In the final webinars in the series titled “Visual Thinking Strategies for Career Coaching,” hosted by the Career Cafe, Dr. Katharine Brooks–author of “You Majored In What?–continues her demonstration of how visual techniques can be effective, inventive, often surprisingly informative, and very cost effective—all you need is pen and paper (and SmartArt Graphics from Word if you like—see below).

Many students come to career coaches without any idea of what their career goals are or what their next moves might be.  The first step toward academic and career success is to examine their skills, interests, and values. It’s about exploration.

Following the lessons on SWOT analyses and mapping, Dr. Brooks builds on these career exploration strategies using graphis elements such as circles, diamonds, and hexagons to organize and direct discussions and thought.

Circles and Clusters

Circles can be cut up like a pie as in the RIASEC chart of ‘occupational themes’ (or Holland Code) that help give students a general idea of the kinds of jobs that might appeal to them. (RIASEC stands for realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, or conventional.)

A student can think about how he sees himself: is he respectively a doer, a thinker, a creator, a helper, a persuader, or an organizer? Professions can be associated with each of these categories: a doer works with his hands/body or with tools, a thinker works with theories and information, a creator does something original, a helper could be interested in healing, a persuader would be good in sales, and an organizer could go toward finances or statistics. A career coach can provide a list of possible career paths for each slice of the pie, and the student sees the list of possibilities grow before him.

Let’s take a look at a sample student. This student sees himself as a Doer, a Creator,  a Persuader, or an Organizer, and he starts to list career paths that might interest him (with the help of the coach):

This inspires an exciting conversation about the possibilities that fit the student. And he can take the chart home with him to ponder. (As you can see, you can prepare these ahead using SmartArt and write in the labels and professions during the coaching session.)

Or a career coach could explore what kind of job might fit where the elements of this discussion overlap by applying Venn Diagrams:

Cycles of discovery are another visual strategy, providing the student a visual path to guide the conversation for each “dream”:

Expanding circles can show how to build on a concept. For example, networking: what kind of connections can I build on?

Clusters help students explore the options that seem possible or interesting to them and then find the themes.  For example, when asked “what careers would you consider?” a student provided the following:

Together the career coach and the student can ‘map’ the themes:

• Health & fitness
• Looking good
• Problem solving (Dr. Brook said most students think they want to work in “CSI.”
• Animal welfare
• Teaching or acting, anything with an audience

It’s easy for a student to feel overwhelmed by all this. Notice where he runs out of steam and stop there. Then pick one or two themes and do a SWOT analysis. A career coach can also help a the student realize that he shouldn’t be discouraged if his path to a theme isn’t immediately apparent. If he loves opera and can’t sing, for example, he can explore other ways to get connected.

The same can be done in reverse, finding a job that matches the student’s strengths–with the arrows pointing in the opposite direction:

Once the student creates a list of jobs that match his strengths, this strategy can help him later, when he needs to write the cover letter when applying for a job position.

Triangles, diamonds, and hexagons lend themselves to these exercises by allowing the student and the career coach to arrange and rearrange them to fit together in any pattern that makes sense. Labels can include goals, skills, education, resume, cover letter, everything that flows from NOW to the Outcome(s) or vice versa.

And a career diamond can be used to explore career paths in this way:

Finally, for more information, Dr. Brooks shared with us this list of references:

• The Vision Board by Joyce Schwarz
• The Complete Idiots Guide to Vision Boards
• Visioning by Lucia Capacchione
• The Right Brain Business Plan by Jennifer Lee
• The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam, and
• Visual Meetings by David Sibbet.

I’d like to thank Dr. Katharine Brooks for these valuable webinars and lessons, and the staff at the Career Café: Susan Coleman, Project/Grant Director and Rita Jones, Grant Coordinator.

Remember to join the Ning at the Career Café to continue the conversation and share your visual techniques and creations.

And be sure to check out the Career Café’s Big Ideas for Career Professionals workshops—Get Started, Get a Pathway, and Get Help—as well as the Career Briefs site, which includes Quick Tips for Classroom Instructors and a Library of free resources for career professionals.

Good luck! And let us know if you use any of these techniques and how they worked out. We’d love to hear.

In the meantime, you should know about these upcoming opportunities for CTE professionals, educators, and their students & families:

February 2012:

3rd Annual Dare 2B Digital Conference – Dare 2B Digital is the the premier hands-on learning event for girls ages 13-16 in middle and high school, plus their parents and mentors. Attend inspirational keynote sessions, workshops, demonstrations and discussion panels with computing experts at the eBay campus in San Jose, Calif. We covered this conference last year (read the post here), and thought it was a fantastic event chock full of opportunities for girls to engage with and learn about careers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) fields. If you have students you think might benefit from an experience like this, I can’t recommend it enough. This event takes place on February 11, 2012. Lunch and door prizes are included with registration.

