Get Ahead: Guide to Career Advancement by Free Times

getahead Guide to Career Advancement

Local Center Trains High School Students for High-Tech Careers

By Al Dozier

ome Midlands high school students are looking beyond history, math and English courses to hone high-tech career skills.

What’s making this possible is a new trend in some school districts toward hightech instruction. A centerpiece in this effort is the Center for Advanced Technical Studies in Lexington-Richland School District 5, which some say could become a national model. The center opened during the 2012-13 school year in a rural area on Mount Vernon Church Road near Chapin. It now has an enrollment of more than 1,000. The 17 different courses offered at the center are available to students in all of the high schools in the district, though it has an immediate affinity to Spring Hill High School, a new magnet school right next door. The magnet school offers programs in exercise science, environmental studies engineering, entertainment and entrepreneurship. At the Center for Advanced Technical Studies, a student can enroll in four courses, arranging classroom time to work with his or her existing schedule of courses. A typical routine is three hours of instruction every other day. Courses include aerospace engineering; agriculture and biosystems engineering technology; biomedical sciences and integrated technology; clean energy and engineering systems; and networking and cyber security technology. But the center is not limited to hightech engineering and technology instruction. Students can also choose law enforcement; fire and rescue services; welding technology; veterinary sciences; culinary

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arts; and digital art and design. The instruction is not what you normally see in a classroom, according to Dr. Bob Couch, the center’s director. Students have the opportunity to use their own imaginations to develop solutions to the problems facing their area of study, be it health care or animal science. Students can be found throughout the center, some working on their own in the high-tech facilities that provide the electrical gadgets and equipment needed. They become critical thinkers and problem solvers, even if it’s a seemingly big problem. Matthew Herron of Dutch Fork High School says he’s conducting research on red blood cells. Some students have already been recognized with research awards. A similar high-tech center will soon become available to Midlands students in Richland District 2 when the Richland 2 Institute for Innovation (R2i2) opens in August of 2016. It’s a huge project. It will be housed in a 180,000-squarefoot building on a 32-acre site in the heart of the Village at Sandhill at a cost of around $40 million. Most of the focus areas of the curriculum are designated as advanced. The initial study areas include advanced engineering, advanced IT, advanced hospitality arts, supply chain logistics, advanced manufacturing and managerial business. Just like the District 5 program, R2i2 will offer certification programs that could

The Center for Advanced Technical Studies teaches everything from welding to cyber security.

help students land a job. A key component of the R2i2 program will be the multiple partnerships it is now developing with regional businesses, colleges and universities. The Lexington-Richland 5 center, meanwhile, is already winning accolades. It’s received multiple achievement awards and draws visitors from out of state, even out of the nation, with delegations from China coming to visit. The center received the Platinum High Achievement Award from the Southern Regional Education Board. Students from the center have already won numerous awards at Career and Technical Student Organization competitions. Couch, who developed the center, has worked extensively in South Carolina on technical education issues. He previously served as state director for career and technical education for hundreds of schools throughout the state. He also serves as an advisor to the General Assembly in his role as a member of the state’s Education Oversight Committee. So he already had a grasp on technical education. free-times.com

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Couch says he was not given any extensive recommendations on what he should do when he accepted the job, though the school district and board had input as he developed his plan. He didn’t follow any model, just focused on what today’s student actually needs in a workplace that has changed dramatically. He recalls Lexington-Richland 5 Superintendent Stephen Hefner’s frequent analogy to what education access should mean. “He would say it’s like an interstate highway,” Couch says. As students move ahead on the highway, they have to consider the best exits. Those pathways are available in a variety of ways at the new center. Couch says properly trained instructors are a key to his mission. He wanted teachers who had real job experience in the course being offered. But that didn’t exclude academic credentials. He wanted both. South Carolina has long had post-high school technical schools that have trained students for jobs in high demand. Now, for at least some students, that training is starting even sooner. facebook.com/freetimes

Dec. 30, 2015

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Filling the Skills Gap Apprenticeship Program Helps Workers Find Jobs and Employers Fill Needs By Rodney Welch

or almost as long as there have been jobs, there have been apprentices and masters — experts who pass on what they know to someone who wants to learn. It’s also a tradition that, as Kevin Meetze sees it, has fallen out of practice. “Many years ago, when you learned a trade or a skill, you became an apprentice to a master,” says Meetze, owner of Meetze Plumbing in Columbia. “The master’s job was to train you to become a journeyman, and hopefully one day you’d become a master. That no longer happens. We’re trying to go back to the process of apprenticejourneyman-master.” It’s a process whose value has been especially proven in South Carolina, where the Apprenticeship Carolina program began in 2007. At that time, Director Brad Neese told NPR last year, “We only had 90 companies that had apprenticeship programs.” That number of companies is now up to 770, and to date more than 14,000 people have either completed or are currently enrolled, according to Carla Whitlock, senior consultant with Apprenticeship Carolina. Overall, there are more than 1,000 occupations represented, with opportunities in all industries, and not just skilled trades. “We’ve done a lot of apprenticeships in nontraditional arenas, like in customer service reps or in IT positions,” says Barrie Kirk, vice president for corporate and continuing education at Midlands Technical College. “The medical field is used in apprenticeship in a lot of different ways.”

