Lessons We’ve Learned as Educators Partnering with Business

The US government and many states are investing millions of dollars to support workforce development for young people, funding Career Technical Education programs and other career readiness initiatives. At the same time, both our workforce and educators are grappling with the changes brought on by artificial intelligence and its impact on the future careers of our youth. Our young people need guidance navigating their career journeys more than ever, and one of the best things educators can do is provide career exploration opportunities and adult mentors to guide them along their journey. To do this, partnering with the business community is critical. After nearly a decade working with over 120 business partners in support of our AIME career mentoring and internship program, we at the Anaheim Union High School District have learned several lessons about partnering with businesses and other organizations to support young people in their career exploration journey.

Honor Business Leaders’ Time

Early on, we recognized that for a business partner, time spent meeting with us and participating in mentoring and internships is time away from profitable activities. Whereas internally, we might set a one-hour timeframe for a meeting, with our business partners we default to thirty minutes or less. Shorter meetings help us stay focused and get right to the point. In addition, we make sure we are prepared with a clear agenda and know what our ask is. A meeting that ends without a clear ask or next step is a missed opportunity.

In addition, when hosting a guest speaker or coordinating a mentoring event, we do our best to ensure that the event starts and ends on time. If transportation is required to bring students to a business location, we allow plenty of time for traffic to ensure the students and chaperones arrive on time. To help with this, we have worked closely with our district’s transportation department, and they understand the importance of being on time for events hosted by business partners. When we honor a business’s time, we increase the likelihood of working with them again in the future.

Be Professional in Attire and Language

Knowing that it’s critical to be professional in appearance when meeting with a business, we match the attire of the business community in our area. For many years, this meant a shirt and tie (or suit) for men and a business suit or equivalent for women. In recent years, business attire has become more casual, although this may vary depending on whether we are meeting with a corporation versus a government organization. Professional attire applies whether the meeting is virtual or in-person.

In addition, when interacting with a potential business partner, we keep our language professional and avoid divisive topics or politically incorrect comments. In addition, we present our school district in the best possible light. We all deal with bureaucratic hurdles and conflicts with colleagues that can be frustrating (it happens in the business world too), but sharing those with outside partners can undermine our credibility and damage the relationship.

Make Agreements and Logistics Easy

When arranging guest speakers or mentoring field trips, we do not require formal agreements since our staff will chaperone and supervise the experience. This makes these events easy for businesses to participate in, since signing an agreement would likely require involving their legal and risk management departments.

For internships, formal agreements are required, but we do our best to make this process easy on the business partner. Our district uses standard, pre-written internship agreements for all of our partners, which include the legal requirements and protections our risk management team and legal counsel require. This saves us having to create new agreements for each partner, or accidentally leaving something off of an agreement because we are cutting and pasting from a document we have used in the past. If a business would like to request a change to the language of the agreement, we ensure that our risk management team and legal counsel respond in a timely manner to keep things moving.

To meet state requirements and keep students safe, our internship agreements require background checks for those working directly with our students. To streamline this process, we allow partners to use the same background check facility we use for employees, with costs covered by our work-based learning grant funding. Our agreements also offer the option of letting the business certify that they will handle the background check, since many organizations already do this as part of their onboarding process, again making the process as easy as possible.

Respond and Follow Up Quickly and Consistently

While we all get overwhelmed by email and other forms of communication at times, we have found it’s critical to respond in a timely manner to our business partners. Many businesses and executives are used to moving quickly on ideas and projects, and if they do not hear back they are likely to move on to other things. If communication comes in from a business partner, we respond as promptly as possible.

We also make sure someone on our team is keeping leads organized and following up when we do not hear back from a potential business partner. For us, this involves a simple ongoing spreadsheet, but longer term we may move to a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program, similar to what a sales team at a business would use.

Create Plug and Play Opportunities

One of the early decisions we made for the AIME program was to create a tiered system of engagement, so that business partners could choose how to support students, essentially selecting from a menu of options. This not only makes our programs easy to understand, but also makes working with us that much more straightforward and user-friendly.

Our program is organized around four tiers. Tier 1 offers Career Exploration through guest speaker visits and field trips to businesses. Students explore career fields, tour businesses, and learn about the education requirements for various industries.

Our second tier is the Career Mentoring Series, which involves two or more events with the business partner in a series. These events allow students and businesses to develop deeper mentoring relationships. A tier 2 event might involve site tours, keynote speakers, small group mentoring and projects in collaboration with the business, or simply going deeper to learn about the industry through multiple visits.

Tier 3 is a Professional Internship, which takes place either over the summer or during the school year, and as mentioned above requires agreements as well as staff coordination. Even though an internship is a much larger commitment, businesses appreciate that we have a ready-made program with curriculum, staff support, and template agreements.

Tier 4 is a Teacher Externship, where our teachers visit a business for a two-day experience. The first day typically consists of a site tour, career pathway conversations with various employees, a summary of the careers within the business and the education required, and coverage of the key skills desired in the organization. During the second day, the teachers work on curriculum development to incorporate what they learned into their classrooms. These have proven to be highly valuable experiences for our teachers, and the learning will reach every student in that teacher’s classes for years to come.

Having these plug and play opportunities has lowered friction for our partners and increases the likelihood of businesses being willing to participate and continue participating into the future.

Final Thoughts:

For educators, working with businesses to support students’ career exploration is often new territory, and it certainly was for us when we started the AIME program. With business and education speaking different languages and seeking different outcomes, sometimes these differences can prevent collaboration between educators and businesses. We believe the lessons learned above have increased our likelihood of success. Considering the urgent need to help our students discover their future careers, the tremendous support businesses provide is more valuable than ever.