Educating for Careers 2012 – Educating for Careers is an annual 3-day conference and professional development event addressing a range of CTE-related topics. The conference features over 170 breakout sessions organized under the following themes: Assessment & Accountability; California Partnership Academies Model; Career Pathways/Industry Sectors; Curriculum & Instructional Strategies; Employer & Community Partnerships; Mentor & Internship Programs; Middle School Connections; Perkins Policy & Programs; Secondary-Postsecondary Connections; and Work-Based Learning. This event takes place February 13 – 15, 2012 in Sacramento, CA. Those interested should register here.

March 2012:

CCCAOE Spring 2012 Conference – The California Community College Association for Occupational Education is holding its spring conference in San Francisco, CA. We attended the fall 2011 conference (see posts here and here), and expect that this coming event will be just as packed with useful ideas, information, and discussion. Also, the Keynote will be delivered by Richard Baraniuk, Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Rice University on the topic of the “open access movement,” that is currently sweeping the academic world. You won’t want to miss his talk, “Disruptive Innovation Via Open Education Resources.” This event takes place March 21 – 23, 2012. Those interested should register here.

April 2012:

UCCI Institute, Spring 2012- The University of California is seeking motivated, talented high school educators to develop innovative new courses integrating Career Technical Education (CTE) with “a-g” subject areas, at the Spring 2012 UC Curriculum Integration (UCCI) Institutes, April 22-25, 2012 in Burlingame, California. The UCCI Institute model courses are designed to be approved as core “a-f” courses and designated as CTE courses. Participants are trained in “a-g” course submission requirements, and gain valuable skills with which to develop integrated “a-g” and CTE courses on their own. The two UCCI Institutes for Spring 2012 will focus on integrating the Arts, Media, and Entertainment CTE industry sector with the (“b”) English “a-g” subject area (those interested should apply here), and on the Building Trades and Construction CTE Industry Sector with the (“c”) Mathematics “a-g” subject area (those interested should apply here). The application deadline for this institute is March 5, 2012. You can read about our experience observing a past UCCI Insitute here.

Hope you’re able to attend one or more of these events – as CTE professionals, we all know the value of ongoing professional development and learning. Also, please remember to forward this post or links to the events to any colleagues who may be interested.

Thanks for reading!

This series of webinars presented by the Career Café is designed to help counselors and teachers give students simple tools that will help guide their thinking when making career choices.

In the second workshop in this series, Dr. Katharine Brooks, author of “You Majored in What? Mapping Your Path from Chaos to Career,” revealed several different approaches to a strategy called mapping or mind-mapping, that Dr. Brooks describes as “a systems type of thinking which allows the students to see order, ideas, themes, and concepts related to their lives. They can see how seemingly disparate parts connect and fit to make a whole, and they often uncover hidden thoughts and information about themselves..” So it is a tool that can help a student see the big picture: the ideas, themes, events, and characteristics of one’s life and personality that, when connections are found between them, bring a kind of order to the chaos.

Random thoughts and feelings, life events, likes and dislikes or even New Year’s resolutions, all laid out in a simple drawing, can help a student who feels confused and find connections that point in a meaningful direction. Google “mind mapping” and click on Images, and you’ll be surprised how many ways there are to approach mapping.

Depending on your resources—or how compulsive you are—you can either begin with a prepared blank map of connected squares, more or less like this:

Or you can simply draw a stick person in the middle of a blank page and surround it by circles.

For example, let’s say to a student: What interests you? Ask the student to draw a circle in the middle of a piece of paper and put a stick figure in it to represent herself. Then ask her to fill in the rest of the page with words describing what she likes to do or her hobbies or her interests. Then she circles each item, and you have a page of balloons floating around the image that represents her.

The next step is to connect them in any way that makes sense on any level. It could be things related to sports or things she does alone or things she does in a group or family things or just interests or the things she wants to do someday. The number of types of connections is limited only by her imagination. A career professional can then help the student see how the “themes” of a map can lead to choosing a major or a career, for example. Often it’s hard for them to see those connections on their own.

Here’s an example of a map after the connection have all been made (click on the image to enlarge it):

Studying the map together you can help the student see many things:

• She likes reading, poetry, and foreign languages and movies
• She is interested in marine biology, fish, snorkeling, and Hawaii
• She has an affinity for physical sciences as well
• She has experience teaching and counseling
• She likes sports: surfing, snorkeling, swimming, biking
• She likes to cook and eat and listen to music
• She likes animals, fish, dogs, marine biology

From this list, the student can see her strengths and interests very clearly. It’s a beginning.

Mapping can take the form of a tree with many branches, a collage of images and words cut from magazines, or a “wandering map,” which is a mixture of drawings and words around a theme that looks more like graffiti but nonetheless lends itself to connections.

If mapping is a classroom activity, low student self-esteem isn’t an issue: this is not a presentation; the teacher works with the students individually. If the student’s words and images are overwhelmingly negative, the counselor can go for the positive: how did you overcome these? How amazing is it you are here in spite of this?

