New partnership pairs businesses with schools | A new collaboration between schools and workplaces links students with prospective employers
There is a high school and a vocational school in Waterville. There are 16 public and private high schools in Kennebec County. And there are some 540 small and large businesses in the Mid-Maine Chamber of Commerce. Given a worker attrition rate that is expected to threaten area businesses as the Maine workforce ages, the quest to find young workers has resulted in surprisingly little collaboration between these business and education worlds.
Area business leaders hope to change that with the Central Maine Business-Education Cooperative.
Launched in fall 2008, the program is operated by the Central Maine Growth Council, the Mid-Maine Chamber of Commerce and the Kennebec Valley Council of Governments. The structure is simple — area high school and college instructors take their classes on tours of area businesses so students can learn about the range of jobs available and the skills needed to get those jobs. The purpose is to bridge the gap between what’s taught in area schools and what’s needed to obtain work in area businesses. Organizers hope programs like this will help stem the central Maine brain drain.
“Businesses were telling us they were having trouble finding people with these simple, ‘soft’ skills,” explains Ken Young, executive director of KVCOG. “The expectation [in public education] has moved from preparing kids to go to work to preparing kids to go to college and, in this transition, training kids on soft skill sets has pretty much gone out the window.”
Soft skills, like showing up to work on time, effective customer service techniques and proper dress, as well as how to access more involved training, like the associate’s degree program in pulp and paper technology at Kennebec Valley Community College, aren’t commonly part of school curricula — even as businesses in central Maine and around the state brace for a drop in the youth pool that often supplies its entry-level workforce. By 2030, the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School predicts one in five people living in central Maine counties will be 65 years old or older, and, while the number of workers age 25 to 64 is expected to grow slowly, the number of workers between the ages of 16 and 24 — those very young minds targeted by the business-education cooperative — is expected to decline significantly between now and 2020.
The time appears ripe for programs like the central Maine effort, which complements interactions with area businesses provided by the regions’s career and technical schools and cooperative education program. But trying to relieve pressure on the workforce involves overcoming some considerable bottom-line pressure in the public schools, where budgets are under fire and teachers are often required to craft curricula to boost standardized test results rather than to address real-world skills.
Inroads for opportunity
Of the 16 businesses in Waterville and surrounding areas that have offered free tours to classes through the program since it launched this fall, only two, the Hampton Inn in Waterville and the T-Mobile call center in Oakland, have been taken up on the proposition. Allison Watson, a business and education teacher at Lawrence High School in Fairfield, toured the facilities by herself in November, and plans to bring her class to both businesses later this month, as long as the cost of the bus to transport the students and the substitute to watch the students who opt out of the trip are approved by the district office.
“I have students who don’t know what human resources is,” Watson says. “They don’t know what kind of industries we have in Maine, or what kind of jobs we have in those industries. To take a student out of the classroom setting and put them into a business setting is something a lot of students haven’t had before.”
Watson has been able to tour area businesses before, but she says the program, which provides instructors with a packet listing businesses interested in high school tours, the length and nature of the tours and who to contact to arrange the tour, makes the whole process of reaching out to the business community much easier.
According to the Department of Economic and Community Development and the Maine Department of Education, programs linking the business and education communities can be found around Maine, like a 45-hour course for area educators and high school support staff at the Skowhegan Regional Vocational Center that has been running off and on since 1999. The course details the type of skills needed by local businesses like contractor Cianbro Corp. in Pittsfield and tomato grower Backyard Beauties in Madison, and the post-secondary certificates that some area employers require, and it takes participants on tours of the businesses. The school district does not have data detailing the number of students influenced by the course, or whether hiring at any related companies has improved because of it, but course instructor Rudy Charrier says interest in the program always exceeds available spots, and that business participation continues to be strong. He believes he’s helping students become better employees, wherever they end up.
“What we’re hoping to do is give teachers another tool to help students make informed career choices and be aware of opportunities in the area,” he says.
To address significant projected shortages in incoming pulp and paper workers, Madison Paper Industries participates in a number of high school and college outreach programs, including the Skowhegan vocational course and the Central Maine Business-Education Cooperative. Michael Michaud, director of human resources for the Madison facility, which is owned by the Finnish company MYLLYKOSKI, says tours through the cooperative will help his business alter the perception that the pulp and paper industry, as he puts it, “has no future.”
Michaud hopes the program will help “deliver to us a technically advanced workforce, people who understand the value of the business who can hit the ground running.”
Michaud says Madison Paper’s Maine operation employs some 250 people, with the salary for entry-level jobs hovering at around $40,000.
“We want to see if we can attract some of these [area high school] students into going into the paper industry,” Michaud says.
From classroom to conference room
Kim Lindlof, president and CEO of the Mid-Maine Chamber of Commerce, recalls the conversation that sparked the business-education cooperative. In 2007, Lindlof, KVCOG’s Young, and John Butera, executive director of the Central Maine Growth Council, gathered area educators and business leaders around a table and asked them to talk about workforce development challenges in the area.
“The educators were clear on, ‘Well, there are really no jobs in this area once our kids graduate’,” says Lindlof. “And the lady from MaineGeneral [Health in Augusta and Waterville], from HR, sat up and said, ‘Well, we have 250 job listings at any given time on our website and that’s not just doctors. We need employees.’ And one of the life-long teachers at an area high school, said, ‘Oh my goodness, I had no idea that there were that many jobs out there.’ Cianbro, Mid-State Machine, I mean there were a bunch of people, Northeast [Laboratory Services], that were sitting around that table going, we have open positions that we can’t find skilled workers for.”
In five years, organizer Butera hopes all of the area schools are participating in the business-education cooperative, and that most classes incorporate tours and presentations from area businesses to show students how their coursework applies to the working world.
Nicole Desjardins, director of sales at the Hampton Inn, says she wishes more businesses reached out to her when she was a high school student. As a student, she says she had no idea that director of sales positions existed, or even what a salesman’s job was like. Desjardins ended up taking a job in sales after majoring in psychology, thinking the stint would be temporary. She hopes now that the Central Maine Business-Education Cooperative will help students like her learn about jobs in hospitality that pay well, and that are accessible.
“I really just hope,” Desjardins says, “that more Maine students are going to take a hard look at returning to Maine for the future.”
Sara Donnelly, Mainebiz managing editor, can be reached at sdonnelly@mainebiz.biz.
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