Texas Career Signing Day Webinar and Script



Texas Career Signing Day Webinar and TranscriptLink to WebinarUse the link below to access the webinar. One: Title SlideJennifer Troke: Hi everybody! Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. This is Jen Troke. I am the Director for Workforce Grants and Contracts here at TWC. I think we have an exciting presentation planned for you this afternoon.Slide Two: Agenda SlideJennifer Troke: I want to first see who's here. Can everybody please type their name, title, and organization in the chat box? That would be great. You have joined the second annual Texas Career Signing Day webinar this afternoon. We are making plans for 2020 and we really want you to be a part of those plans. I'm going to provide a quick overview of really what is entailed in a Signing Day. You'll hear from a couple of local experts who hosted events last year. Then we'll really get into the nuts and bolts of how you can host your own event. We even think we're going to have time for some questions. So, buckle up it's going to be a wild and woolly 30 minutes, but we want to get all the great information out to you guys efficiently. Slide 3: Signing Day Event held on Tuesday, March 5, 2019Jennifer Troke: Let me talk about Texas Workforce Commissions first-ever Career and Technical Education Signing Day. It was held on March 5th, 2019 after House Resolution 241 was adopted by the Texas House of Representatives. The proclamation talked about the urgent need for skilled labor in high demand industries and encouraged talented young Texans to choose viable career pathways through Career and Technical Education. After that proclamation was read, we had a signing ceremony here at the Texas Workforce Commission. Four students actually received full scholarships to Lamar Institute of Technology. They've signed letters of intent and we'll talk about what those are, but those letters of intent reflected their commitment to attend that institution. All in all, it was truly an exciting day for the students, for their families who were there, for all the Commissioners, and all the staff who supported the event. I really will never forget the students coming down the hallway and just hundreds of TWC employees cheering for them. They were so excited for this huge important milestone in their lives. It was great! Slide 4: Signing Day at LIT Jennifer Troke: The next is a picture of a Signing Day event that was held at Lamar Institute of Technology. They are really strong champions and we thank them for that. Texas Career Signing Day is built on the concept of a statewide signing proclamation. It is an opportunity to recognize and celebrate important decisions that are made by high school students. Signing Days are surely not a new concept. You are familiar for Signing Days that are used with athletes and really this is a model of that concept. We want to lift up and celebrate a different kind of milestone for high school seniors. We are promoting the success of them choosing careers in career pathways that are leading to in demand careers and targeted occupations directly from high school. We're celebrating those employment opportunities and those long-term career goals. Slide 5: Events Celebrate Students Moving into Career PathwaysJennifer Troke: The main objective for the 2020 Texas Career Signing Day is that we are celebrating student’s entry into the workforce. If they're moving into employment, we definitely want to lift that up. We want to celebrate any type of applied learning opportunity like an internship or registered apprenticeship, if they are entering a Career and Technical Education Program or some combination of all the above. We really don't want to limit the possibilities for celebrating talented youth in Texas, especially talented youth who are getting more talented through technical skills. Organizations that were interested in participating in Texas Career Signing events, really any organizations interested in youth skill development. It could be a workforce board. It could be a high school. It could be an employer and it could be a Chamber or an apprenticeship program. It can really be as creative as possible, and we also encourage you to think about key partners who have a vested interest in high school seniors in your area. Like p-tech high schools’, early college high schools, as well as local technical and community colleges.Jennifer Troke: On this slide you'll see a sample template that we've created and it's to help you promote your local career Signing Day event. It does have some TWC branding so you'll see our seal. However, the idea is that you can take these documents and really make them your own for those events. There is a whole toolkit on our website. Slide 6: Key Parameters of Signing Day EventsJennifer Troke: You might be wondering well but what should I expect if I decide to host an event. There are a couple things that we asked you to do. As I mentioned, students will sign a letter of intent submitted by a prospective employer while their families cheer them on. You'll see an image on this slide that's a certificate of intent that we have created as well in our toolkit. Events can take place at locations that you think are most feasible. So