Feature: Vocational Education
From October 2006
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Vocational Ed Gets Technical
By Jess Sullivan
Vocational education used to be pervasive in public high schools. But those days are long gone. Vocational programs have been whittled away or gutted in the last several years as K-12 public school spending has focused on test taking and reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic.
For the business world, particularly the state’s construction industry, this governmental shift away from a focus on vocational education has created a debilitating lack of trained workers. “Shop classes have gone away in the schools — 85 percent of them. Today everything is geared to passing those exams,” says Doug Urbick, president of Teichert Construction.
Teichert and Urbick are not sitting on their hands waiting for the education bureaucracy to figure out the unintended consequences of such a policy.
“If you think of the future in terms of a 10-year-old child today, about 70 percent of the jobs that child will have to choose from as an adult have not even been thought of in 2006,” says Bill Hughes, a marketing consultant and professor for the vocational education degree program at Sacramento State’s School of Continuing Education.
From a purely personal perspective, employees and employers should be mindful of two truths of the new economy:
1. Job tenure is down to an average of four years for the typical worker, regardless of whether they have a blue-collar or white-collar job, according to U.S. Dept. of Labor reports.
2. More and more jobs require specialized skills and training. Nearly two-thirds of jobs were classified as unskilled 50 years ago, when our grandparents were figuring out what they wanted to do for a living; today, fewer than 15 percent require only low skills or none at all.
Hughes points to his students as examples of professionals who are preparing for career change. His students, whose average age is 45, say their desired new vocation is to teach vocational education. Mostly transitioning from other jobs, they want to pass on their hard-earned expertise to the next generation.
Innovation Integration
Remaining vocational programs are sometimes faulted for being out of date or out of touch with the needs of the 21st century economy. Last year, the Legislative Analyst’s Office criticized the paucity of programs designed to transition vocational skills from the high school level into community colleges and then the workforce. The LAO report pointed out fewer than 700 tech-prep programs designed for specific vocations operate in the entire state; i.e., fewer than one per high school. Those programs that succeed do so not because of federal or state coordination, according to the report. They succeed largely because dedicated individuals are committed to making a difference.
The programs wear a few different labels. Laddering and 2+2; i.e., two years of high school vocational education and two years at a junior college, are two terms describing examples of integrating the K-12 system with the community college system.
In other instances, the traditional vocational-education model has been supplanted by innovative charter-school endeavors. One year ago, the Sacramento City Unified School District opened Health Professions High School, thanks in large part to a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The school, which hopes to grow to 500 students, has counterparts in school districts serving Roseville, Elk Grove and Placerville.
Private Sector to Rescue
High school auto-shop classes may be on their way out, but the number of cars on California’s roads keeps growing. In the Sacramento region’s private sector, for-profit schools have taken over where public-school programs once held sway.
During each of the next 10 years, California’s new car dealers will have to recruit 3,600 auto technicians, according to the California Motor Car Dealers Association.
With more than 800 car dealers within 100 miles of Sacramento, and mindful that the Sacramento region is expected to grow from 2.15 million people to nearly 3 million people by 2025, two private vocational schools have set up shop to train auto technicians.
Wyo-Tech Inc. opened an auto-repair campus in West Sacramento in 2004 and expects to have 1,700 students within the next two years. Universal Technical Institute opened an auto-repair campus in North Natomas, right alongside Interstate 5, earlier this year and hopes to have as many as 2,000 students in the upcoming years.
Christine Hauser is marketing and member services director for Western Electrical Contractors Association. Part of her job is to help recruit potential electricians. “The building industry throughout California is continuing to grow. We have a shortage of electricians today and that is going to continue for the next five to 10 years.” “It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Hauser predicts.
She is not alone in her assessment.
Over the next five years there will be as many as 35,000 jobs available in Northern California’s construction industry, many of them for carpenters, plumbers, electricians and heating-and-air-conditioning specialists, according to the Homebuilders’ Institute.
With the start of the new school year, the North State Building Industry Association is about to debut a $600,000 program dedicated to the short-term goal of enlisting 250 students into the building trades. The program, the only one of its kind in California, is intended to be a model that can be duplicated.
Partnering with 11 regional high schools and Sierra and Cosumnes River community colleges, the two-year BIA program goes a long way toward taking bureaucracy out of the loop. The national Homebuilders Institute’s grant funding to NSBIA enables the consolidating of textbooks, so students are literally working off the same page as they aim toward the local construction industry job market.
“This creates a direct link between the local industry and the local schools,” explains John Orr, president and CEO of NSBIA. “We’ve worked with schools before over the years but not on a coordinated basis like this.”
Re-enter Teichert
Mirroring the national trend, the average age of Teichert Construction craft trades employees is 47, making the company’s key role in rebuilding the regional workforce an important item in its strategic plan.
Teichert’s Urbick currently chairs the nonprofit Linking Education and Economic Development board. The goal of the organization is to replicate what a career-guidance counselor or teacher might have done years ago in advising high school students about career opportunities beyond the classroom. LEED’s outreach and education efforts also are funded in part by a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant. Workplace tours, job shadowing and internships are all part of the LEED menu. Urbick’s role at Teichert is not lost in the LEED outreach effort to replace what has been lost in public schools as career education has disappeared.
“Before a presentation at a school, 5 percent to 10 percent of students say they would consider a job in the construction industry. Afterwards, the percentage changes to 80 percent and sometimes 90 percent,” Urbick says.
