by Joshua Schuetz
On February 8th, CEDA connected students from Tri-City United High School in Montgomery, Minnesota, with area career opportunities through a career expo hosted by TCU in conjunction with local businesses and professional organizations. Tri-City United High School serves the cities of Montgomery, Lonsdale, and Le Center. CEDA provides workforce coordination services to rural school districts through its contract with South Central Services Cooperative.
Unlike most career fairs, this event involved hands-on learning, with business owners and professionals joining students in the classroom to teach students about their fields of work, demonstrate equipment and techniques related to those fields, and offer students a chance to participate in hands-on activities.
CEDA team member Honey Burg, who serves as a workforce coordinator for TCU, said there were four professional categories at the event: agriculture, agribusiness, businesses and commerce, health and human services, and public service and administration.
“We chose 15-minute sessions as teasers where the professionals got to present, demonstrate, or allow hands-on exploration with the students,” she said. “Those are the same things a teacher does in the classroom and that lead all the way to career and technical education.”
Students got to choose up to six sessions to participate in throughout the day, thanks to the use of state software normally used for class planning and sign-up.
“The assistant principal contacted the state about using the scheduling software that the school already uses for classes, which allowed students to freely select what sessions they wanted to attend, which was really cool,” Burg said. “It proved that it could be 100 percent student choice and student led.”
Burg said she targeted high-wage job sectors and businesses to come and present to students, noting the importance of a living wage and opportunities for young people to advance their careers. She added that attending businesses expressed excitement about the event and interest in participating again.
With CEDA offering workforce coordination services to multiple school districts, Burg said events like TCU’s could be implemented in existing and new workforce coordination contracts.
“I’ve had people ask how we replicate this, and I have written everything down so as we were designing and building this, we’re documenting it,” she said. “Hands down, businesses will come in and work volunteering for the students—every single business I talked to in the time I’ve been here has been all-in.”