It’s about exploration.

If you have similar or equally effective career coaching strategies, as always, I offer you this forum. I’ll be happy to help you post your story.

Don’t forget that the third workshop in the Career Café series takes place at noon today, Friday January 27 . Sign up here. And join the discussion and keep up to date with events at the Career Café Ning.

The Career Café is presenting a webinar series on how to use visual thinking strategies to help students think about careers and then create a strategy for the job search as well as prepare for the interviews. The series began last Friday, but you’ve only missed one, and I’ll summarize it here. Sign up now for the presentations that follow in this series—each on the next three Fridays from noon to 1pm. All you need is a way to connect to the website and a way to listen (your computer’s internal speakers should do the trick). And you might want a pen and paper.

Dr. Katharine Brooks is the lead. You may recognize her name: she’s the author of “You Majored in What? Mapping Your Path from Chaos to Career.” Her writing has also appeared in Psychology Today (among other publications) and she is the creator of Wise Wanderings TM, a career coaching system which is at the heart of “You Majored in What?” She is the author also of the “Hot Tips” section of the Career Café, and she writes a blog on the site as well.

Last Friday Dr. Brooks showed us a surprisingly simple way to help guide students along their career path—a technique some of you may recognize but few may have thought to use in this context (it may have been part of a warm-up exercise in a workshop). Its simplicity is surprising because it is so effective and easy to use with limited time and no preparation—say a student walks in cold and needs help during lunch. You don’t need to prepare; the process blooms before you. It’s called the SWOT strategy.

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. (Think of strengths and weaknesses as internal issues and opportunities and threats as external; weaknesses and strengths are issues for the student at a personal level, and threats and opportunities are the things he has no control over but which he needs to consider.) It is often used in the rest of the world to evaluate a project or a business opportunity. In the context of career coaching, you can quickly help a student evaluate the pros and cons of a career choice or job opportunity, and then use what you’ve found to prepare a strategy, ranging from the training and education the student will need to writing the cover letter and preparing for the job interview–especially if you have the job requirements in hand.

For those of us new to the SWOT strategy, Dr. Brooks walked us through it:

First draw a square and divide it into four parts; each part represents one of the four elements of the strategy.  You can use index cards, a prepared blank form, or whatever is easiest for you and your student to work with. Then let’s try an example:

A student asks for help applying for a job in fashion design and merchandising. He has the job description in hand. He likes fashion, keeps up with all the latest trends and designers, and frequents local boutiques close to home. But he has no experience in retail, hasn’t done a resume yet, no car, and doesn’t really know anyone personally in the field. He feels overwhelmed by his weaknesses.

The job description makes it clear they are looking for someone who is passionate about fashion and design, a team player, someone with specific computer and drawing skills, and experience or a degree (or working toward one) in design.

This is what you might create together:

This clears the way because the student has a plan:

• research the neighborhood for part-time work opportunities and for fashion events
• get to know local people in this industry
• check out local public transportation
• create a resume

For this job opportunity, the student can tailor his resume and cover letter to realistically represent his passion for the industry, his team player skills, and his willingness to learn new computer skills. As you are doing this he adds, “I’m great at sketching!” So you add that to the list of strengths and plan to include it in your cover letter, perhaps with an example. And then together you work out his possible career path: the degrees he will be pursuing, the experience he is seeking locally. Despite the weaknesses and outside threats–the Ws and the Ts–it’s a project full of optimism. And it’s about motivation.

Jenn Burleson, General/ Athletic Counselor Student Athletes Support Program Coordinator Mt. San Jacinto College, participated in the webinar and shared a great example of how a SWOT strategy can be used.  Join the Career Café Ning today to see this dynamic PowerPoint presentation, and so that you don’t miss Dr. Brooks’ blog or other upcoming events. And those of you who haven’t yet explored the resources available to students in the Career Café, check it out. It is a journey well worth taking and recommending.

If you have any examples of similar or equally effective career coaching strategies, this is your forum. Send them to tross@wested.org. We’ll build a blog here together.

See you at the Career Café webinar tomorrow.

In the past few years – but especially this year, it seems – there’s been a lot of talk around how education can “gamify” learning, or incorporate the motivational strategies and design elements commonly used in games (including, but not limited to, video games). This has led to a lot of discussion of these gamification strategies, and debate about which components would be more or less effective in a school or classroom setting, in online settings, and in what combinations they might produce the effects that educators would like to see. Achievements are one of the most popular topics of discussion – essentially used in games to mark…well, achievement. For many gamers, achievements are rewards and recognitions of challenges that exist within the scope of the primary game’s objectives, as well as outside those objectives. Often, the visual representation of what the gamers receive comes in the form of badges. Think along the lines of merit badges, such as those utilized in Scouting.

