AMS Fulfillment Invests in Employees through Adult Education
A unique experiment has been going on wherein Santa Clarita Valley’s College of the Canyons (COC) is collaborating with AMS Fulfillment in presenting free classes to AMS employees either at the COC campus or at the at AMS Valencia facility.
There are several ways in which these first-of-a-kind collaborations are taking place. The most recent, scheduled to begin in May of 2016, will be a class in beginner Microsoft Excel. These beginner class take place on the COC campus. The future hope of AMS is to continue these classes into intermediate and expert levels, and provide them at the AMS campus location. This way AMS employees can easily take the class, advance their skills, and put them to use at AMS or with other companies as their careers grow. As an added attraction to members of the public who live nearby the AMS Valencia campus, all COC classes held on the AMS campus are open to the general public through COC.
Santa Clarita’s College of the Canyons (COC) and AMS Fulfillment have been working together in this exemplary way for well over a year. Their collaboration, which has been a first between the college and a business, is a win-win for all, benefiting the students, the business, the broader community and the college.
For more details on how the classes work: Registration for the classes is done through COC, and instructors come to the AMS facility from the college. The classes are majority funded by the Employee Training Institute (ETI), with partial funding by AMS, including the books. Employees of AMS and members of the general public are invited to attend not just the Excel class, but all classes that have been taking place so far.
In February 2016 a very interesting and highly beneficial class began on the AMS campus. It is the adult education non-credit ESL (English as a Second Language) beginner course. Thirty-four students are attending the twice-a-week level one class at this time. When this level is completed, AMS will continue offering classes through level four, which will be the entire non-credit ESL offering of COC.
For AMS employees, the ESL class is very beneficial with regard to their work, in that most of the positions in the company do require an ability to communicate in English, especially with regard to correspondence. In addition, having gained a greater command of English, new opportunities within the company and within COC will open up for those who are attending the classes.
Concurrent with offering the English as a Second Language class, AMS and COC are collaborating in offering the Lean Six Sigma (LSS) Green Belt course. Like the ESL classes, all levels of the LSS training are taking place within the AMS facility and are majority funded by ETI with partial funding by AMS. LSS classes teach a business management philosophy that is meant to improve the efficiency of a company, its effectiveness, and at the same time improve the customer experience. The LSS classes are and taught by COC instructors, and they are currently ongoing as students reach the higher levels of training. Prior to these two courses, AMS also hosted a Lean Enterprise Six Sigma course that was very well attended and received.
AMS is now looking into offering two more courses: A GED course to equip individuals who haven’t completed high school with the knowledge and skills necessary to attend college, and a citizenship preparation class where students can learn the naturalization application process, US history and government, and the English vocabulary and skills that are necessary for the citizenship test. It is easy to see the benefits of both of these courses to the individuals involved, to AMS and to the community.
The advantage of offering classes to AMS employees in collaboration with College of the Canyons will be mentioned in a future blog from the AMS CEO, with regard to some well-thought-out strategies on how to incorporate minimum wage increases while reducing any negative impact to the company.
