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Employer Quotes

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

They are talking about this topic: Educational Partnerships

 

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 Sort descending Region
"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
"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
"I just want to point out that once you get them at the school, there are some things you can do with them, but there are a whole lot of people wandering in the wilderness that aren't sure of where they're going to end up." Southeast
"I think the Youth Scrubs Camp that [MnSCU college] puts on for southeastern Minnesota is a wonderful opportunity to expose them to the fact that there's still a cool factor, and it gets kids interested in looking at health occupations." Southeast
"I want to follow up on the comment about the K-12. We just called a school principal and the social worker that helps the students with their career development, and they're totally unaware that in long-term care we can actually reimburse people as they move from nurse's aide to LPN and as they go to school to become an RN. The state reimburses us to pay for that education. I think there is a huge need to communicate to our education system the opportunities." Southeast
"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
"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
"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
"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
"Our clinic has worked very hard in the last 11 years to develop career education programs to reach out to high school students. If there's anybody who's interested in learning more about what we have done—what we do and what we plan to do—we are more than willing to share. We would love to give away our program guidelines to help you work with the privacy issues and other issues because there is a way to deal with that. And the Scrubs Camp is an example of something out there that the community partners with. There are a lot of things out there so it's a matter of making sure everyone is aware of it." Southeast
"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
"We have partnered with [MnSCU college] and [high school]. We are putting in a nurse's aide training course in the high school for high school students. And it's been great. We hire everybody that comes out of there that will go to work." Central
"We talk about K-12 and getting them introduced to what is out there in health care, but all of these new privacy things have come up. We used to have family members of middle-school kids calling and saying, 'My child is showing an interest in lab, can they come take a look?' And we'd say, 'Well, sure they can come and take a look.' Now that just isn't happening. If there could be a creative way on a national level—I know our organizations were saying you need to get out there and tell people what this is—but until there is something formalized on a nationwide level from the colleges or something to hit these students and create some films to go into schools...If the high schools aren't responding to it, or aren't looking for it—asking for you to come in—then we need to be going to them." Southeast
"We're starting to work with a local high school about trying to do some type of youth leadership or youth program, just to have another way to help them become aware of health care careers so that they're thinking about it." Southeast
"We're talking about the students and their reality check of what they're getting into. We find that a lot of students come to us with their background being CSI, House, and Desperate Housewives—this influences their vision of what these careers are about. They have severe culture shock when they realize that they might have to get their hands dirty and it actually is work. One of the things that we've been doing on our sites as part of a summer project is that we have our students who have recently graduated—since they all have iPhones and iPads—to do some little video vignettes of, 'This is my day. This is what I do.' And they will get clearance from their facility for us to have those videos as part of our recruiting portion for that. We started partially with a Department of Labor grant that was given to [MnSCU college] for doing some of those things for the students because they really have a very pop-culture idea of what health care is all about—and laboratory in particular. They didn't really have a clue. They thought they were all going to walk in and instantly become CSIs. And that you could wear high heels to the crime scene. They think that's reality. We need to reach out and give them the real picture because they really don't have it." Southeast
"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
"Well, from a high school perspective and out of the pipeline, it's also very helpful when employers and educators at that level can get together so that students at an early age can really develop their awareness of some of these expectations. You can plant those seeds, they'll build, and they'll grow. I just think sometimes when you're doing it a bit later on that it's harder." Southeast
"You know the other reality is—and I have spent a lot of time in K-12—and K-12's not here in this room; they're not a part of this conversation. That's where those thoughts, ideas and beliefs are developed. I just asked industry and post-secondary education, shouldn't we be in that classroom with secondary education making sure that young people understand what reality is?" Southeast