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3 <br /> 1 <br /> INTRODUCTION <br /> In October of 1994, the Board of County Commissioners created the Skill Development Board <br /> and charged it with the following: <br /> 1. Identify the employment skill development needs of county citizens and how they relate to <br /> current or possible future job opportunities. <br /> 2. Develop an inventory of existing and/or potentially available training/skill development <br /> opportunities and resources and also any support systems available. <br /> 3. Identify the space, programming, and equipment needs that will be required to successfully <br /> create a skill development program; also identify any barriers to training. <br /> 4. Explore all funding possibilities, including the State of North Carolina and public private <br /> partnerships with contributions of funding, equipment, or training expertise coming from <br /> businesses directly benefitting from such a program. <br /> As the 23-member workgroup addressed this charge, two philosophical directions were agreed <br /> upon and used to develop this report. The first was that our county goal should be to provide <br /> adequate training and services to allow all Orange County citizens to be self-sufficient and <br /> free of all publie and private assistance. The second direction was to agree that the needs and <br /> programmatic solutions varied among distinct segments and, therefore, we first had to identify the <br /> groupings and then develop means to address their individual and, in some cases, collective needs. <br /> SECTION 1A - NEEDS OF ORANGE COUNTY CITIZENS <br /> To assess the educational and training needs of different populations, the Board divided the target <br /> audience into seven key need groups. These are: <br /> 1. Persons on public assistance <br /> 2. Under-employed <br /> 3. Unemployed <br /> 4. School dropouts/kickouts <br /> 5. High school graduates looking for work <br /> 6. Working poor <br /> 7. People lost outside the system <br /> The Board recognized that these are often overlapping populations, i.e., an Orange County <br />