Stories & Case Studies
Serving western Wisconsin through more than 165 programs, certificates, and apprenticeships designed with employer input, ATD Network institution Chippewa Valley Technical College (CVTC) has long made workforce alignment central to its mission. With the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), the goal remained the same — preparing students for workplace success — but as employers and educators alike grappled with AI’s potential impact, the college found itself rethinking how it engaged employers, prepared faculty, and anticipated emerging workforce needs.
When CVTC first proposed integrating AI into its Administrative Professional Program, the advisory board wasn’t immediately convinced. Early conversations surfaced real hesitation: Would AI have a place in fields where proofreading and professional communication were core? But CVTC’s intent was never to replace those foundational skills. As CVTC Director of Educational Technology Melody Brennan, Ph.D., put it, the goal was to help students learn to use AI responsibly and effectively alongside them. The college moved forward, and over time, so did the advisory board.
One year later, the same advisory board had done a complete reversal by not just accepting and supporting AI integration but by asking the college to prioritize it.
That arc — from resistance to advocacy, from hesitation to co-leadership — captures something important about what it takes to build workforce-ready AI at a technical college. It’s not a technology story. It’s a story about trust, curiosity, and the willingness to move ahead of industry demand rather than wait for it.
Building capacity across three lanes
CVTC’s approach to AI isn’t siloed into one department or initiative. Brennan describes it as working simultaneously across three interconnected lanes: staff development, industry alignment, and student success. The greatest impact comes when progress in one area reinforces progress in the others — a multiplier effect that has shaped the college’s approach to AI.
On the staff side, CVTC built a layered professional development infrastructure that meets employees where they are. An asynchronous training module in Canvas gives any employee on-demand access to AI knowledge and skill building . Twice-yearly institutional in-service days include AI keynotes, breakout sessions, and open lab time. And a two-day Learning Summit each May offers faculty time in summer to redesign courses before the fall semester begins.
“We offer a wide variety of ways and opportunities for employees to develop their understanding and use,” Brennan said. What’s notable is that CVTC deliberately opened these opportunities to people with a wide range of perspectives — from early adopters to skeptics. “It really helped build the conversation and the depth of knowledge that’s shared.”
This mirrors what the ATD AI for All Task Force identifies in its roadmap for using AI to accelerate student success, Creating the AI-Enabled Community College, in Action Area 4: Build staff capabilities. It isn’t just about training in the use of tools; it’s about creating the conditions for a whole-institution culture shift, one where leaders, faculty, and support staff are all moving together.
Leading industry conversations on AI
The CVTC story reveals something the ATD AI for All Task Force roadmap names clearly: industry partners often can’t articulate their AI needs until institutions lead the way. Stephanie Esser, executive dean of business, arts, and sciences at CVTC, put it plainly: “Because AI is evolving so quickly, some industry needs aren’t fully defined yet, but we’re working together to get in front of that.”
Rather than waiting for employer demand signals to catch up, CVTC leaned into its advisory board structure (existing committees that meet twice yearly) and added AI as a standing agenda item. The conversations that followed extended beyond curriculum. They became a collaborative process of sensemaking, with CVTC and its industry partners building shared understanding of where the workforce is headed.
The result was more than curriculum alignment — it was a reversal of the typical dynamic: community colleges waiting to hear from employers then scrambling to respond. CVTC flipped it. And now, as Esser noted, their employers look to them as much as the other way around: “Our employers are relying on us just as much to help them with what AI looks like in their industry.”
This is what Action Area 7, Leverage AI for Workforce Alignment, looks like in practice — not a one-time curriculum audit but an ongoing, reciprocal relationship with industry that evolves as the technology does.
Designing AI that serves students
The cumulative impact of CVTC’s coordinated approach is clearest when you look at what’s happening for students.
Gregg Nelson, an English faculty member at CVTC, piloted using AI as a co-facilitator in small group sessions, giving it a persona, asking it questions, letting students interact with it in real time. When AI addressed a student by name mid-conversation, Gregg said his reaction was immediate: “There are so many things this can do that I don’t know anything about, and this is a really exciting time as an educator.”
That enthusiasm isn’t happening by chance; it’s being reinforced through intentional institutional design. CVTC embedded AI criteria directly into its Core Abilities, the foundational competencies woven through all general education courses, and built common assessments that measure not just whether students use AI but whether they use it generatively and ethically. Instructors across nine sections of the same course came together, used AI to compare their rubrics, and built something unified. Students, regardless of which section they’re in or which instructor they have, now get consistent preparation.
As Esser put it, “We are ensuring that students are getting equitable access and consistency to the same content, and it’s being assessed in the same way.”
Creating the conditions for change
When asked what had to be in place for all of this to work, the CVTC team pointed to the same interconnected conditions: leadership support, a culture of curiosity, and sustainable funding.
Leadership didn’t just endorse the work; they modeled it. Faculty fellows were funded through grants to support colleagues in navigating the shift from knowing AI is in the core abilities to knowing what that means for their course. New faculty developers come from departments already enthusiastic about AI, creating the conditions for that culture to be self-sustaining.
“The culture is plan, do, check, adjust,” Brennan said. “We’re very innovative, we’re very curious, and we are a culture of doers.”
Importantly, CVTC didn’t treat grants as one-time wins. Their institutional research and grants team consistently asked: “How do we sustain this so it’s not just a hurrah moment?” The answer was embedding the work so deeply that it outlasted any single funding cycle.
Generating a snowball effect
What began as an overhaul of the Administrative Professional Program soon spread across the college as other deans saw opportunities to strengthen the workforce relevance of their own programs amidst the increasing need for an AI-enabled workforce. The collaborative culture made the work replicable in ways that no single initiative could have predicted.
“Going from hesitation and curiosity to fully executing,” Brennan said, “and then being told you’re the expert, it became a collaborative experience. We don’t really always name one area or one department as exemplary; it’s just the collaborative culture.”
That’s the multiplier effect in action: when staff capacity, industry alignment, and student success advance in tandem, the impact compounds. Students graduate better prepared for the workforce. Industry partners become co-designers. Faculty move from uncertainty to leadership. And the institution becomes the kind of place people look to not because it has all the answers, but because it never stopped asking the right questions.
This blog post is part of the “From Vision to Action” series showcasing how ATD Network colleges are operationalizing AI integration across eight key action areas identified in the ATD AI for All Task Force’s report, “Creating the AI-Enabled Community College: A Road Map for Using Generative AI To Accelerate Student Success.”