Helping Students Be Present While Preparing Them for Their Future

I recently finished the audiobook version of Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. This book is an interesting contrast to much of the literature on productivity, acting as a counterpoint to Getting Things Done, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and other treasured productivity books. I enjoyed the book; Burkeman’s humor mixed with his strong background in philosophy make for an interesting and entertaining read. The premise of the book is that we each have about four thousand weeks to live, and there is no way we can accomplish everything we want to get done in that time. We must figure out how to make the best use of our time, rather than trying to cram in every possible accomplishment.

Something that struck me related to education is Burkeman’s discussion of how spending our time with a future-orientation means we are not living in the present. He bemoans the nonstop focus on productivity, where we have to constantly prepare for something in the future; where every activity, sometimes even our hobbies, needs to be productive or profitable in some way.

He brings this up in relation to education at one point, pointing out that the education system is constantly training students for the next stage. Kindergarten students are being prepared for elementary school, elementary students for junior high, high school students for college, college students for the workforce, and so on. His thesis is that we are training young people to have this future orientation, rather than letting them just be students and children.

In my role at my school district, I coordinate career education for junior high and high school students. Much of our focus is on the future of our students: career pathway programs to prepare students for their careers, dual enrollment classes to help students start earning early credit for college, internships, and more. We want to develop students’ 21st Century Skills, technical skills, each student’s sense of purpose, and more to prepare them for life. All of these efforts may lead students to develop the future-orientation Burkeman writes about in his book.

How can we prepare students for their futures while allowing them to enjoy their childhood? I am thankful that our district has trained many of our teachers in embedding mindfulness into the classroom, which can help ground students (and the teachers and staff who support them) in the present moment. If in our career education programs we can balance allowing students to explore potential careers while letting them be teenagers, we may be able to avoid causing undue stress or creating the future-orientation Burkeman discusses.

Burkeman reminds us that we do not want to spend our lives planning for the future or regretting the past. Instead, we should live in and enjoy the present. This leaves educators with the question: how can we help students be present for their childhood, yet still prepare them for their future?

Partnering Education and Industry to Prepare Students for the Workforce

Over the last ten years, my school district, the Anaheim Union High School District, has grown their career mentoring program, called AIME, in which we partner with local businesses, government agencies, and non-profits to provide career mentoring and internships to our students. We have had over 100 businesses participate in these efforts, and they enjoy working with our students and are regularly impressed with the caliber of the young people who will make up the workforce of tomorrow. Throughout our county there are several organizations working towards a similar mission: The CEO Leadership Alliance of Orange County, Vital Link, Orange County United Way, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and others. The Disneyland Resort has also made generous donations to AIME and other programs in the community to support workforce development.

While these efforts have made great progress, the number of students who participate in these work-based learning efforts is slim in comparison to the overall student population. In addition, the business community and the educational system often remain siloed, and work-based learning programs seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Educational entities, including the K12 system, community college, and universities, have their own standards, operating procedures, unions, and government requirements, making it challenging to collaborate. Legal requirements, risk management, and the bureaucracy of creating board-approved agreements can slow down the process of partnering, which leads to resistance in moving these relationships forward. All of this means slower progress towards meeting the needs of our students as well as the workforce needs of our local regions.

There are several promising practices that may lead us towards a stronger partnership with the business world and greater student participation in work-based learning. For example, our school district has implemented the Career Preparedness Systems Framework (CPSF) to align our educational goals with workforce readiness. This framework focuses our efforts around three main drivers: Youth Voice and Purpose, Technical Skills, and 21st Century Skills. By addressing 21st Century Skills in every classroom (communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, and character) we are providing skills that we know will be important regardless of a student’s career choice. Our focus on the second driver, technical skills, not only ensures that students will have relevant skills they can cite on their resumes once they finish their education, it also helps teachers identify the skills in their curriculum that will lead to job-readiness and brings relevance to classroom learning. Finally, by allowing Youth Voice and Purpose to guide each student’s educational journey, we are avoiding tracking students towards particular pathways based on our perceptions of those students, and we are empowering students to become part of their communities to influence positive change. Our focus on career readiness does not just take place in Career Technical Education pathways, rather it is implemented across the curriculum.

We are in the early stages of implementing the CPSF, but believe it will be a positive step towards preparing our future workforce for success. Our business partners agree that drivers such as the 5 Cs are well worth focusing on, as they will help students succeed in any industry. In addition, UC Irvine has reported that our students who attend their university have higher average GPAs when compared with students from other districts, and are more likely to continue their education beyond the first year of college. We believe that our focus on transferrable career skills has helped students prepare for success in both their college and career pursuits.

Another promising example of successful partnerships between education and industry is that of apprenticeships. Whereas traditional apprenticeships were associated with building, manufacturing, and other trades, apprenticeships are now being implemented in high-tech fields, such as computer science and biotechnology. In an apprenticeship, the employer and educators agree on the skills that apprentices will learn, and the apprentice works for a wage while receiving instruction aligned with the apprentice’s experience in the workplace. If the student meets the standards of the apprenticeship, they are hired to work for the company. Our district, as well as the Orange County Department of Education, is working on implementing apprenticeships at the high school level.

It is time for education and industry to become true partners in preparing our future workforce. While CTE educators have long been working towards these partnerships, it is time to orient our entire educational system towards career and life readiness. I applaud the efforts of our local nonprofits and corporate partners as we work toward a common vision of workforce readiness. Considering that our students will spend most of their lives working in their careers, let’s focus on career preparedness as the end goal and let that drive our school and district improvement efforts to guide students towards purposeful, fulfilling lives.