Career Advice Blog

Citizen Schools Career Apprenticships

brightfuturespress — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:53:44 +0000

Citizen Schools Apprenticeships

: Lowes Grove Publishing Apprentices

Career exploration is my thing. My work is all about helping students of all ages figure out what they want to be when they grow up. So, of course, I’m always on the look-out for people and programs who share an interest in helping kids prepare for bright futures. Which explains why I was so excited to learn about an organization called Citizen Schools. Citizen Schools is a national initiative that trains and supports adult professionals to share their expertise with groups of middle school “apprentices” during ten-week after school apprenticeships. Everything about this organization so supports everything I’ve been trying to do all these years….

About five minutes after disovering Citizen Schools, I was signed up to offer a Publishing Apprenticeship at their Lowes Grove Middle School site in Durham, North Carolina. Last week, we (along with 11 other apprenticeship teams) celebrated the end of very productive (and really fun!) apprenticeships at a local community center. The students were looking good in their “professional attire” and totally lived up to the the event’s promise to WOW! parents, teachers, and community leaders.

To say that this was a rewarding volunteer experience is something of an understatement. Citizens Schools is the type of program with potential to benefit every student it touches. And it starts with a cadre of caring professionals willing to share what they love to do with students eager to find the passion that will ultimately drive their own life’s work. You can find out more at http://www.citizenschools.org. But, first, take a look at the wonderful advice book written by the Lowe’s Grove apprentices! Click here: Lowes Grove.

Merging Education, Commerce a Goal:Career Academies

brightfuturespress — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:57:53 +0000

By Emily Ford

eford

KANNAPOLIS — In the dark days after Pillowtex closed in 2003, N.C. Sen. Fletcher Hartsell convened a meeting of business leaders and legislators in Kannapolis to deal with the aftermath of the largest layoff in state history.

More than 4,300 people in Rowan and Cabarrus counties had lost their jobs, and Hartsell, who represents Cabarrus County, wanted his committee to figure out how to prevent it from happening again.

"We learned lessons, but we never re … READ MORE

Stuck on Sticky Learning?

brightfuturespress — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:18:05 +0000

Project-Based Learning isn’t new. Some of education’s most prominent
voices — Rousseau, Piaget, Dewey — were advocates of various aspects
of it for decades and, in some cases, even centuries ago.

When thousands of British children were evacuated to the relative
safety of makeshift boarding schools during World War II, innovative
teachers made up for the lack of textbooks and other traditional
resources by using project-based learning to effectively teach
history, literature, science, and math.

In more recent days, study after study has found compelling evidence
that it is an effective way to engage students, cut absenteeism, boost
cooperative learning skills, and improve test scores.

Even though project-based learning has been advocated by brilliant
educators, tested by time, and validated under the scrutiny of
academic research, there has never been a better time to put it to use
in classrooms at every level and with students of all ages.

Why?

According to Sandy Mittelsteadt and Wally Holmes Bouchillon, authors
of a new book called Sticky Learning: A Make It Real Planning Guide
for Engaging Students in Project-Based Learning, project-based
learning becomes a springboard for launching incredibly effective 21st
century “sticky learning” experiences when it blends four key
ingredients:

1. Integrated curriculum

2. Action-based inquiry

3. Discovery learning

4. Real world application

The result, they say, is purposeful learning that involves students in
the pursuit and authentic application of knowledge.

In short, sticky learning works because it sticks!

To order copies of Sticky Learning Toolkit, go online to http://www.brightfuturespress.com/Item186/Sticky_Learning.aspx.

Career Exploration from a Corporate Perspective

brightfuturespress — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:47:14 +0000

By Melissa Kerlin and Susan Schneider

The articles and initiatives are everywhere. People from all walks of public and private life are calling for adults to step up and teach kids the basic, relevant life skills they will need to have independent, productive and fulfilling lives as valued members of the workforce.

In speeches he gives across the country, U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Carlos Gutierrez, underscores the need for marketable skills training. In one speech, entitled, ‘Getting the Skills to Compete,’ Gutierrez said:

“If there is one piece of advice you can give people today, it is to increase your skills. The bottom line is that when you have more skills, you’re making more money…It could be a vocational skill. It could be an electrician’s skill. It could be the skill to fix air conditioners. Something. But you need skills.”

Well-known MSNBC.com career columnist Eva Tahmincioglu, wrote in a recent essay titled ‘Tough Love: Help your Grown Child Get a Job:’

“Is there a twenty-something unemployed kid lying on your couch?

If so, you’re not alone. Quite a few parents write me about their struggling adult children, many who are fresh out of college, who just can’t get on the right career path or any path at all.

Many found the professions they had hoped to break into weren’t as easy to break into. Others haven’t quite figured out what it is they want to do, biding their time in the rooms they grew up, in waiting for the career fairy to show them a sign.”