Businesses – such as those creating mobile apps – are jumping on board the badging bandwagon. Badges are, after all, a pretty simple and relatively low-cost way of recognizing, rewarding, and promoting desired behaviors in consumers and users. For instance, let’s say you use the foursquare app. You’re out getting lunch, so you check into your 3rd Mexican restaurant. Bing! You’ve won the Mexican Restaurant-lovers badge commemorating the occasion (and your due-diligence in using foursquare). Say you’re tracking your runs on Runkeeper, and you just completed your first 5k. Bing! You’ve earned the 5k badge, to recognize and reward your accomplishment.

That’s great, Carol, you say. But what’s this got to do with CTE?

Quite a lot, actually, if the Mozilla Open Badges project has anything to say about it. More and more, we’re finding enterprising – and sometimes just flat-out disengaged – students turning to alternative and often informal sources of learning to acquire new knowledge and skills–employable knowledge and skills. These non-traditional educational sources may run the gamut from volunteering opportunities, mentoring or peer relationships, after-school programs, online courses, and informal online learning communities. The Mozilla Open Badges project is seeking to recognize and reward these efforts by developing a system that allows people to earn badges which act as a means of accreditation for skills and knowledge acquired outside of more traditional education settings. Badges, Mozilla argues, will allow a learner to display (to potential employers, schools, colleagues, and their communities) that they have met some predetermined threshold of knowledge and/or skills acquisition.

Not certificates. Not degrees. Badges.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Let’s say Martha S. is interested in becoming a web developer. Instead of going to the trouble of applying to a Computer Science program at a university, or enrolling in courses at her local community college, she goes online. She finds sites like P2PU, where she’s able to learn to code PHP, Ruby on Rails, and HTML by hand (if she should so desire). She starts to mock up a few different websites, creating a portfolio for herself, using her newly acquired skills. She checks in with peers at various online discussion forums when she runs into a problem she can’t solve on her own. She earns badges for these new skills (from P2PU, let’s say) and now she’s ready to freelance as a web developer or apply for a position at a company somewhere. In this scenario, the badges she’s earned for her web development skills are legitimate currency with which to pursue both career and learning opportunities.

For an engineer, who received his B.S. or M. Eng. back in 1986, these badges might actually have more weight with potential employers than his college degree(s), as the badges might indicate that he has a firm handle on more current, up-to-date technologies, knowledge, and skills.

Do you see where this is headed?

So, what does this mean for the CTE field? A couple different things, actually. As with all innovations, there comes good news and bad news. The bad news is that, while there may always be a place for the traditional education model (teachers/instructors, students, classrooms, testing, grading, etc), this place is progressively getting smaller and smaller. When you add in the burdens of cost, time, and difficulty of access (how many of us have seen students essentially drop out of a certificate or degree program because it was just too difficult to enroll in required courses in a timely manner?), it’s not surprising to see why something like the Open Badges project has so much appeal.

With heavyweight backing provided by organizations like HASTAC and the MacArthur Foundation, the Open Badges project is finding its footing. Leading industry, education, and governmental partners have all signed on to take part in the process of designing and working with the new system.

The good news is that there’s still a lot of room to participate in the discussion and process of developing these new, more informal education models. It’s been my experience that CTE professionals are the subgroup of the education community most willing to think outside the box and be enterprising in finding ways to provide students the essential skills and knowledge they need to be well-employed and well-paid. Check out the long list of organizations - - many of them already our partners in CTE projects and programs – who’ve decided to take a look and a leap. Consider how you, your programs, your college, and your students, might explore and benefit from the possibilities laid out by something like the Open Badges project and other “Open Learning” models.

I look forward to hearing about what you come up with.

And for those of you who run graphic, web, or industrial design programs, you might want to take a look at this opportunity for your students and faculty to work directly on developing the badges themselves.

For more reading on this topic, check out this Chronicle of Higher Education article.

I noticed several articles from around the nation about how CTE students and classes cleverly incorporate the Holidays into their training both to celebrate  the season and to demonstrate how what they are learning has practical applications. Other CTE classes are translating the skills they are learning into toy making in general — learning how to take a toy concept and make it a reality.

The Academy of Careers and Technology in West Virginia hosted its 11^th annual Festival of Trees again this year. Somehow they stretched 16 career clusters into 29 Holiday Trees! In the article from the Register Herald, Principal Charles Pack said, “we have each one of our programs build a tree that reflects the program they are in. It’s all about the use of material, the skills and technologies their program has,” he explained. “For instance, carpentry builds one out of lumber and wood, the electrical use conduit, programmable logic controllers. Some of the electrical trees you see out here, two of them may have $4,000 to $5,000 worth of electronic equipment that are controlling the lights — which may be overkill — but it showcases the skills each program offers.”

A tree created by ACT’s welding class was on display in the main lobby of the ACT training building during the annual Festival of Trees.  Photo: Chris Tilley

The Culinary Arts Program tree we can visualize. But for a description of the Criminal Justice Program and the Pharmacy Tech Programs’ trees, you’ll have to read the article. It’s inspiring how creative CTE kids can be.

