college system consists of 16 colleges spread out across the state of South Carolina within about 30 minutes of every citizen and each year we serve about 140,000 South Carolinians.

 

Many of these come to us for certificates, degrees, diplomas. Many of them take short-term training programs that we offer through the technical college system. But in addition to that, they're really with us for one purpose: to get a good job. And we work closely with them to be able to do that.

 

Another area we provide through the technical college system is here in our office in Colombia we also house the readySC and Apprenticeship Carolina programs. readySC is the entity that works with new industries and existing industries as they come into the state to be able to have that highly trained workforce that we offer for the companies that come to the state of South Carolina.

 

We also use an apprenticeship model that through Apprenticeship Carolina allows companies to train individuals working with mentors to be able to grow their own workforce, if you will, to be able to have people that are skilled but have been trained in the way they do their particular business.

 

But we're really part of the economic development community in the state of South Carolina, though. Many years ago that was Michelin, BMW, and other companies like Boeing and Volvo. We still work with all those companies, but they've now brought in to the state of South Carolina in our partnership with the Department of Commerce, we have companies like AESC over in Florence that will make batteries for electric vehicles. We have Scout Motors here in the Columbia area that we'll be working with them to train their employees. Redwood materials is a company over in Berkeley County that will be recycling battery components.

 

At the end of the day, South Carolina and the technical college system is really about return on investment. Here in the state of South Carolina, the technical college system, our governor and our legislature views the technical college system as a good investment of state funds. And what I mean by that is they invest your state tax dollars across the state of South Carolina in us training individuals for good jobs. So we really want to continue to be that return on investment as we produce the workforce for the future in 2024 and for many years to come.”

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