1. Skip to content

Employer Quotes

The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Health Care

They are talking about this topic: Educational Partnerships

 

Your Selection:


The quotes below are about this issue:
Employers express concern that many K-12 students do not adequately understand career options in the health care field. They believe there is a need for higher education and businesses to support the K-12 system in improving career counseling efforts.

Employer Quote Region
"There's something that's bothered me for years. It goes back to the fundamentals of whether the technical four-year and two-year programs are doing an adequate job or not—I don't think that's the point. The point we need to look at is the very root cause or the root problem. And that is—what I perceive—a lack of an emphasis in our school system, in our high school system, to properly educate those kids. Number one, assessments of the individual child's abilities and interests, and a good dose of realism. That if you choose to go into the health care field, be it laboratory, be it nurse, what have you—then, yeah, you're going to have to probably work evenings, probably work nights. Yeah, it's going to be weekends and holidays. Sometimes we hear, 'Oh, I didn't know that. I don't want to do that.' Well, then, you just spent four years getting an RN degree, so good luck. We need to go back and try to help these kids because I don't think—and I'm sure there are school systems out there who invest some time and effort and money into that—but I would venture a guess that a vast majority of the schools in our state are not really doing a solid job at that freshman preferably, and sophomore level. I've talked to kids at school that are juniors and seniors. They say, 'I want to be a doctor,' or 'I want to be a nurse.' And one of my first questions is, 'How many of you have taken all the science classes you possibly can take from this school? Are you getting A's in science and mathematics in this school?' I'm sorry, but unless you can change overnight, you're history.

I'm very proud that I have two sons who started as CNAs at our facility because they wanted to be doctors. I said, 'Well, then you'd better become a CNA because if you can't handle this work, there's no sense going on further.' Today, they're both second-year medical students. Two more years and they'll be physicians, and then on to residency. They had the advantage of a mother who's a former schoolteacher a father who's a health care administrator, so they had mentors. But they're an exception to the rule. They didn't get it from school. They got it at home. But that's what we need our school systems to provide: career mentors. People who know the system, know what it takes to be a teacher, know what it takes to be an electrician. And then sit down with the parents, too, and say, 'Look, you need to get behind Mary or Johnny because if they want to be an electrician, they're going to need to do this, this, and this. And they're going to need to get some good grades.' It's not a slam dunk when someone says, 'I want to be a doctor, I want to get in.' No. Thousands of people apply. And only a handful gets in. Even nurses."		 Northwest
"It's very selective. I think that's really what we ought to be focusing on: How do we educate the proper skills for those kids? And get them in the system properly?" Northwest
"I would maybe even take these positions off the school system's payroll, and have a different level of accountability. So, they're not the math teacher and the science teacher and, `Oh, by the way, you're also going to do career counseling.' No. We have to have dedicated people who are doing career counseling where we can have some benchmarks that we can monitor. So, over the five year period, how did the people that they mentored fare? Not how did they do in their English classes and so forth, because that's the primary job of the teachers. The schools come in to supplement and to provide knowledge or advice about their school systems in the area as well as the state. So, I think it's a partnering. And the higher education school system could get behind this effort, legislatively, to have monies and this type of position mandated. I think every school—I mean [MnSCU college] has graduated maybe 20 or 25 students a year. But they need a full-time person? No. But I'd like to see a half-time, 20 hours a week person that is working with 20, 30, 40, or 50 students in those two grades on a regular basis." Northwest
"We've talked with students. But we're talking for an hour and, you know, half of them are sitting there with a deer-in-the-headlights glaze in their eyes and it's going over their heads. You've got to sit down one-to-one and create some trust in the relationship. That's why I'm saying we need a career mentor. But we also, in our facility, if there's an identified student who wants a career in health care, but they're not sure exactly what, or they maybe want to be a nurse, they come into our facility for an hour every day—or every other day—over a semester or over a whole year. And they shadow our staff. Kind of an internship. So, I mean, bring them into whatever industry they're interested in—maybe it's health care or maybe it's manufacturing. If somebody's interested in manufacturing and welding, bring that student in and let them observe." Northwest
"In my own school district, when my daughter went to a career fair, they had said, 'So, which career booths did you visit there?' They were supposed to research ahead of time. She said, 'Well, all of us went to the cosmetician because we wanted to see how to do makeup and do hair.' And then they had some local guy that had run stock cars, which was where all the guys went to. Impractical. So, really there needs to be some education before that. Who you bring to a career fair has to make sense in the real world, in the real scheme of thing, yes?" Northwest
"About how the local businesses could help, I know if we had this educational-mentor type individual that he or she could go out to the businesses and say, 'What's your projection in five years for nurses? What your projection five years from now for welders? What's your projection for electricians in five years?' That educational mentor could then tell these young people, 'Look, there's a good chance you could probably get a job in that field if you want to come back to this area after your education.'" Northwest
"Employer 1: That was brought up at one of the manufacturing workforce get-togethers, too, that nobody graduates from high school wanting to be a welder, for instance, because they just don't know what it is. But they had the idea of having something like a rolling career counselor. Somebody that, you know, maybe was not just a staff person in school dealing with school problems, but maybe going from school to school, enrobing their time to spend one-on-one time with the students to really help them on their future career goals and help them see what different occupations are—like a researcher, maybe. There might only be one student in 50 interested in that, but it's something that they really need—time spent with them.

Employer 2: And you say 'researcher,' and there are a million different kinds of researchers. I think students get stuck in silo where they think, 'I can only do X, Y, and Z,' and they don't see that they can go off and do this and this and this. I mean, my undergraduate degree is in art and I'm not doing anything related to art. But do I use my creativity? Every day on my job. I sure do."		 Northwest
"I was just at a national conference of community colleges and one thing that came up in one of the sessions I was at was—and I thought about this for many years—that, if employers need something, it's too bad the employers can't get attached to the potential employee before the students gets into their post-secondary education. Because if you don't have this pipeline, people jump into it, hoping they'll get out at the right end at the right time. And I think sometimes employers push responsibility down to the colleges, the colleges push it down to the schools, and the schools push it down to families. And I wonder if it would be more motivating to students to know that, 'I've got an employer who's investing in me and my education and, in return, I will go to work for that person at the end.' Because sometimes I just think we are, at the college level, trying to get people to come to the college because we need enrollment. And we get them in programs, and then we just hope that there are going to be jobs at the end. So, there's a disconnect there, too." Northwest