Filling a Need The success of the program isn’t hard to figure. It has filled a need for skilled workers. Employers “were so worried about, ‘How are we going to replace all of our employees that are retiring?’” Kirk says. “When they posted a job, they weren’t having enough qualified applicants apply.” Meetze says the skills gap and labor shortage in his own industry indicated the need to develop more training opportunities. For many employers, Kirk added, Apprenticeship Carolina has become a means to train employees who are loyal as well as qualified. “The benefit to the employer is once you invest the time and the resources into an employee, the likelihood that they’re going to stay with you for the long haul increases tremendously,” she says. “You’re building a dedicated employee, not somebody that’s going to leave.” For anyone soon to be entering the job market, or looking for a new career, Apprenticeship Carolina offers a means to not just learn a skilled trade, but to learn the right way.

Apprenticeship South Carolina apprenticeshipcarolina.com

Master plumber training can boost salaries substantially.

The programs offered are all certified by the U.S. Department of Labor, which means they combine three factors: classroom instruction, on-the-job training and “scalable wage progression.” That last part means your salary increases along with your skill level.

A Pathway to Mastery — Plus Training on Soft Skills The apprenticeship course at Meetze Plumbing involves 144 hours of class time and about that same amount in a lab setting. Upon completion of the course, a student is eligible to take an exam to become a journeyman plumber. After four more years of work, they can take an exam to become a master plumber. Students work on the job four days a week and attend class on Friday. Instructor Lee Zeruth, himself a master plumber, spends the morning giving students textbook training. They look at pneumatic drawings, learn about threading and gluing and other basics of the trade. After lunch, they attend a lab – set up by the company specifically for train-

ing purposes — that tests what they’ve learned. “We actually put in a water heater and ran it live, with gas and water and everything,” says recent graduate Stanley Archie Jr. Sometimes Zeruth will mess with the machinery to give students fresh problems. “By us taking someone that has no plumbing skills whatsoever, we get to teach them the proper way to do the things,” Zeruth said. “We do things the proper way and we hold them to a certain standard, whereas somebody else might do a shortcut. That might work for a while, but it’s not the proper way to do it. They don’t have any bad habits when we get them. We get to teach them good habits. That’s what I like about it.” “They educated us a lot on things that we may not see, ever,” Archie says. “They educated us on everything.” It isn’t all just a matter of technical know-how, either. Students in the program also learn how to deal with clients. “When I was coming up, that wasn’t necessarily important,” Meetze says. “We do a lot of soft skills training, like

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Successful completion of an apprenticeship program — which can take anywhere from one to four years — comes with a certificate from the Department of Labor. Just like with a college degree, that piece of paper is basic proof that you know what you’re doing, and that you can take your skill with you anywhere you move. Apprenticeship programs are available either through the South Carolina Technical College System or through an in-house program created within a particular trade or industry. Young people in high school can also join a Youth Apprenticeship program and learn while going to school. “A lot of our companies actually use the apprenticeship program in order to bring people up to different levels within their organization,” Whitlock says. “So really being engaged with a company [that] has apprenticeship programs would be really good for somebody looking for types of opportunities.” Since apprenticeship courses generally work hand in hand with companies in order to meet the on-the-job training free-times.com

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requirement, companies will often pay the costs of education. There’s also another major incentive: The more you learn, the more you earn. At Meetze Plumbing, successful completion of a six-to-eight-month program means a pay increase of $15,000 a year. “We’re looking for folks not necessarily that have a plumbing background or even a construction background,” Meetze says. “What we are looking for are folks who have mechanical aptitude and that have a positive attitude. Those are the two criteria I have when I interview people to put them in this course. The idea that you can go into a trade, essentially making $13 an hour, and in six to eight months you can almost double your pay, is a pretty good career option I think.” Archie doesn’t disagree. “I feel like it’s a great investment,” he says. Aside from other benefits, Meetze also sees the apprenticeship program as a duty. “ I think it is our requirement as a business,” he says, “since the educational industry has kind of lost track with the apprenticeship-journeyman-master concept and skills training, although they are trying now to get back in the game. I think it’s a business’s job to find and develop people. That’s just being a good steward.” facebook.com/freetimes

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