JPMorgan Chase Foundation awards BHEF with $1.2 million to create workforce partnerships

Partnerships will focus on training and developing undergraduate workforces in seven regions across the United States

WASHINGTON, DC (October 11, 2018) – The Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF) has received a two-year, $1.2 million grant from the JPMorgan Chase Foundation to assist in growing the number and diversity of graduates with the digital skills necessary to succeed in today’s workforce by developing and strengthening business-higher education partnerships.
 
BHEF has partnered with JPMorgan Chase to implement partnerships in eight regions across the United States: Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, Raleigh-Durham, the Southeast, Utah, and the Greater Washington area. Each regional partnership will be led by Fortune 500 CEOs and local colleges and universities and will focus on skills specific to each region such as cybersecurity, advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, and cloud technology. These partnerships will create new or realigned undergraduate pathways and apprenticeship models and expand the number of students who have access to these pathways.
 
“Meaningful collaboration between businesses and higher education institutions creates novel solutions demanded by the next generation of workers and needed to drive economic development across the country,” said Jennie Sparandara, Executive Director and Head of Workforce Initiatives at JPMorgan Chase. “BHEF’s deep expertise in creating sustainable, successful business-academic partnerships makes it an excellent partner for this initiative.” 
 
To implement these partnerships, BHEF will frame specific sets of digital skills competencies in the different fields and map the competencies against existing curricula at local higher education institutions. These competency maps will then be utilized to identify any curricular gaps, and companies will work with higher education institutions to provide hands-on learning to address and close these gaps.
 
“BHEF is grateful to have been chosen by JPMorgan Chase Foundation to implement these partnerships by utilizing BHEF’s proven Strategic Business Engagement Model,” said Brian Fitzgerald, CEO of BHEF. “Our efforts will increase alignment of higher education with workforce needs on both regional and national levels and create a highly skilled and diverse workforce.”
 
Since developing the Strategic Business Engagement Model and Partnership Implementation Process, BHEF partnerships have created dozens of new majors, minors, and certificates in emerging fields such as data science and analytics, cybersecurity, and engineering, preparing thousands of graduates with the new skills necessary to the digital economy.
 
About JPMorgan Chase
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM) is a leading global financial services firm with assets of $2.6 trillion and operations worldwide. The Firm is a leader in investment banking, financial services for consumers and small businesses, commercial banking, financial transaction processing, and asset management. A component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, JPMorgan Chase & Co. serves millions of customers in the United States and many of the world's most prominent corporate, institutional and government clients under its J.P. Morgan and Chase brands. Information about JPMorgan Chase & Co. is available at www.jpmorganchase.com.