And Paul Graham, the successful computer entrepreneur and philanthropist, delivers a popular speech to new graduates entitled, “What You’ll Wish You Had Known” that includes this sage piece of advice:

“If I were back in high school and someone asked me about my plans, I’d say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. You don’t need to be in a rush to choose your life’s work. What you need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do.”

But how do adults open kids’ eyes to the wide world of exciting jobs there are to choose from? How do they excite kids about their schoolwork and connecting-the-dots between the subjects they love and finding a fulfilling career? Most adults only have their own narrow career paths to draw from, so the ways in which they can help their child discover his or her unique calling is narrow too.

Two former human resources marketing executives, Melissa Kerlin and Susan Schneider, co-founders of Tailwag Studio, Inc., have recently published a line of very creative career exploration and employment preparation materials that address these challenges. Their ‘CareerWise, Grow Up. Get a Job.™” materials help kids explore, prepare and become excited about joining the work-a-day world by discovering their inherent talents, interests and natural abilities.

Kerlin and Schneider developed these products after working for almost for almost 20 years apiece as ‘behind-the-scenes’ executives for agencies that provided recruitment and retention programs for employers across the country. They helped create employment brands for companies ranging from Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft and Nokia to Jack in the Box, The Walt Disney Company and AOL.

They frequently heard from hiring managers that new graduates are not prepared with basic work-world skills such as how to articulately discuss their career goals or why they should be hired. Nor are they comfortable with basic employment practices such as job interviewing and discussing a compensation package.

Kerlin and Schneider decided to apply their experiences to the development of materials that are based on what employers wish kids knew and thought about before they enter the workforce. It is a perspective that is very different from that found in most career exploration/employment preparation materials.

CareerWise Grow Up. Get a Job. materials also help kids hone reading, writing, presentation, research and interviewing skills and help them become familiar with the employment worlds’ jargon, practices and employers’ expectations. The exercises and activities do not ‘spoon feed’ kids any answers. They have to figure things out for themselves – an important life skill in itself.

Besides helping kids understand the reality of what employers’ expectations are in the real world, CareerWise Grow Up. Get a Job. materials get parents and kids sharing dreams, plans, hopes and fears. They help everyone plan for the day when kids can leave their parent’s nest with the confidence and skills to go out and feather their own.

Visit www.GetCareerWise.com for more information.

They Must Have Been Doing Something Right

brightfuturespress — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:15:21 +0000

By Diane Lindsey Reeves, Bright Futures Press

A couple years ago my daughter and I visited the Old Salem village in Winston-Salem. Old Salem is a historical museum portraying the day-to-day life of early Moravian settlers in North Carolina. One of the first things we learned about the inhabitants of this village is that they had an average life span that was several years longer than the national average at that time.

Hmmm…I couldn’t help but wonder why. Surely, the quality of their lifestyle had something to do with it. But what were they doing that was so different from other communities?

My conclusions are far from scientific–perhaps based more on the musings of a mother and educator who would like more for her children and grandchildren. But I suspect these people made it easier for their offspring to succeed by doing three things:

Surrounding them with a caring community that was completely committed to helping them find their way toward responsible adulthood
Equipping them with a solid education that emphasized both academic and practical life skills
Providing real world training opportunities that empowered them to survive and thrive on their own with marketable skills

In other words, they provided the ultimate “leave no child behind” experience—without the end-of-grade tests!

One of the most powerful examples of this premise was evident in the Single Brother’s House. By the age of 14, the village’s young boys were brought here to begin a seven year apprenticeship. Essentially, this is where they learned to be men, where they learned how to be productive, contributing members of their society, and where they learned to how to make a good living. In addition to providing relatively comfortable room and board for many of the boys, the House also included a school, a chapel, and a variety of occupational training opportunities in fields considered high-demand in that era. On-site was a fully functioning bakery, slaughterhouse, tannery, and brewery. In addition, master craftsmen shared their expertise to help prepare a new (and highly skilled) generation of tailors, joiners, clockmakers, shoemakers, tinsmiths, and other viable trades.

And, get this…

There were equal educational opportunities for girls! Quite a radical concept for the late 1700s. Girls received the same offering of well-rounded academics, arts, and music. Their training differed in that, instead of official apprenticeships, they were trained in crafts more associated with home-making such as weaving, fine needlework, and laundry. But prior to marriage, they too were offered opportunities to put these skills to work as teachers and workers in the Single Sister’s weaving shop, laundry, and other enterprises.

The common denominator for both girls and boys was this–nobody was pushed out of the nest before they were ready to fly!

While there are many aspects of those bygone days that are best left in the past—like their match-making tendencies! —, these people were obviously doing something right. What can we learn from them? How can we give today’s young people the same strong foundation for succeeding in life and work? And, for that matter, are there programs out there that are already doing this sort of thing in imaginative and effective ways?

I suspect that there are and that’s what this blog will explore in the coming weeks and months.

So share your discoveries! Toot your favorite program’s horn! Let us know what you think! Most of all, come back often for inspiration and ideas about how we can get it right and give this up-and-coming generation their best shot at bright futures!

