A lot has been happening here at Otsego Now lately. Most excitingly, we have finally gotten our space here on the fifth floor of 189 Main Street fully furnished and outfitted and it’s all really beautiful!

We are winding up our first Employability Training class, too. It will end with distribution of certificates next week. And then we’ll be beginning our first DSP Training class at the end of this month.

On top of all that, we held a really exciting and very successful launch event last week that earned us plenty of media coverage. Speakers included Senator James Seward, Empire State Development Mohawk Valley Regional Director Ken Tompkins, our business partners Paul Landers of Pathfinder Village and Greg Ward of Burt Rigid Box, Superintendent of the Oneonta City School District and educational partner Joseph Yelich, and Regional Workforce Training Center Director Dawn Rivers, all hosted by IDA Chairman Bob Hanft.

A lot of people came and listened to the speeches and attended the Open House after that but, in case you couldn’t make it, please join me for a brief tour.

This small lounge area is the first thing you see when you enter the Susquehanna Room. But once you get inside, the full glory of the space bursts upon you.

This is the seminar space in the Susquehanna Room, complete with huge whiteboard and LCD projector that turns it into a smart board. You can make any kind of presentation imaginable with this setup, everything from simple whiteboard stick figures to the most sophisticated streamed content online.

Upstairs in the actual training center, there is a lounge and beverage center. The 55″ flat screen television is being used as a high definition monitor with which you can, once again, access anything from a PowerPoint presentation on a thumb drive to your favorite episode of House on Netflix. The space can be used casually, by our trainees during a break, or for informal meetings for small groups.

But the pièce de résistance is this:

This is our 12-seat training classroom, complete with individual computer stations (equipped with mice and headsets, as well as laptops), as well as another large smart board with touch screen capabilities and offline and online access. Trainees have all the resources available on the Internet at their fingertips but the classroom itself supports small group intimacy that enables individualized attention for every one of them.

Now that we have our training center up and running, we are planning to expand our course offerings to meet more of our regional employer needs. If you’re interested in improving your own earning power in and around Otsego County, keep and eye on our training programs page. All our courses will be posted there.