At Milford High School in Milford, Delaware, CTE high school students hosted a party for Morris Elementary School students as well as The Greater Milford Boys and Girls Club and The Learning Center: their 13th annual Santa’s Workshop Program. “The high school students used the skills they have learned in class from designing the backgrounds, building toys and mentoring children, “the article in The Milford Live Progressive  explained. The event gives the high school students a chance to show the elementary students what they have learned, and the younger kids are inspired to want to learn the same.

Source: www.milfordlive.com

Students at the Career Building Academy in Colorado Spring, Colorado, usually spend their time learning how to build houses. But this month they focused their skills onto something smaller: wooden toys for local children.  The winter weather and the Holiday season both helped the students by allowing them to work indoors as well as use their skills in a way that gives back to their community.  High school students attend the Academy part time in addition to their regular classes.

Vista Ridge High School senior David Collas, 18, held 3-year-old Ashton King after the kids received Christmas gifts made by students at The Career Building Academy. Kristina Iodice: The Gazette

In the Colorado Springs Gazette article Jordan Reed, 17, a senior in Falcon School District 49’s Virtual Academy, said the program is great for those who are hands-on learners who like to solve problems by physically working on things. “It’s not school work, but it’s work that we can use in real life,” he said. “It’s been a real learning experience.”

Rick Johnson, founder and president of The Career Building Academy, said, “These are kids who may be struggling in high school,” he said. “We’re teaching them a trade, we’re teaching them how to work, and we’re teaching them work ethics.”

They are also learning the joy of giving back to their community.

And if you are interested in incorporating toy making into your CTE curriculum for the next Holiday Season, you need not reinvent the wheel. The Ohio Resource Center has put together a curriculum for the development, design, and marketing of a new toy idea using materials that are available to them. Students learn how to create a prototype, research the demographics, and even design the packaging. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

Can you imagine the event you could create around these activities next year?

If you celebrated the season with CTE related activities or events, let us know. We would love to feature you here.

Happy Holidays!

Over the past 20+ year period, the number of available jobs in the U.S. has grown by about 63 million, for those with the necessary skills and credentials to obtain them. In contrast, for those with a high school diploma or less, the number of available jobs shrunk by about 2 million. In light of these numbers and the challenges faced by the economy in recent years, we in the CTE field, she argued, have the power to become catalysts, in California, for economic and job recovery at the local, regional, and state levels.

Vice Chancellor Van Ton-Quinlivan makes her keynote address.

So, how to do this? 1) Supply in-demand skills for employers, 2) create relevant and stackable credentials, 3) get Californians into open jobs, and 4) ensure student success.

Currently, there are 8000 certificate programs and 4500 Associate degrees being offered in 142 fields, throughout the state. On average, there are 113 programs in 25 fields per college, and the most commonly offered programs are in the fields of auto tech, office tech, and child development/early care and education. Smaller colleges offer more programs per students, which is associated with lower completions per program. Also, when you compare private, for-profit colleges and community colleges, the facts show that the private for-profits are out-performing the community colleges in awarding certifications and achieving completion of their programs.

These numbers beg the questions, are our offerings aligned to market needs? Are they (and we) spread too thin?

The Vice Chancellor then returned to her earlier themes, and started to break things down a bit more. First, she addressed our need for greater responsiveness, to both the industry sector and to students. There’s a great deal of complexity involved within our community college systems, and as we work to deliver the training needed by multiple sectors and employers, this complexity increases and becomes magnified. In order to be more responsive, we need to help industry navigate our systems, facilitating the process by which their need for skilled workers are met.

Vice Chancellor of Economic and Workforce Development, Van Ton-Quinlivan

In order to be responsive to students, we need to create relevant pathways and stackable credentials. Here, Ton-Quinlivan illustrated two test cases, the first being the “high end” students, such as engineers. Engineering students generally spend the equivalent of four years in college, with only one of those years being allowed for developing a specialization. Unfortunately, in a field that evolves as rapidly as engineering, those specializations can become obsolete within the lifespan of an engineer’s career. If provided the right opportunities, engineers could come to community colleges, mid-career, and obtain the certification necessary to specialize in new and updated areas of specialization, making their skill sets more relevant to the changing demands of their field. The second scenario presented construction students, who used an apprenticeship program to obtain an entry level job. In this scenario, the apprentice comes to the community colleges to get a certificate to become a journeyman. Then, later, s/he can return for an AA or an AAS to become a supervisor or manager. Farther on in his/her career, there may be a third opportunity for the this individual to return and get a teaching certificate. Both of these cases illustrate that the community college system needs to be able to provide the on-ramps and exits to facilitate the seven careers the average person will have during a lifetime. Providing stackable credentials allows for phases and transformations in careers.

