Putting School to Work
By Carolyn Hirschman

Steve Boettcher has done the math, and he's coming up short. He's not sure how his company will get all the employees it needs in the next decade, but he's trying hard to make everything add up.

"This is the first year every one of our business units is involved in workforce planning," says Boettcher, director of workforce planning and recruiting at Xcel Energy Inc., an 11,048-person electric-natural gas utility based in Minneapolis.

One of Boettcher's strategies is to give high-school students a firsthand look at the energy business. Every summer, one or two students from North High School in Minneapolis "job shadow" employees in an Xcel coal plant in the city. Under the supervision of a mentor, they rotate through the plant's departments.

"We have hired a number of [summer students]," Boettcher says, though he did not have an exact figure.

Like Boettcher, many human resource executives use job shadowing, internships and other school-to-work programs to fill their labor pipelines. By exposing young students early on to the world of work, they hope to teach them practical skills while identifying future talent.

There's more to be had than warm bodies, says Jane Paradiso, who leads consulting firm Watson Wyatt's workforce planning practice. "Organizations should plan so they have the best shot at hiring talented new employees. You want new ideas. You'll get more diversity," she says.

It's impossible to predict exactly how demographic, economic and technological changes will influence the labor market, but many studies forecast a shortage of skilled employees within the next 10 years. Energy, health care, construction and technology are among the industries expected to be hardest hit as a wave of baby boomers retires while schools produce fewer graduates with the knowledge and skills to replace them.

Six of 10 of the fastest-growing occupations are in health care; another three are in computers and information technology, according to 2002-2012 projections by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. By 2012, we'll need 59 percent more medical assistants and 57 percent more network-systems analysts, for example.

With this in mind, some employers are mapping their future workforce needs and are doing everything in their power to fill their entry-level pipelines through school-to-work programs. The benefits go both ways. According to studies by think tanks MDRC and Jobs for the Future, such programs help many students improve their academic performance, define their interests and gain real-life work experience. They help employers, too, by branding them as employers of choice and laying the foundation for the future hiring.

"It's enlightened self-interest. Increasingly, companies are thinking of this not just as community responsibility but [helping the] bottom line," Paradiso says.

In other words, employers' motives are both altruistic-supporting local schools-and practical-fulfilling labor needs, or at least broadening the entry-level talent pool. It's a long-term strategy that takes time and effort, experts note, but it can yield workers who will need less training and are more likely to be retained.

"You're able to hire the person with some confidence they can do the job," says Mimi Collins, a spokeswoman for the National Association of Colleges and Employers in Bethlehem, PA.

Many Approaches
School-to-work programs take many forms, from internships to career academies, but share a common core: alliances between schools and employers based on integrated curricula and job experiences.

"There's no one-size-fits-all. There are a variety of ways to fuse academic and technical education," says Karen Elzey, a senior program officer at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Center for Workforce Preparation in Washington.

Many programs operate locally, with formal links between employers and high schools, universities, community colleges and other educational institutions. There are also distance-learning programs that draw students nationwide.

"Our students live all over the country. They live in five different time zones," says David Sachs, associate dean of New York-based Pace University's School of Computer Science and Information Systems, which hosts an online telecommunications program.

More than 3,000 students have earned associate's degrees and professional certificates since the program began in 1999 to train network technicians for Verizon Communications Inc., SBC Communications Inc. and other large telecom companies. Most entering students work for these companies in non-technical jobs.

Students in many school-to-work programs are trained in both "soft skills," such as interviewing, teamwork and dressing for success, and the practical skills of a particular job. Employers say both are important to groom future workers.

HR professionals often teach courses on resume writing, interviewing techniques and other soft skills in the classroom, which get reinforced in part-time and temporary jobs.

"You develop the basic competency of working," says Christopher Smith, director of employer organizing at the Boston Private Industry Council, which runs ProTech, a program for about 100 students from seven Boston public high schools.

Each of ProTech's eight participating employers partners with a high school that focuses on its business-health care, financial services or utilities and communication. Current participants include Liberty Mutual Group, Sovereign Bank and Comcast Corp.

ProTech starts with 10th graders who take academic and career-oriented classes and tour local employers. In mid-11th grade, they start 19-month paid internships at local hospitals, utilities, banks and other companies, working up to 20 hours per week after school and full-time during the summer for $7.25 to $10 per hour.

Most ProTech graduates go on to college in Boston and end up working there, Smith says. Some end up working part- or full-time where they interned in high school, he adds, and PIC is making more of an effort to keep former interns in touch with employers.

