Get Your Students Hired
This is a general discussion forum for the following learning topic:
Learning Through Student Based Enterprises --> Developing Learners
Post what you've learned about this topic and how you intend to apply it. Feel free to post questions and comments too.
Soft skills and real industry experience are vital to student success in future professions. We host networking lunches with industry professionals so our students can practice soft skills of interviewing over a meal (very common in agriculture). We also provide hands on training of tractors, gps systems, pesticide applications, drone certifications, etc.
One critical area for an SBE is to implement a F.L.E.X. model and let students know that failure is an option but that you can learn from it and grow and sometimes it's not always about the outcome but what we get out of the process.
I learned what soft skills students can develop from working in an SBE. These skills will translate into the real world. Instead of viewing my course as teaching a lesson, I need to view it as developing learners.
Industry certifications earned by students during school is a preferred hiring credential for many industries. The OSHA 10 card is one such certification that has helped all of my students.
I would like to give students more autonomy in the business. From a planning perspective, giving students the tasks and allowing them to figure things out can be hard to measure. What is enough time and what is too much time. How do we keep them motivated? I usually end up micromanaging this a bit for time's sake, but I probably need to step back and let the students take more control so they can have successes and failures that are entirely theirs.
The biggest takeaway for me is the idea of adding industry certifications to my SBE. I want to further research this and see how I could add that as an additional benefit for my students. I see a lot of benefits to this and could see where my admin would really like that added benefit aswell.
I have learned how to help students learn and gain soft skills. Within my classroom I can incorporate time-management activities. By helping students prioritize tasks can help them reach their goals they have set for themselves. Another takeaway from this module was on how students’ can gain industry certificates while still in high school. This is something that I am interested in learning more about and how this can look in at school. Lastly, by incorporating industry workers as speakers will only better prepare students for what the real world is like in the career area.