This led to the third theme Ton-Quinlivan brought up – integration and leverage to get Californians into open jobs. Community colleges should make easier what is hard. Articulation at the local level can be facilitated at the system level. To support this, there should be transparent definitions of excellence – a way to unpack what makes programs truly successful. These definitions should be pulled from an intersection of industry partnership practices and career education practices, where “Best Practice Models” are able to accommodate more players and regions, and the greater complexity that they will undoubtedly bring. Also, she addressed the “firehose versus the faucet” situation that often occurs in certificate programs. Often, pathways or programs produce 25 certificated students or more, in answer to a situation where there are only one to three job openings per sector or pipeline. To prevent this, community colleges need to enlist multiple employers, regionally and maybe even beyond, to “own” the program, ensuring that the number of available jobs are in proportion to the number of students moving through the pipeline.

Vice Chancellor Van Ton-Quinlivan, taking questions from conference attendees.

Winding down her talk, the Vice Chancellor projected forward, carrying the work we do from CTE into the broader context, where we may have a greater shared knowledge and capacity to answer some of the most challenging questions our ever-evolving industries, economy, and society-at-large may ask. Will we swing and miss, she asked? Or will we do what it takes to hit a home run?

Today’s post will focus on the CTE Pathways Initiative presence at the conference.

Ron Selge speaking at the SB70 Pre-Conference.

Pre-Conference: “The Future of SB70 and Beyond”

The WestEd CTE Pathways Initiative (SB70) Evaluation team hosted a very successful pre-conference, as well as several breakout sessions, that featured grantees who shared their work and ideas. The SB70 Pre-Conference event featured talks about Audrey Green from College of the Canyons on the importance of administrative support and Larry Dutto and Randy Wallace from College of the Sequoias and Tulare County Office of Education on leveraging funding sources and developing sustainability. These were followed by Rita Jones of Irvine Valley College, who provided an overview of the Career Cafe website , and then facilitated, with the help of WestEd staff, the “Speed Meeting” portion of the pre-conference.

Speed Meeting at the SB70 Pre-Conference

The “Speed Meeting,” was a riff on speed-dating, where pre-selected representatives from grantee schools and programs had exactly 5 minutes – 3 to introduce their program and give key highlights and 2 minutes for Q&A – to share their innovative work with each of nine tables of participants. At the end of the 5 minutes, time was called, and the speakers were rotated to the next table, where they’d meet a new group of participants, and do it all over again. It was a pretty intense and packed hour of talking and discussion – especially for the presenters – but as the goal was to provide pre-conference participants the opportunity to hear from colleagues who are working on exciting projects, and gather as many new contacts and ideas as possible in a very limited amount of time, the overall consensus was that it was a success. The following is a list of the Speed Meeting presenters:

• Wheeler North, San Diego Miramar College & Nancy Jones, Coastline Community College: Who Do U Want 2 Be?
• Audrey Reille, HUB: Centers of Excellence
• Sue Parsons & Mirna Cardena, Cerritos College: Teacher Preparation Pipeline
• Maricela Sandoval, Rancho Santiago Community College District: Youth Entrepreneurship Program
• Raine Hambly, Coast Community College District: Connecting with Middle Schools
• Natalie Ray, Grossmont College: Pathways
• Jan Swinton, Glendale Community College & Emma Sanchez, Pasadena City College: Faculty Externships
• Julie Pekhonen, Riverside Community College: Professional Development
• Linda Collins, Career Ladders Project; Peter Simon, College of Alameda, & Rodney Murray, El Camino College Compton Center: Career Advancement Academies

Conference Breakout Sessions

During the main conference itself, the WestEd CTE Pathways Initiative evaluation team also hosted breakout sessions, which featured grantees and their work. I wasn’t able to attend all of them, but will provide short summaries of each below. If you’d like more information on any specific panel or individual project, contact me, and I’ll get you in touch with the appropriate speaker.

• Session 1: How to Engage K-12 Schools and Students in CTE - This breakout session featured grantees sharing their insights and strategies on engaging and working with K-12 schools and students. Speakers included Bob Hawkes from Kern Community College District, Sabrina Robertson from Cuesta College, and Alisa McCord from Orange County Department of Education. Hawkes talked about ways to increase collaboration and participation with K-12 partners who are scattered over a large and diverse geographical area (also featured in a previous post here). McCord gave an overview of the evolution of STEM-based CTE programs in Orange County high schools (also featured here), and Robertson talked extensively on the details of running a CTE summer camp for middle school students.

Sabrina Robertson presenting during a breakout session on engaging K-12 partners.

