Dr. Elana Zolfo
Dowling College
Website: www.dowling.edu
Elana Zolfo was only nine years old when her family emigrated from Israel to the United States. Her father, a police officer who was among the first class of officers trained when Israel became independent, moved his family here for a variety of reasons. One of them was to ensure that his two children would have an opportunity to continue their education, something Elana has taken to heart. "It was very different then," Elana explained. "Not only was it a different time, but a different culture." Her mother worked as head bookkeeper at the only taxi service a city where a horse and buggy was still a common sight at the time. With other family members in the New York area, they settled in Freeport, near the water. "When I was a child we lived near the beach," she said. "I can't imagine being anywhere that's not near the ocean." Continuing education and being near the water remain perfectly in tune with the life Elana has chosen. She has pursued her education at three prominent universities on Long Island earning an undergraduate degree at Hofstra University and her M.B.A. at Adelphi. She is currently working toward her doctoral degree, an Ed.D., from Dowling. Adult continuing education and corporate education, her specialization, is a perfect match for the HIA's business/education partnership. "The field has changed a lot," Elana explained. "We now realize that education is a life-long experience." Re-education is not limited to re-training for a different field or industry, she added. It also means keeping up with technology and the globalization of commerce. Her commute from Long Beach to Oakdale along Long Island's south shore to Dowling is not as arduous as it sounds, she says. Especially since she loves what she does as the administrator of the adult education programs at Dowling. In fact, she just earned a promotion and new title, Vice President of Corporate Programs and Continuing Education. She has been at Dowling for eight years and worked at the Suffolk County Community College Techni-Center on Oser Avenue before that. "That's how I got involved with the HIA," she explained. She joined S.C.C.C. in 1986 and moved to the Techni-Center in 1991. Her involvement with HIA began shortly after that. Over the years she has witnessed a dramatic change in attitude on the part of both the educational and corporate communities. "There's much more of a collaborative effort in training and in other areas today," she noted. From her days developing programs at the Techni-Center, which was established to provide corporate training, to the programs at Dowling which serve as many as 2,000 students, the growth and diversity of programs is impressive. She credits the HIA with fostering part of that growth, as witnessed by the development of the Education Committee, a spin off of the Business Development Committee, early on. She does a lot of listening to companies to try and predict what kinds of educational courses they will need to keep competitive. She has arranged courses to teach workers in China to speak English so they could communicate with companies here, for example. "I deal with many corporations and community people," she added. "We provide training, which is always necessary, and continuing education or degree coursework. So it's a good mix." Deciding what to offer is a big part of her job. "The premise used to be "offer a course and people will come"." she recalled. "What we discovered, through working with the HIA, is that we had to find out what companies needed. " And it isn't just classes for individual employees, she added, sometime it's educating the company on where they fit in today's market. "Training has to be flexible, customized. We have to stay on top of it to be prepared for whatever the future brings." She learns what companies want by going to HIA events, roundtables, or committee meetings and listening to business leaders. "Sometimes they don't know what they need, but when I listen I find there are needs out there that no one else is addressing and find a solution," she said. "Every company needs a well-trained workforce." While the water is a prime attraction for Elana during her free time, she also enjoys slipping into New York City for the theater, opera or just to explore. "I love Broadway, walking around Manhattan and being spontaneous," she said. Another thing she likes to do during her time off is travel. When she started to list the places she had been to over the years; Israel, Brazil, Mexico, Europe, she realized that they all had coastlines. Perhaps it was her love of the water that led her there. When she's on vacation she doesn't get into the so-called "extreme" water sports. "I like to sit back, read and just relax," she said adding that she has relatives living all over the world and often visits them during vacations. There's an advantage for a company to belong to HIA, she said. "HIA offers seminars because the people want them. It helps our economy to train people for work in the real world." And Dowling isn't alone in meeting those needs. "There is competition in some areas among schools here but for the most part it is a collaborative effort," she explained.
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