By Jess Sullivan
Vocational education used to be pervasive in public high schools. But those days are long gone. Vocational programs have been whittled away or gutted in the last several years as K-12 public school spending has focused on test taking and reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic.
For the business world, particularly the state’s construction industry, this governmental shift away from a focus on vocational education has created a debilitating lack of trained workers. “Shop classes have gone away in the schools — 85 percent of them. Today everything is geared to passing those exams,” says Doug Urbick, president of Teichert Construction.
Teichert and Urbick are not sitting on their hands waiting for the education bureaucracy to figure out the unintended consequences of such a policy.
“If you think of the future in terms of a 10-year-old child today, about 70 percent of the jobs that child will have to choose from as an adult have not even been thought of in 2006,” says Bill Hughes, a marketing consultant and professor for the vocational education degree program at Sacramento State’s School of Continuing Education.
From a purely personal perspective, employees and employers should be mindful of two truths of the new economy:
1. Job tenure is down to an average of four years for the typical worker, regardless of whether they have a blue-collar or white-collar job, according to U.S. Dept. of Labor reports.
2. More and more jobs require specialized skills and training. Nearly two-thirds of jobs were classified as unskilled 50 years ago, when our grandparents were figuring out what they wanted to do for a living; today, fewer than 15 percent require only low skills or none at all.
Hughes points to his students as examples of professionals who are preparing for career change. His students, whose average age is 45, say their desired new vocation is to teach vocational education. Mostly transitioning from other jobs, they want to pass on their hard-earned expertise to the next generation.
Innovation Integration
Remaining vocational programs are sometimes faulted for being out of date or out of touch with the needs of the 21st century economy. Last year, the Legislative Analyst’s Office criticized the paucity of programs designed to transition vocational skills from the high school level into community colleges and then the workforce. The LAO report pointed out fewer than 700 tech-prep programs designed for specific vocations operate in the entire state; i.e., fewer than one per high school. Those programs that succeed do so not because of federal or state coordination, according to the report. They succeed largely because dedicated individuals are committed to making a difference.
The programs wear a few different labels. Laddering and 2+2; i.e., two years of high school vocational education and two years at a junior college, are two terms describing examples of integrating the K-12 system with the community college system.
In other instances, the traditional vocational-education model has been supplanted by innovative charter-school endeavors. One year ago, the Sacramento City Unified School District opened Health Professions High School, thanks in large part to a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The school, which hopes to grow to 500 students, has counterparts in school districts serving Roseville, Elk Grove and Placerville.
Private Sector to Rescue
High school auto-shop classes may be on their way out, but the number of cars on California’s roads keeps growing. In the Sacramento region’s private sector, for-profit schools have taken over where public-school programs once held sway.
During each of the next 10 years, California’s new car dealers will have to recruit 3,600 auto technicians, according to the California Motor Car Dealers Association.
With more than 800 car dealers within 100 miles of Sacramento, and mindful that the Sacramento region is expected to grow from 2.15 million people to nearly 3 million people by 2025, two private vocational schools have set up shop to train auto technicians.
Wyo-Tech Inc. opened an auto-repair campus in West Sacramento in 2004 and expects to have 1,700 students within the next two years. Universal Technical Institute opened an auto-repair campus in North Natomas, right alongside Interstate 5, earlier this year and hopes to have as many as 2,000 students in the upcoming years.
Christine Hauser is marketing and member services director for Western Electrical Contractors Association. Part of her job is to help recruit potential electricians. “The building industry throughout California is continuing to grow. We have a shortage of electricians today and that is going to continue for the next five to 10 years.” “It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Hauser predicts.
She is not alone in her assessment.
Over the next five years there will be as many as 35,000 jobs available in Northern California’s construction industry, many of them for carpenters, plumbers, electricians and heating-and-air-conditioning specialists, according to the Homebuilders’ Institute.
With the start of the new school year, the North State Building Industry Association is about to debut a $600,000 program dedicated to the short-term goal of enlisting 250 students into the building trades. The program, the only one of its kind in California, is intended to be a model that can be duplicated.
Partnering with 11 regional high schools and Sierra and Cosumnes River community colleges, the two-year BIA program goes a long way toward taking bureaucracy out of the loop. The national Homebuilders Institute’s grant funding to NSBIA enables the consolidating of textbooks, so students are literally working off the same page as they aim toward the local construction industry job market.
“This creates a direct link between the local industry and the local schools,” explains John Orr, president and CEO of NSBIA. “We’ve worked with schools before over the years but not on a coordinated basis like this.”
Re-enter Teichert
Mirroring the national trend, the average age of Teichert Construction craft trades employees is 47, making the company’s key role in rebuilding the regional workforce an important item in its strategic plan.
Teichert’s Urbick currently chairs the nonprofit Linking Education and Economic Development board. The goal of the organization is to replicate what a career-guidance counselor or teacher might have done years ago in advising high school students about career opportunities beyond the classroom. LEED’s outreach and education efforts also are funded in part by a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant. Workplace tours, job shadowing and internships are all part of the LEED menu. Urbick’s role at Teichert is not lost in the LEED outreach effort to replace what has been lost in public schools as career education has disappeared.
“Before a presentation at a school, 5 percent to 10 percent of students say they would consider a job in the construction industry. Afterwards, the percentage changes to 80 percent and sometimes 90 percent,” Urbick says.
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