As part of our Future Ready Leaders (FRL) initiative, Montour Area School District’s team offered a career fair for peers featuring businesses, post-secondary programs, and volunteer opportunities. South Allegheny School District’s team is offering a discussion series about scholarship opportunities, choosing core classes and electives, and other topics to support peers in planning for the future.
Along with teams from other participating schools, they shared progress on their year-end projects when they came together in March to prepare for site visits with half a dozen employers.
At the meeting, they strategized and practiced ways of “making the most of an employer site visit before, during, and afterward,” said Program Director Jenn Sethman, who organizes FRL in collaboration with Aaron Altemus and Gina Barrett, who also serve as Consortium Program Directors.
Students and educators on the teams determined they needed to prep for the visits with research on the employers and questions they wanted to ask, among other things. During the visits, they agreed they needed to find out about in-demand jobs and explore different career pathways.
To follow up on the visits, teams were to consider whether specific companies or industries might be a good fit for themselves and develop strategies for communicating what they learned to peers.
Employers hosting the initial visits included Operating Engineers Local 66, where team members learned about operating heavy equipment and even got to give it a try, and Urban Design Associates, where they worked with architects and urban planners to envision ways of redeveloping a section of Pittsburgh. Visits on the schedule as this month came to a close were Pittsburgh Regional Transit, Covestro, and the Allegheny Health Network’s Star Center, a training facility on the campus of West Penn Hospital.
In addition to Montour and South Allegheny, districts participating in FRL this year include Allegheny Valley, Brownsville Area, California Area, Cornell, Elizabeth Forward, Greater Latrobe, Hampton, and Quaker Valley.
