Where conditions are right, continuing education (CE) staff working in true collaboration with campus-based credit staff can meet the learning needs of the community and improve instructional quality with greater resource efficiency. CE staff must become learning strategists who bring ideas from their marketplace experience to the instructional planning processes of the institution. A CE office that lacks interest in fully representing both credit and non-credit options to the client is neither customer-responsive nor acting for the college as a whole. CE personnel have a unique and valuable capacity for environmental scanning, resource development, market research, and community outreach. If CE and credit staff think together, advances can be made in such areas as the actualization of the learning community, non-credit programming, general public credit outreach, community services, and occupational learning systems. Occupational clusters that adapt to today's demand will offer a continuum of learning services across the tech prep, job entry, and retraining markets. CE staff could become a major source for reporting workforce trends, for new program development, and for facilitating change in the institution to accommodate new industrial standards. CE administrators, no less than academic administrators, must become learning and institutional partnership leaders. (JMC)