One of the biggest challenges for districts when it comes to providing high-quality career-readiness programs is facilitating partnerships to increase career-exploration opportunities for students.
Districts need to coordinate and collaborate with dozens of employers, community-based organizations, colleges and universities, and local government agencies to come up with internships, apprenticeships, job shadowing, and other work-based learning opportunities for students.
Sometimes, district leaders have to facilitate these partnerships on their own, but in other cases, there are intermediaries, such as a local chamber of commerce or a postsecondary institution, which help districts coordinate work-based learning opportunities, said Lord Ryan Lizardo, the vice president of education for the Chamber of Commerce Hawaii.
The Chamber of Commerce Hawaii’s education and workforce development team aims to build strong local talent pipelines for the state—many of its residents leave for the continental United States for better opportunities—and that work starts in K-12, Lizardo said.
In an interview with Education Week, Lizardo discussed how industry and K-12 can work together to prepare students for careers.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How is the chamber working with schools to build talent pipelines?
One thing is really bulking up K-12 work-based learning opportunities [to build] career awareness for students. You could think about a career fair and you bring in a doctor or a nurse, but some students may want to be an architect and don’t know what that is or an engineer and don’t know what that is. We want to make sure that we’re building opportunities to give them a full scope of the different types of roles. We [also] want to give them the opportunity to actually step into these roles, for internships, job shadows, mentorships that allow them to start thinking about that for the very near future.
Another lane of work is sector partnerships, where we really get an industry together and bring their executives together to brainstorm about how, as a collective, we build a local talent pipeline for that specific industry.
The last lane is around alignment and articulation. How do we align our pathways to make sure that [students] know, from kindergarten to career, what that [career pathway] looks like and what are the next steps in that process?
The chamber sits in the middle like a convener and [hosts] those conversations, either through sector partnerships or, you know, roundtable discussions and dialogue for a particular industry.
What does your work with schools look like?
A lot of it is starting off with engaging in dialogue about what priorities the school wants to set for their pathways and what we can do as the work-based learning intermediary. We start with: What are your top three priorities this year? What are you seeing from your community that needs more support when it comes to pathway development?
We also think about it strategically. Is there something that we’re already doing in the chamber? Is there an existing sector partnership or an existing lane of work that we can embed the school into to address some of these needs, to make sure that they’re involved in these conversations and these actions that we’re taking? Is it a brand-new work that we have to think about, and how do we navigate that?
We enter conversations with employers in mind. The [state] department of education, they’re going to think about students and teacher-related development. We look at it in the lane of how do we get employers to the table and how can we make this an easily accessible opportunity for employers to get involved and give these opportunities to students? Obviously, at the end of the day, the goals are the same: We want students to have opportunities here in Hawaii, build those local talent pipelines. It’s just the way that we enter the work looks very different, and how we show up, and whom we advocate for.
What are the challenges for businesses to enter into these partnerships with K-12?
A lot of it depends on the employer. For a small business, for example, it’s a lot about capacity. Do they have the capacity to offer a mentor to the student? Do they have the funding enabled to bring on the student?
There’s also a sense of liability when you’re working with a high school student, and it could scare you, bringing on a student who might not have the experience.
Our role is how do we lessen the red tape in a safe way? We want the students to be safe in any type of job that they get or internships that they get, but we also want to make sure that [for] our employers, there’s ways for them to engage. We just need to figure out how to navigate this puzzle and create a contract with them. That’s the hope and the goal. We just need to engage in those conversations.
Are there ways schools can help with that?
We see a lot of employers not knowing how to get involved, how to access working with a school. What we see from our educators when we first start working with them, if they don’t have experience with business partners, is [miscommunication]. There’s a common talk educators have and the common talk employers have, and sometimes, those don’t match up.
That’s where intermediaries play a big role, because we can bridge that conversation and know exactly what to do. The biggest piece I give to my educators that work with employers is to think about, essentially, business talk. The way that you’re talking to an employer is going to look very different than the way that you’re talking to a student or a colleague at the school. [Employers], they’re not going to know about field trip form deadlines. They’re not going to know the fact that students sometimes will bring a field trip form the day before the field trip, but our employers are going to be asking you for the roster because they need it for their security-related challenges. You have to match what the employers are going to need in order to make sure that the trip could happen.
And what are some other challenges in making this work?
Hawaii is a small state, but we have so many students who are well-qualified to take on internships or apprenticeships or job shadows, all these different types of opportunities. But there’s only so much capacity an employer can take on. The common challenge will always be capacity and scale. How do we scale the work so that more students are actually able to have these opportunities? How do we build more employer capacity to do so, knowing that it’s an additional people lift [and] a funding lift.
The biggest challenge, as of now, is just the lack of opportunities that are available.
