The purpose of conducting this study was to understand how neoliberal discourses manifest within the local context of a short-term, job-training program offered at a two-year college in the USA. Ethnographic data were collected at the local site through interviews, observations and document analysis. We then situated these data within a global context represented by a corpus of purposively selected national and international policy texts. Focusing on three components of discourse as social action--genres, representations and identities--the data analysis illuminated three interrelated themes relating to how institutional actors translated neoliberal discourses available at the global scale into practice. The ideological consequences for learners as well as examples of counter-hegemonic resistance are discussed. (Contains 2 notes.)