Schools, community focus on career readiness
The State of Ohio has sought to increase awareness of workforce opportunities for students in recent years, seen in a name change to The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce in 2023.
This emphasis is highly appropriate in Knox County, which is home to 69 manufacturing companies, as well as large healthcare employers. Julia Suggs, Vice President of the Area Developmental Foundation, said due to expected growth and the need to replace retiring employees, the county will need over 3,000 new employees in manufacturing and over 2,500 in healthcare by 2032.
“Our highest needs are actually in jobs that do not require furthering education after high school,” she said. The primary need in manufacturing is production associates, along with people in skilled trades such as welding. Out of the five top positions needed in healthcare, only one requires a four-year degree; others require either no certification, some certification or a two-year degree.
The Knox County Business Advisory Council, which Suggs leads, seeks to connect businesses and schools for mutual benefit.
“Each school district sends a representative, and then we have industry reps from construction, manufacturing and healthcare,” she said. “They come and share what they’re hearing from their industry so that the superintendents are getting a quarterly update on workforce [needs] for each of our three most important industries.”
To take this information to teachers and give them practical ways to help students,
Suggs met with high school and middle school teachers recently, at the invitation of Middle School Principal Alex McIntire.
“The Knox County Business Advisory Council has outlined what they need from employees,” McIntire said, “and it’s essential that we prepare our students to meet those expectations so our community can continue to thrive.”
One focus of the training was soft skills: the top 10 employability skills needed to be a competitive and successful individual in the workplace in Knox County. Many of these came directly from the largest employers in the county. They include things such as social awareness, accountability and problem sensitivity, that is, the ability to recognize when something is wrong or is likely to go wrong. McIntire said teachers learned strategies they can use across all content areas to help students build essential soft skills—without
taking time away from their curriculum.
“The earlier students are exposed to and practice these skills, the more likely they are to become habits,” she said.
Intervention Specialist Jennifer Purdy said helping her juniors and seniors learn employability skills is important because they will be entering the job force very soon. She plans to implement time-sense challenges, one of the strategies from the training, with her students.
“All students need to develop better intuitive time management and pacing skills,” she said. “Students have difficulty estimating how much time has elapsed and how much time an activity will require. Improving these skills will benefit them in the classroom and in the workplace.”
Suggs, Career Navigator Sean McCutcheon and Kokosing Workforce Coordinator Andy Fox all agree that the most important employability trait for students to develop in school is faithful attendance, and parents can help greatly with this.
“If I had to pick one attribute that our employers care about the most,” McCutcheon said, “it is without question attendance. Students who think, ‘Hey, once I’m getting a paycheck, I’ll show up to work every day’—that’s not how it works. So, starting that attendance habit at an early age makes a world of difference because employers will bend over backwards for you if you are there every single day.”
Parents can also help by teaching soft skills such as accountability and by talking about careers at home. McCutcheon said his own conversations with students have borne fruit over the past five years.
“The number of seniors who don’t know what they want to do [when they graduate] is drastically shrinking to the point that around 100 percent of all the seniors I talk to, as well as the underclassmen, have an idea of what they want to do,” he said. “And they know why they want to do it; they know how they’re going to do it.”