James Lombella isn’t new to leadership roles. The recently selected president of Enfield’s Asnuntuck Community College earned his management and executive stripes in the private sector, first as the founder of a retail and service company and then later as an operations manager at a Massachusetts packaging business.
He was also an operations manager in the Pepperidge Farm division of Campbell Soup.
The 44-year-old said he sees similarities between his private sector and education roles and is carrying over many of the skills that made him successful in business, including management and leadership, budgeting and forecasting, strategic analysis and experience operating in large teams.
“In the private sector, your most important partner is the customer. In a college, your most important partner is the student,” said Lombella. “So when I stand in front of the faculty and ask ‘Why do we exist?’ we all reply ‘We exist for the student.’”
Chosen over more than 90 applicants, Lombella is one of four newly appointed community college and state university presidents who faces the difficult task of taking over a public higher education institution in transition.
Like many of its peers, Asnuntuck is looking to boost its enrollment. Although the school has seen more students in recent years, its enrollment is down 21 percent since 1993, its first year of operation. It had 1,715 students last year.
Lombella, who served as Asnuntuck’s interim president last year, said his main priority early on will be overseeing the $23.5 million, two-year renovation and upgrade of the school’s Advanced Manufacturing & Technology Center (AMTC). The project is being funded by the state to provide more opportunities to train Connecticut’s next generation of manufacturing workers.
Lombella and his staff are currently working on the AMTC’s design. Construction and renovations should begin in early 2015 and end by 2016. The project specifically targets renovations to the center’s computer-controlled manufacturing and electronics and welding labs, which serve the core courses of Asnuntuck’s manufacturing program.
The facility will be upgraded to a 25,000-square-foot complex including a 4,000-square-foot computer lab. The expansion will also allow the school to double the number of students in the program to about 600 each academic year.
Lombella says that focusing these funds on the manufacturing center is important because apart from hosting full-time students, the center trains and educates around 1,000 incumbent workers a year. Many of these workers arrive from Pratt & Whitney and other aerospace component manufacturers.
Al Samuel of the Aerospace Components Manufacturers, an industry trade group, said Asnuntuck’s expanded training program will be crucial as the industry sees a surge in production over the next few years and new technologies and high demand puts great pressure on an aging workforce.
“We are in need of a young and trained generation,” said Samuel.
Asnuntuck will also be investing in credit-based introductory courses to high school seniors from Enfield and neighboring Granby and East Granby, where the school draws most of its students, Lombella said.
Asnuntuck’s curriculum is designed to be accessible to students who are either full-time or part-time employees, or who can only arrange to study during evening hours or weekends. Transfer students are also a key customer base.
Lombella’s other priorities include expanding the school’s online-based curriculum, which currently features online-only or hybrid course selections. The goal of beefing up online offerings isn’t necessarily to attract students from a wider geographic footprint, but rather accommodate regional students who want to advance in the curriculum through distance learning, Lombella said.
As the Enfield community college undertakes all these challenges, Lombella sees himself harmonizing his experience as a businessman and an interim college president by interchanging his role as principal coordinator of the new state funds with that of being someone fully engaged in faculty and student life.
He says an open-door policy and being a good communicator are also skills he will borrow from his private-sector experience.