• Session 2: Focusing on Sustainability – This breakout session featured grantees sharing strategies directly pertaining to developing sustainability for programs. Speakers included Rock Pfotenhauer from Cabrillo College, Larry Dutto from College of the Sequoias with Randy Wallace from the Tulare County Office of Education, and Greg Newhouse from San Diego Community College District. Pfotenhauer presented on the importance of collecting data, and specifically disussed Cabrillo’s Leaver/Completer survey that helps to gather information regarding students who leave or complete CTE programs at that college. Dutto and Wallace talked about the importance of relationships, focusing on how to build trust between partners and improve communication. Newhouse spoke on engaging business partners and providing them opportunities for meaningful participation in CTE programs and projects.

• Session 3: Spotlight on Health Care Industry and CTE – This breakout session featured grantees sharing strategies and experiences in developing and implementing health sector programs. Speakers included Audrey Reille from Centers of Excellence, Natalie Ray from Grossmont College, and Carol Goldsmith from Westhills Community College District. Reille presented on the resources available from Centers of Excellence, to support health and other industry sector programs. Ray talked about Grossmont’s experiences in developing course sequences in high school science departments related to medicine. Goldsmith gave a brief overview of the TAACCCT grant awarded to the C6 Consortium.

• Session 4: Faculty Externships – This breakout session featured grantees sharing their experiences and strategies from developing and implementing Faculty Externship programs. Speakers included Jan Swinton from Glendale Community College with Emma Sanchez from Pasadena City College, Raine Hambly from Coast Community College District, and Torence Powell from Cosumnes River College with Rick Larkey from the North State Building Industry Association/Foundation. Swinton and Sanchez talked about their amazing collaboration with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to provide a 10 week long, paid internship for high school faculty during summers and the resulting work that teachers do with their new-found skills and experiences. Hambly gave an overview of the evolution of Coast’s faculty externship projects that have resulted in their most current iteration that includes field trips to industry sites coupled with a training in soft skills. Powell and Larkey described their externship program which provides faculty with actual work experiences in building and power/energy industries that culminates in development of lesson plans, units, and curricula, that get shared through a database.

Torence Powell presents during the breakout session on Faculty Externships.

• Session 5: Professional Development – This breakout session featured grantees sharing strategies on creating and implementing professional development (PD) opportunities. Speakers included Renee Marshall from College of the Canyons, Julie Pekhonen from Riverside Community College, and Carol Pepper-Kittredge from Sierra College. Marshall shared her experiences in leveraging a Middle School summer camp into a professional development opportunity for participating faculty. Pekhonen presented on the two particular PD programs: the Counselor Conclave, a one-day event, and the CTE Team Institute, a three-day event. Pepper-Kittredge talked about Sierra College’s very successful teacher-focused PD events, which utilize strategies of close collaboration and expertise-sharing between high school and college faculty.

So, that about sums up the SB70-related activities at CCCAOE. Again, if you’d like more information on any of the projects or programs mentioned above, please shoot me an email or leave a comment below, and I’ll be happy to get you in touch with the appropriate people.

But several recent articles have attempted to put the shoe on the other foot.

Peter Cappelli of the Wall Street Journal writes: “companies need to stop pinning so much of the blame on our nation’s education system. They need to drop the idea of finding perfect candidates and look for people who could do the job with a bit of training and practice.”

He goes on to say that the real problem is employer inflexibility: employers need to be realistic with the salaries they offer and design job descriptions so that employees with a wider variety of education and skill sets can qualify.  “Only about 10% of the people in IT jobs during the Silicon Valley tech boom of the 1990s, for example, had IT-related degrees.”

Plenty of people, he says, even recent graduates, just need a little training to meet the needs of the job, especially since more students today are focusing their coursework to specialized areas—thanks to the influence of career education.

Cappelli has three suggestions:

• employers need to partner with community colleges and provide input in course design and outcomes;
• create apprenticeships or long-term probationary periods, both with lower pay if necessary;
• and create greater upward mobility within the industry: hire from within and, again, provide the necessary training.

Dr. Cappelli is the George W. Taylor professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. The follow-up to this article also presents a case for who’s to blame. 

Roger Bybee, in an article for Common Dreams, believes two things:

• that the problems are much smaller than they are made out to be, citing a recent survey that shows only 5% of manufacturing jobs are presently unfilled due to a lack of qualified applicants, and
• that corporations are to blame for hypocritically blaming the schools while at the same time avoiding paying their fair share of taxes (money that would help schools continue to improve).

Pretty heady stuff.

Walt Gardner writes in Education Week, “the complaint raises the age-old question about the purpose of education. Business has always wanted schools to train their employees so that it doesn’t have to. A survey by Nielsen Co. of 100 top executives at U.S. manufacturing companies found that they expect to spend at least $100 million each over the next five years to fill the gaps left by retiring baby boomer factory workers (Skills gap looms at U.S. factories as boomers retire, The Globe and Mail, Sept. 8). “

Gardner continues: “Education, however, is more than just about preparing students for the workplace. This is particularly so because as many as 80 percent of the jobs that kindergartners will hold as adults don’t yet exist, according to remarks made by futurist Ed Barlow before the Industrial Asset Management Council in Oct. 2007. Of course, neither Barlow nor anyone else knows what the future holds, a point underscored by Christopher L. Doyle in “Let’s Stop Forecasting 21st-Century Skills (Commentary, Education Week, Sept. 14).”

