School advisers work to pair jobs, students
Posted on Sunday, October 5, 2008
Arkansas’ 2008 high school graduates’ career interests do not align with the jobs the state’s economy will produce as they enter the work force, survey results show.
The Arkansas Department of Workforce Education defines the top five areas of job growth through 2014 as education, management, community services, marketing and sales, and health care.
Students responding to a survey given with the ACT college admissions test indicated that the number of jobs created in four of those fields likely will exceed the number of graduates planning to enter them. Students’ interest outpaced work force need in health-care jobs.
Results released in September by the American College Testing Board also show up to 91 percent of those students will require some remediation to complete their college course work. The results lend additional support to efforts to increase work force training, career counseling and field-specific training at a high school level, educators said.
“It doesn’t shock me,” said Raymond Henson, program manager for Career Guidance, Exploration and Preparation agency of the Workforce Education Department. “Students ’ knowledge of the workplace is often rather limited, and the programs of study at a high school level don’t always align with what a student is interested in.”
While economic development officials push for job creation and higher education administrators seek to retain gifted students, public schools should work to ensure that students are aware of the needs of the state’s work force and have the academic skills necessary to obtain jobs in those fields, Henson said.
Last year, the Workforce Education Department partnered with the state’s education cooperatives to offer voluntary courses, allowing teachers and counselors to be certified as career development facilitators. Henson would like to see the Legislature boost funding and create requirements to install the facilitators in public high schools statewide. While guidance counselors increasingly take on administrative duties, the facilitators could work one-on-one with students, using economic indicators, academic potential and personal interests as a targeted method of determining a future career, he said. “Counselors are spread very thin,” Henson said, “and students do need a lot more guidance.”
DIFFERENT INTERESTS According to the ACT survey, 17 percent of jobs created between 2004 and 2014 will be in education, but 11 percent of students are interested in that field. Fourteen percent of jobs will be created in management, but 6 percent of students are interested in that field. Nine percent of jobs will be created in community services, an area that attracts 4 percent of student interest. While 8 percent of jobs will open in marketing and sales, only 2 percent of students want to work in that area.
Dawn Norman, a guidance counselor at Fayetteville High School, said students frequently are unrealistic about their career expectations.
“We get a lot of people who say they’re going to be doctors, lawyers and actresses,” she said.
Working to create a plan with students will become more important as job creation drops in a tense economic climate, Norman said.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, job growth in the Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers Metropolitan Statistical Area hit a high of 6 percent in September 2005 but has shown modest declines since.
Failures in the national economy sparked congressional approval of a $ 700 billion financial bailout package and fears of fewer jobs available to future graduates.
“I think there’s going to be a little more urgency about it,” Norman said. “There will be more urgency in this economy to say, ‘What have you done to prepare for this ?’”
High school students largely are unaware of how decisions made on Wall Street could influence their future, she said.
Because the average high school student graduating after 2000 is predicted to change careers six times in his lifetime, Norman uses aptitude tests and personality profiles to determine a student’s field of study rather than a specific career.
“We want them to realize that there are so many jobs in the future that haven’t been created yet,” Norman said. “For them to say ‘ I want to be this’ is not the best way to pick a career. We want them to know themselves, to identify the characteristics about them that help them identify the best careers.”
Targeting a career field early motivates students to achieve higher goals and frequently lowers the need for remedial course work in college, Henson said. Arkansas Code 6-15-10, passed in 1987, requires students to take noncredit remedial courses if they score below a 19 on the English, reading or math sections of the ACT. Some of the state’s universities, such as the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, set higher standards.
CREATING ACADEMIES Schools seek to direct students’ career interests, motivate learning and create a sense of community through academies, or “schools within a school,” Henson said. About a third of Arkansas’ high school students complete an academy, defined by three years of designated course work, before graduating.
To boost participation, educators fuse popular student interests with needed work fields.
When students showed interest in criminal investigation television shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the Workforce Education Department saw an opportunity to create public service academies, hoping to fill future rosters for the state’s police departments, which are known for being short-staffed, Henson said.
In Springdale High School’s Public Service Academy, students work alongside police officers to learn about the law and to compete in mock-trial competitions. With state Department of Education grants, the Springdale district started an information technology academy this fall. A group of agriculture teachers have worked with University of Arkansas at Fayetteville professors and Tyson Foods Inc. employees to create classes for a food processing, packaging and production academy set to launch next fall. While schools shouldn’t force students into unchangeable paths of career and study, counselors should use academies to emphasize more prudent preparation for the future, Norman said. “We have to be careful not to track kids into certain careers, but we do need to be involved,” she said. “A lot of those interests are formed in high school.”
To contact this reporter: eblad@arkansasonline. com
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