Trent has returned as Executive Director to Minnesota North College – Customized Training Solutions after working on behalf of Minnesota State’s System Office for the last three years in multiple capacities revolving around the scaling-up of our Customized Training Solutions work in the continuing education and customized training space. Through his work as Senior Project Lead and as Interim Executive Director for Workforce Solutions, Trent’s role was to work with multiple constituencies to redesign and implement a better system for continuing education and customized training delivery, one that delivers more workforce training capacity to our business and industry partners, reduces systematic silos between our campuses, while also being profitable without any appropriation.
Previously, Trent served as the founding Executive Director of Advanced Minnesota for the Northeast Higher Education District (NHED). In this capacity Trent was charged with consolidating and streamlining the customized training, continuing education, and university partnership departments and their twenty-one education professionals from the five community and technical colleges of the NHED into one entity. “Advanced Minnesota: Five colleges. One training solution.” provides companies throughout the Midwest with training in safety and health, fire, law enforcement, process improvement, emergency medical services, and general industry training among others all while being financially solvent without any state appropriation. In this position he also worked to strengthened partnerships with universities to enable more students to complete their degrees on the Iron Range.
In addition, Trent has also served as the Director of Arrowhead University Consortium (a university partnership entity) for NHED and during his time as director he helped launch and implement the Iron Range Engineering program, a collaboration between regional industries, Itasca Community College and Minnesota State University, Mankato that delivers a unique project-based baccalaureate degree on a community college campus in greater Northeastern Minnesota. Before NHED, Trent held frontline professional positions of Transfer Specialist, Professional Advisor, and Admissions Counselor at multiple higher education institutions throughout Minnesota.
Trent is a proud Associate of Arts degree graduate of Hibbing Community College, he also holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from the University of St. Thomas, a Master’s degree in Education from the University of Minnesota-Duluth and a Doctor of Education in Teaching and Learning from the University of Minnesota where his dissertation title was: The Community College Baccalaureate and Iron Range Engineering: Limiting Rural Brain Drain in Northeastern Minnesota by Offering a Hands-On Baccalaureate Degree on a Community College Campus. Additionally, to his work in higher education, Trent has served as the President of the Range Center Inc. board which provides residential and employment services for people with developmental disabilities, served as a Board Member for the Grand Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce, and is currently Board Chair for the Northland Foundation, a regional initiative foundation (born out of the McKnight Foundation), that serves the communities of northeastern Minnesota. Trent currently lives in Hibbing, Minnesota with his wife, Janelle, and their two young children Brady and Charlie.