Someone does. In a Wall Street Journal article, Ben Casselman predicts that time will correct the discrepancy: “That kind of mismatch between what employers want and what workers have to offer is a classic example of what economists call a “structural” issue in the labor market. In time, workers will develop the skills the job market needs—or employers will readjust their needs to the skills workers have available—but that process is slow.”

In an interesting and finally inspiring aside about corporate involvement in schools and employee training (to show that all the news isn’t bad, even when the hook tries to be), a recent study by the National Education Policy Center warns that corporate sponsorship in schools can be harmful because it can “create student experiences and shape student attitudes in ways that support, or at least do not undermine, the corporate bottom line.” But what I find hopeful is how schools are proving they are smarter than that. Teachers find that such sponsorship inspires critical thinking in their students about industries as well as helps create partnerships that generate money for the schools. (All you might have to do is rename your gymnasium.) And in return, the schools provide classroom space for corporate worker training during the summer when they are normally empty.

Did someone say worker training?

Today’s post, however, is a grantee/reader contribution, from Contra Costa County Community Collaborative for CTE (C5CTE). Contra Costa County is one of nine counties in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area, with over 1 million residents (it’s the 9th most populous county in the state).  They’ve been doing some interesting work with their K-12 partners, which you may find valuable to your own efforts. Read on below!

C5CTE began as a project that would offer improved linkages between the career and technical curricula of the public schools and community colleges.  Now in its fourth year, the county-wide SB70 funded project has enabled the colleges to work with our regional middle and high schools to identify CTE programming needs and design responsive pathways.

During the 2010-11 academic year, the collaborative enjoyed many successful outcomes. Included below is a spotlight on recent accomplishments at Diablo Valley College and Contra Costa College.  Plans for the 2011-12 academic year include a focus on health pathways and linking activities for students in pathways ranging from arts digital media to sports medicine.

Diablo Valley College (DVC)

During the 2010-11 academic year, more than 100 high school students in articulated classes utilizing “credit by exam” mechanisms, earned college units and were congratulated with a letter of instruction on how to access their transcript at the college.  DVC’s Career Pathways website (www.dvc.edu/careerpathways) was updated to help secondary schools identify which courses currently articulate with the college.  Twenty-two “credit by exam” articulation agreements are currently in effect with the high schools.  A fall CTE high school articulation workshop utilizing State Pathway templates will be offered on Saturday, October 15^th with a focus on the following areas: early childhood education, culinary arts, arts digital media, broadcast communication arts, and computer information systems.

The 2011 summer marked the seventh year that Diablo Valley College hosted the annual Engineering, Construction and Manufacturing Summer Camp. The camp offers summer enrichment opportunities for high school students and teachers to explore theory and practice in a week-long event that offers hands-on exploration, industry field visits, problem-solving, and expert industry viewpoints.

Over the years, approximately 400 students representing more than twenty-five high schools in Contra Costa County have enrolled in the camp, which has been made possible by a collaborative effort between Diablo Valley College, the Contra Costa County Office of Education, and the Contra Costa Economic Partnership Workforce Initiative. The culminating camp event consistently draws attendance from approximately 120 audience members consisting of students, parents, teachers, industry participants, college faculty, and administrators.

High school students and their parents are often not aware of the educational training paths and job opportunities available in the Building Trades, Construction, and Engineering industry sectors.  A slide show for the 2011 camp and an article written by the Contra Contra Times is available at www.dvc.edu/careerpathways. Click on the green “Engineering Camp” tab on the left.

 Contra Costa College (CCC)

Thirty Helms eighth grade English students stopped off at Richmond City Hall to hear the Mayor talk about “green” careers.  This was just one stop in their action packed day.  Over the course of their day-long “green tour,” they visited a water treatment facility, a recycling center and Richmond Builds.  These visits were rounded out by lunch at Mountain Hardware, a company that designs outdoor wear and is housed in a “green” building.  The students had the opportunity to observe first hand a variety of jobs related to protecting our environment.

Contra Costa College, with funding through the Contra Costa County Community Collaborative for Career Technical Education, has coordinated and funded over 20 such “green” field trips for students participating in the Discover, Explore, Soar program.  This program brings career exploration activities to over 500 seventh and eighth grade students in West Contra Costa middle schools annually.  It is a 7-week, biweekly seminar that provides career curriculum, interest inventory testing, and exploration of careers through technical means, as well as guest speakers and field experience.  In addition to the above pictured field trip, over 200 middle school students annually visit Contra Costa College as part of this program.  In the four years that this program has been in place in West Contra Costa, other field experience activities have included visits to San Francisco General Hospital, Kaiser Hospital, Chevron, and local businesses.