Graduate School USA Success Stories

Graduate School USA Success Stories

Since 1921, federal, local and state government and some of our nation’s most respected organizations have entrusted Graduate School USA (GSUSA) to train and develop their employees to become their biggest assets. From 176 students in eight courses to now more than 250 courses and thousands of students worldwide each year, one thing has remained the same – GSUSA’s commitment to our customers’ success.

Take a moment to read a few stories about how we have assisted organizations like yours with workforce solutions:

United States Depatment of Interior - Office of Insular Affairs
 

THE CHALLENGE:

To provide professional training and organizational development services for the United States of the Interior - Office of Insular Affairs - United States-affiliated insular areas. These include the territories of Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI), and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), as well as three Freely Associated States (FAS): the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) and the Republic of Palau (Palau).
 

THE SOLUTION:

After meeting with the appropriate officials to assess the need of each insular government, GSUSA identified areas of improvement that could be of significant benefit to the Government including:

• Financial improvement of the Government Finance Officers’ Association (IGFOA)
• Assisting the Association of Pacific Island Public Auditors (APIPA) with improving their internal quality control system and providing further understanding and assurance of compliance with the Government Auditing Standards
• Continuing professional education for the auditing staff from the Insular Governments, Pohnpei, Yap, Chuuk, Kosrae, Guam, Samoa, and the Virgin Islands.

From these findings, we developed training, in particular, to address good governance and financial management capacity development needs within the U.S. insular governments.

The training program areas were identified as Pacific Islands Training Initiative (PITI) – Virgin Islands Training Initiative (VITI) and Business Missions; the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) – Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) Economic Reporting.

We customized and designed an Executive Leadership Development Program (ELDP) to provide leadership training to insular government employees to develop skills in leadership, management, government finance, procurement, and auditing.
 

GSUSA MEETS THE CHALLENGE:

"The contractor performed in an exceptional manner. The quality of the service by the Contractor was exceptional. The reports and data were accurate. The products and services were exceptional. The work met all expected specifications and standards and the Government and technical direction to resolve problems was only minimally needed. For all seven insular areas, GSUSA also developed and presented annual Performeters - an analytical tool that takes a government’s financial statements and converts them into useful and understandable measures of financial performance. The Performeter uses a copyrighted analysis methodology to arrive at an overall rating of 1-10, which indicates the overall financial health and performance of a government.

Since 2002, the PITI-VITI has been developing Performeters annually for each of the insular areas. This has resulted in making multiple years of cumulative data available to the governments. This is a tremendous benefit to the Government of the United States thereby improving accountability, transparency , and the most appropriate use of funds (allocation of funds)."
 

American Red Cross

For the Red Cross, we customized French, Spanish, and Arabic language classroom courses that focus on helping first responders and aid workers communicate better in a variety of situations with the people they serve.
 

Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)

Since 2012, Graduate School USA’s Distance Education team has delivered virtual class series for HUD supervisors as part of the agency’s Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) program. A flagship leadership development program for advanced-degree candidates, the PMF is designed to develop future federal leaders.
 

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)

Graduate School USA staff consulted with FEMA’s Senior Educational Policy Advisor to develop a transformational leadership framework and plan. The resulting program took a unique approach, including multiple levels of leaders in many of the same modular and customized focus activities. This meant that multiple perspectives reflecting mission-critical functions could be brought to problem-solving activities, and all agency leaders could be expected to possess many of the same essential competencies. 
 

City of New York

We support state and local governments nationwide with flexible, customized services. Since 1992, Graduate School USA has provided the New York City government with comprehensive auditing training, mapping its curriculum to city performance competencies and covering diverse issues.