Career Academies Work!

brightfuturespress — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:47:16 +0000

The results are in and the verdict is clear–career academies work. So says a report issued by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation after a rigorous 15 year study of this growing educational phenomenon.

See for yourself in this article written by Erik Eckholm and featured in the New York Times on June 28, 2008 at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/education/26careers.html?ex=1372478400&en=

Career Programs Stress College, Too, and Give Students a Leg Up, Study Says

By ERIK ECKHOLM

Forget the old-fashioned “vocational ed” classes that sent students on a decidedly noncollege track. Over the last quarter-century, a new kind of high school program known as a career academy has proliferated, especially in low-income districts, that combines job placement, college preparation and classes beyond the vocational trades, from accounting to health care.

Now, a long-term and rigorous evaluation of nine career academies across the country, to be released in Washington on Friday, has found that eight years after graduation, participants had significantly higher employment and earnings than similar students in a control group.

Poverty experts called the findings encouraging because few interventions with low-income teenagers, especially blacks and Hispanics, have shown significant and lasting effects, and they come at a time when young minority men, especially, are losing ground disastrously in the job market.

Career academies offer students experience in the workplace, and help them get paying jobs while they pursue standard academic coursework. When the study, by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, began 15 years ago, there were fewer than 500 career academies in the United States. Today there are more than 2,500, and the new findings are likely to spur more growth, several experts said.

The participants were mainly Hispanic and black, and the schools had emphases including business, tourism, health care and electronics, with students enrolled for three or four years.

Eight years after high school, when most participants were about 26, the academy group had average earnings 11 percent — or $2,088 a year — higher than the control group.

“The findings show that you can make an investment in high school that has a measurable payoff in earnings well after,” said James J. Kemple, the author of the study and an education specialist at Manpower, a New York-based group that evaluates poverty programs.

“They also show that you can provide a solid foothold in the labor market without compromising a student’s capacity to go on to college,” Mr. Kemple said.

To compare similar students, all those who volunteered to join a career academy at each school were randomly assigned either to participate in the academy or to serve as part of a control group outside the academy. The increase in earnings was higher for men in the academy group, who showed a 17 percent difference, or $3,731 per year. The researchers were mystified by the negligible gains for women and plan to study possible factors like the time the women spent raising children and the longer time they spent in postsecondary schooling, which might portend better earnings in later years.

To the surprise of researchers, the groups showed no difference in rates of high school and college completion. Ninety percent of students in both groups finished high school or obtained a G.E.D., and half gained some postsecondary credential — rates far higher than among their school populations over all. Researchers believe that those who initially expressed interest in the academies may have shared similar motivation to succeed, whether or not they were chosen for the special program.

But this also suggests that something about the academy experience, apart from educational achievement, promoted greater success in the job market. One likely factor is the exposure the academies provide to a range of adults in real workplaces, said J. D. Hoye, who directed a “school-to-work” initiative for the Clinton administration and now heads the National Academy Foundation, which advises career academies on curriculums and other topics.

“The students see what work is like, and they build a network of caring adults at school and in the workplace,” Ms. Hoye said.

Students in an academy stay together as a group. They usually get paying internships after their junior year, which for some turn into jobs they keep through college or longer. At the tourism academy at Miami Beach Senior High School, for example, many start working on the front desks of major hotels, some with hopes of entering management.

One school in the study is Valley High School in Southern California, where nearly 90 percent of the 3,000 students are Hispanic and about 180 sophomores, juniors and seniors are in its Global Academy of Finance. Along with traditional subjects, students take computer training and accounting courses and study the stock market, real estate and personal finance. They do internships with banks, law and finance firms and in the school district’s administration, among others.

Students seem to benefit from being part of a special, small group, said Mark Bartholio, the academy director. Many do not pursue finance careers but instead go into teaching, social services or criminal justice, he said, but one graduate said the accounting skills he learned in the academy had enabled him to help start a small business.

One student who just graduated, Henry Gomez, 18, started working as a Wells Fargo Bank teller last year and is continuing this summer. “I’m not sure this is what I want to do, but I like the experience I’m gaining,” he said.

Before he entered the academy, he had worked at a Target store, said Mr. Gomez, whose parents did not finish high school. He plans to enter a community college in the fall, with the bank wages helping him pay his way.

Another graduate, Cathy Castorena, 18 and working at Wells Fargo, said she would continue at the bank, while she attends a state university and studies psychology. Her dream, she said, is to become a prison psychologist.

“The career academies tell students that if you are willing to make the effort to succeed in a bachelor’s degree program, here’s a way to do that,” said David Stern, an education expert at the University of California, Berkeley, who was an early proponent of career academies. “But if you end up not wanting to apply, or start college and don’t finish, you have some work experience and training to fall back on, to give you a little edge in the labor market.”

To see a copy of the actual report, go to the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation website at http://www.mdrc.org/publications/482/full.pdf.