A grant project was designed to facilitate the transition of students from a community college adult education program into a community college credit-degree program in manufacturing. Key features of the program included a focus on identifying policy implications; bridging the separation between the adult education segment of the community college and the more traditional post-secondary education segment; implementing a contextualized curriculum; using a learning community model; and using action research. Despite difficulty reaching the target number of students, the experimental and policy development emphasis of the grant allowed other key characteristics of the project to yield interesting results and to have a lasting effect on the participants. (Contains 1 footnote.)