A year ago, the Educational Equity Resource Center and the Guidance
Division and School to Careers Programs at Clark County School District
teamed up and began the "Making Tracks for Success: A Workplace
Experience for Counselors" program. Our hidden agenda is to help
counselors redefine their priorities so that career guidance and the
school to careers transition takes the forefront over the clerical tasks
they are so commonly required to do. We decided to begin this project
with the glitze piece; placing them in a business for a day with specific
items about which they must ask or observe. The focus is upon training,
the training that businesses offer; on-the-job or apprenticeship
training. I have taken nontraditional to a broader sense in that the
companies they visit, and the jobs they shadow will be those in which
they would never have in their wildest dreams imagined themselves doing.
We have had counselors on the 32nd floor of the new Bellagio Hotel (without
walls) with the ironworkers, with firefighters training units, FBI,
victim witness programs at the U.S. Attorney General's Office and police
depts., gold mines, ..... and on and on. They must learn about what
businesses expect of their hirees, employee screening, drug/alcohol
testing (hair sampling), team work, diversity, nontraditional employees,
bias, disability, etc., what kinds of preparation their students need to
have, what careers these jobs lead to, training programs, the
role of technology, how interviewing and hiring will be changing in the
future, benefits... It covers the gamut. There is a two hour pre-meeting,
then one day at the business, and a post meeting where they have an
opportunity to share their experience with each other. We plan to summarize
the highlights of these and put it together in a booklet/pamphlet to
distribute to all CCSD counselors.
Just this beginning piece has been received by the counselors with a
great deal of enthusiasm and a wish to repeat the experience as well as a
wealth of information and ideas to bring back to their students and
colleagues. There have even been some unexpected outcomes: the local
vocational high school has offered to produce the recruiting tape for a
local gold mine, and one of the construction firms took the counselors
that they had out to lunch at Spago's restaurant. (The latter has caused
the two people coordinating this program to consider the fact that we need to
start going on some of these workplace experiences). I would also like to
mention that this has been an excellent way for counselors to develop a
connection with people working in business and industry to develop
additional school to careers programs for their schools.
We have offered this twice for high school counselors, the second time
was hosted and coordinated with the Western Apprenticeship Coordinators
Association. We are currently organizing one for April that will target
middle school counselors. We take one counselor from each school to
participate. It's fun to work with the businesses to see what types of
experiences we can develop for the counselors.
This is the first phase. We are hoping that the counselors and schools
will begin setting up their own workplace experiences so we can move on
to phase two, yet to be determined.
If you would like more information, please don't hesitate to contact me.
Joyce
Joyce Nelson-Leaf, equity@nevada.edu Educational Equity
Resource Center, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 4505 Maryland Pky, Las
Vegas, NV 89154-3015 (702) 895-1380