I was speaking with Nickie at Bristol and she mentioned she has moved to the workforce development department at the college. They are responsible for taking applications from employees to award money for professional development. They have some unique characteristics that would differ quite dramatically from their existing scholarship application process including:

1. Very short cycles (monthly) and short awarding decisions. Workforce Development goes on all year long.
2. Very different questions for employees - including potential import data since they have all of the employee-specific information on file with the institution.
3. Tracking usage of the funds - confirming employees followed through and were successful with the professional development awarded.

It sounds a lot like scholarship management for students, but this is of course just for employees - taking classes, going to conferences, getting educational certificates, etc. So, there is a lot of cross over with applying, reviewing and awarding but I do not know how the two processes could live in the same system. She said they are inundated with paper right now in that office and she felt like she was taking several steps backward. I thought I would share with you and I emailed Matt about it as there might be some kind of future business opportunity there...like a Workforce Development Module/Portal, etc. It was an interesting conversation and happy to speak more with you about it.