Massachusetts General Hospital initially viewed ProTech as "the right thing to do," says Candace Burns, who directs public-school partnerships for the 16,000-employee hospital. "Of late, it's a strategic approach to make sure we have a prepared workforce. We're seeing many shortages in nursing, radiology and [other areas]."

Each year, 24 students from East Boston High School intern at Mass. General, starting with administrative jobs such as filing records and answering telephones. They can't care for patients, but later on, they get more patient contact by working alongside nurses and other staff to prepare hospital rooms, transport patients and prepare specimens in the laboratory.

"Most of our students are offered part-time positions upon high school graduation," and 60 percent take them while attending college, Burns says. Some stay on after college, though the hospital has not tracked exact numbers. Mass. General also helps its former interns stay in college with scholarships and workshops on budgeting and other topics.

Developing "hard" skills for an occupation makes most sense for college students, who are more likely than high-schoolers to be thinking about possible careers. Work experience gives students an edge upon graduation, says Collins. Employers surveyed by NACE last year offered full-time employment to nearly 58 percent of their college student interns and to more than 60 percent who took part in cooperative assignments.

Employers Closely Involved
Employers' participation in school-to-work programs can go beyond providing work experience to developing schools' curricula to meet their employment needs. "Teachers want to know how to incorporate in the classroom things going on in the workplace," says Ed Powell, director of the Boston PIC's school-to-work office.

To that end, employers invite teachers to visit so they can discuss their skills needs and demonstrate new technology. HR executives also can sit on school advisory boards to facilitate the process.

Frequent changes in technology require Universal Technical Institute Inc. to refresh its curriculum, says Julian Gorman, senior vice president of industry solutions for the Phoenix-based company, which runs eight schools for automotive, motorcycle and marine-service technicians. Two more campuses are under construction.

"We know what the employers need. That has heavy influence on what we teach," Gorman says. Manufacturers such as Audi, BMW and Volvo help develop brand-specific training programs and provide vehicles and other equipment for students to work on.

Art Motroni, a general manager at Foreign Motors West Inc. in Natick, Mass., visits UTI campuses once or twice a year, sits in on classes and talks to students. "We look in on their curriculum and make sure it's up-to-date," he says.

Motroni's Mercedes-Benz division hires eight to 10 technicians every year, most of them from UTI. They're "ready to get started in the real world," with the help of older mentors who work with them for 30 to 90 days after hire, he says.

UTI's close relationships with employers pay off for its 15,525 students, most of them straight out of high school. It boasts an 87 percent placement rate for graduates, who typically earn starting salaries of $28,000 to $36,000, says UTI spokeswoman Tina Miller Steinke.

According to Gorman, about half of UTI students are fresh out of high school and need training in soft skills, "so they understand how to work with people [and] how to communicate with customers." UTI incorporates this training into the curriculum with a two-day seminar on professionalism as well as by taking attendance and enforcing a dress code, he says. Demerits called "unprofessionals" are issued to students who are regularly late or ill-behaved.

Getting Started
Employers should not jump into a school-to-work program without first analyzing their current workforce and projecting their future skills needs, Paradiso advises. Take time to find a program that really suits your needs.

The next step is for HR to convince top management to become involved. "Lots of times, the HR [professional] really carries the message inside the company. It's up to them to explain how this fits into their workforce strategy," Smith says. Done right, school-to-work helps recruiting, diversity and community involvement all at once, he adds.

It's not necessary-in fact, it's not advisable-to start from scratch. Experts recommend contacting a local chamber of commerce or campus career center that might have programs already. A plus is a local intermediary, such as a workforce investment board, that coordinates a program and takes some of the burden off HR.

Even with outside help, HR must oversee the employer's end of things-to determine the number of interns, what they'll do, when they'll work and who will manage them. "The logistics are huge. You have to have processes in place," says Seth Koziol, an organizational trainer who runs ProTech at Boston Medical Center.

In addition, employers must give interns more than busy work to make their experiences meaningful. "The success stories I've seen are when supervisors paid attention to kids and involved them in their work," says Powell, explaining why students are assigned certain tasks and inviting them to speak at staff meetings.

Finally, stick with a program, even when not hiring entry-level people. School-to-work partnerships rely on building and sustaining relationships, a task that's too hard to rev up once it's down. Inevitably, some employers can no longer afford to participate.

Reprinted from Human Resources Executive