Butler County educators prepare students for careers
Amid unusual job market conditions and coming out of a year and a half of pandemic difficulty, schools, colleges and educators across Butler County are striving to prepare students for the workplace.
At Butler County Community College, which serves about 19,000 students overall, the focus is on reaching students where they need assistance most and making sure they're ready to enter a workforce that needs their help.
For the 2021 calendar year, in the workforce development and public safety program, BC3 has 15,956 people enrolled. The academic program for the fall semester has close to 3,000 students enrolled.
Belinda Richardson, vice president for academic affairs, said that she approaches preparing individuals for the workforce from a number of perspectives. One angle is in being aware of the needs of particular groups the college serves.Richardson said that the community college segment was hit harder than most by the pandemic, based on the demographics of many who attend: people who are first-generation students, who work while attending college, who are living of varying socioeconomic classes and unique family situations.Speaking at the Women Shaping Our Region conference earlier in the month, Richardson also brought up the needs of those in “pink collar jobs,” or lower-paying, front-facing jobs primarily held by women that were adversely impacted during the pandemic.“In many — not all — cases women are the primary caregivers, and women had to make decisions about 'Do I stay home to be with my children?' because children were home during remote learning,” she said.The pandemic, she said, has allowed BC3 to be more aware of the possibilities for accommodating different living situations. She cited the college's efforts through its Pioneer Pantry food pantry, founded in 2019, to provide assistance for students living with food insecurity.
“When we look at poverty, and we look at food insecurity, and the work we are doing, we recognize this is very important work,” she said. “We continue to serve our populations and we address these in a number of ways: low tuition, additional campus locations in underserved rural areas, opportunities for scholarships and addressing food insecurity.“We see our students, and we feel that they are part of a caring community, and we want to make sure they feel and recognize that.”She said that the pandemic demonstrated the “flexibility” that BC3 offers in serving students, and pushed the college to expand remote options in a way that they had previously hoped and planned to do.“It gave us the opportunity to increase our online and remote offerings,” Richardson said. “We have altered the way that we do education, and the way that we do business.“We have opened up and provided opportunities that go beyond face-to-face offerings to offering more online and more flexibility, and we experienced that in our workforce development division just as we did in our academic programs.”
During the pandemic, BC3 workforce development educators had to change their approach, said Lisa Campbell, dean of Workforce Development.“In my area, we were really working (directly with) companies, but companies were shutting down and we couldn't go into their facilities for a period,” she said. “But that didn't stop our instructors from trying, and reaching, and saying: 'How do we flip this, how can we still be accessible for our audiences.'”The increased need for new workers led some businesses to hire workers more quickly, she said, and the college is shifting to adapt.“Because of the changes our employers are going through, I'm becoming more aware that they are hiring more people without certain skills. They're bringing individuals onboard and training them once they're hired,” she said. “The individuals who might come to us first with some kind of training needs are going straight to work.
“We are shifting how we work with the businesses we work with, and we are trying to prepare our program to support our businesses that may have training needs.”Campbell said that the Workforce Development team works closely with the Tri-County Workforce Investment Board and reads their lists of high-demand jobs to align their courses with what is most needed.“The connection with the Tri-County Workforce Investment Board and our Career Link is important, because that's something that our certificate and professional education department work very closely with,” Campbell said. “We're good partners. It goes both ways.”Some of the developments as the pandemic has progressed have been unexpected, she said.“The numbers of job seekers, especially during COVID, we thought that there might be more individuals looking to transition (careers), but we haven't seen that yet,” she said. “Really, how COVID impacted us is many people are looking for online training and programs.”
Educators at the high school, middle school and elementary levels are also working to make sure that students are prepared for the jobs of tomorrow.South Butler County School District career and intervention counselor Courtney Stein said that at South Butler, the process of readying students to think about careers starts early.“We try to be proactive about preparing them for whatever education and training would be necessary, so if they do have a career in mind, they have a good idea of what the pathway would look like before their senior year,” she said.Students at South Butler begin doing career assessments long before they get to high school. Sixth-graders participate in lessons about finding their “career clusters” and doing research on the outlook of careers for the future.The freshman seminar class, which is now a graduation requirement, is a semester-long class that covers a number of different topics that students might find useful in their post-high-school path: mental health, financial literacy, conflict resolution and the pathways that exist to attend college or trade schools.
“The freshman seminar is relatively new,” Stein said. “Our current juniors are the first class year that would have done it. We have done career exploration before that too, but now, instead of pushing that into classes, we have the opportunity to make it part of the class curriculum.”Senior students at South Butler also have individual meetings with counselors to discuss career plans and what education pathways those plans might require. Job shadowing opportunities are also encouraged, but not required.“We do recommend they try to get a hands-on, firsthand account of what a day in a different career looks like,” Stein said. “Seeing it in person can be very different from reading about it online. We have opportunity for two excused absences from school for job shadowing opportunities, and we encourage students to take advantage of them.”During the pandemic, it was harder to get students directly into workplace settings for job shadowing, Stein said, so informational interviews, where students have the chance to ask adults about their careers and get more information, became more common.At North Catholic High School, career development program coordinator Jessika Coltz also saw more students participating in informational interviews to learn more about careers.“(Informational interviews) are something that you can do as a phone call or Zoom call,” Coltz said. “We also do bring in industry professionals to talk about their career paths and the things that make them successful. That is another way, because people are talking about their life and lived experiences, and including information about how COVID has changed the way that they work.”Since colleges began consistently offering in-person courses again this year, Coltz said, students are feeling more confident about their future planning.“This year, it seems like folks are going forward with their plans in ways that they would have anyway,” she said. “The only notable exception might be kids who had planned to do any sort of traveling. We get a couple of kids who will go on mission trips and will take a gap year to do that sort of work. Those options are different now because of travel restrictions.”One change that Stein has seen in students plans since COVID: more children are interested in health careers.“More students are interested in careers in mental health, whether it be therapists or other professions in the health industry — health in general, but especially mental health,” she said. “Whether it's because of the past two years, or because maybe in general our society has been less stigmatizing of mental health — it's just as important as physical health. I can't say whether or not that is because of the pandemic, but it is one of the positives that has come out of it.”
At Butler County Area Vocational-Technical School, principal Jared Ryan said that the worker shortage has provided more opportunities for students.“It's created some opportunity to get students out on cooperative learning experiences with employers while they are still students in high school,” he said.Students have the chance to work during their senior year at a local employer related to their program of study — students in the Machine Technology program, he said, often get employed at Penn United, for example.“Typically the majority of them stay in (the jobs after graduation),” Ryan said. “They get them into their apprenticeship training programs, and start that process there.”Further opportunities have opened up for students who now may have more of a chance to receive training on the job.
“One of the biggest things we're seeing is employers who are willing to hire students just based on work ethic, even if they didn't receive training in that specific area,” Ryan said. “If they've shown here that they have a good work ethic and good attendance, if they can rely on the person to show up, they are willing to train them too. They see transferrable knowledge and transferrable skills.”He said the increased openings are across a variety of programs.“It's not really any one program that is experiencing anything different prior to COVID in terms of employment opportunities,” he said. “They were in demand before and they still are, even more so now.”
