What We Do

International Transportation Learning Center is the only national organization that focuses on the frontline workforce in public transportation and transportation in general.  It is the only organization funded by the Federal Transit Administration, the US Department of Labor, and the Transit Cooperative Research Program to develop and support technical training partnerships for today’s and tomorrow’s front-line work force. 

Mission Statement

The International Transportation Learning Center is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving public transportation at the national level and within communities. To accomplish this mission, the Center builds labor-management training partnerships that improve organizational performance, expand workforce knowledge, skills and abilities, and promote career advancement.

Statement of Purpose

The International Transportation Learning Center is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving public transportation by committed investment at the national and local levels in frontline technical workers.  We facilitate, lead and support activities that benefit all stakeholders in public transportation, through:

• Labor-management partnerships that create high-quality workforce training programs leading to high-performance organizations based in collaborations that support employee voice, engagement and commitment;

• Cutting-edge research and evaluation of human capital investment and its outcomes in public transportation;

• National training standards created through joint labor-management industry consortia that improve organizational performance, advance workers’ skills, knowledge and abilities and ensure safe, efficient and well-maintained public transportation systems that drive and serve high consumer demand for public transport options;

• Career ladder programs that create opportunities for incumbent workers to advance through training and education;

• Career pathways into public transportation jobs that provide living wages and benefits, with an emphasis on access to those jobs and continuing education and training for young people and men and women from disadvantaged populations served by public transportation;

• Greener work processes that create more sustainable communities.

Since 2001, the Center has:

• sponsored or supported local and statewide training partnerships in 12 states, provided over 27,000 training opportunities for transit mechanics

• developed national training standards for six frontline maintenance and operations occupations

• created national frameworks for apprenticeship with mentoring and train-the-trainer for bus, rail vehicle and elevator-escalator technicians

• established an industry-wide Consortium for developing training materials for elevator-escalator technicians and initiated a broad-based proposal for a Signals training consortium (and broad interest in follow-on consortium work in fields like traction power and rail vehicle maintenance).

In more recent years, the Center has also started to develop additional programs that build on the partnerships for incumbent worker training:

• Safety, safety culture, and safety and health, expanding the reach of data-driven, problem-solving partnerships into new critical areas of joint interest to transit labor and management

• Career Pathways programs, using industry training standards and hands-on learning modules to motivate and educate in-school youth and other community members for future careers in frontline transit and other transportation occupations.