again, don't limit yourself. You might want to have it at the chamber, at the library, or in an auditorium. Be creative! Again, prospective employers and partners, we encourage them to participate and we need them to participate. Many times, they may offer up promotional materials like a hat or a t-shirt. We want to make sure you know they're leveraging their resources as well. We want to make sure that the youth sign a release form. One of the things we're trying to do is collect photos and success stories from these signing day events. We want to make sure you're having them sign a release form and then you might want to think about what's involved in recording that event. We'll show a clip to you of an event that can give you some ideas for what might be needed.Slide 7: Tool Kit with TemplatesJennifer Troke: We're open to other creative ideas too. There's a lot of you here on the line today. As you think of like “Hey Jen, what about this or that?”, please throw that into the chat box. We would welcome that. We have a whole toolkit as I mentioned. All of these items are downloadable. There's a letter of intent that you've seen and a frameable certificate. On this slide, there is a sample of an event planning checklist that will help you plan the local event in your area. We are trying to make it as easy as possible for you to host that event.Slide 8: 2020 Texas Career Signing DayJennifer Troke: We recently got approval to host our 2020 signing day events in March, April, and May. We know that school calendars fill up very quickly, so we're hoping that we have gotten ahead of the curve a little bit this year and that you all are still able to join us in the spring of 2020.Slide 9: Creating a Signing DayJennifer Troke: You've heard me talk about Signing Day from the TWC perspective as to what these events are about. But I really would love for you to hear from our local experts. I'm just delighted that Amy Villarreal has joined us! She is the Deputy Director in the Coastal Bend Workforce Board. We also have Jesse Jennings and Aaron Ennis, who are from Brazosport ISD and Wood. Aaron is our employer partner. They are going to talk about some of their insights and learnings from their event in Brazos Valley.Slide 10: Signing Day at the Craft Training CenterJennifer Troke: To kick them off, we are going to click out into a video that shows some of the highlights from the event that was held in Coastal Bend. Amy is going to hit the button here for me. It should pop up on your screen. When the video is done playing, you're going to need to X out of that in your own browser. So, Amy let's give it a whirl. Link to video with transcript below: HYPERLINK ""High School Seniors Sign Letters of Intent to Further Industrial Careers Katia Uriarte: “Today was an exciting day for more than 70 high school seniors” (KRIS 6 News).Lee Sausely: “Now they signed letters of intent to further their industrial careers at the first-ever Texas Career Signing Day and here's our Ashley Portillo to explain what that's all about” (KRIS 6 News).Ashley Portillo: “A big congratulations to these high school seniors. When they graduate in a few weeks they'll have the skills needed for technical schools and industrial trade careers. And these are just some of the names of nearly 75 students who signed their letters of intent today here at the Craft Training Center. The students trained in fields like welding, electrical, instrumentation, pipe fitting, and plumbing. They learn their skills at the Craft Training Center. And those skills are demands right now” (KRIS 6 News).Allen Law: “Trades that are desired right now in our Coastal Ben area. They can’t get enough workers” (KRIS 6 News).Ashley Portillo: “Every day the Craft Training Center teaches about 250 high school students for 16 different level high schools. Students like London High School senior, Jonathan Barrera” (KRIS 6 News).Jonathan Barrera, London High School Senior: "I wake up every morning at 6 in the morning and I come here every morning. So, it was a big commitment” (KRIS 6 News).Ashley Portillo: "Barrera's next step is attending a trade school in Waco to further his career. But thanks to the Craft Training Center, students like him are one step ahead of the others” (KRIS 6 News).Jonathan Barrera, London High School Senior: "On the college visits I went to, I told them that I had my NCCER card and they were really excited about that, because I'm like one of the only kids that have it" (KRIS 6 News).Ashley Portillo: “And Prepared to enter the Coastal Bend Workforce after they graduate. Ashley Portillo - KRIS SIX NEWS” (KRIS 6 News).Jennifer Troke: Okay great! I hope you all were able to see that clip. Again, just X out of it in your browser. Amy Villarreal, I know you're on the line with us. I'd love for you to talk about what worked especially well with your event and any tips you want to share with the team today.Amy Villareal: Okay, I am here. I also got our Public Information Officer, Monica De la Garza and Alba Silvas who is our Director of Programs on the line today. The can help to give us a unique perspective to what we did. When we decided to do this, it was an easy thing to do because we had been working with our partners at Coastal Compass, which is a resource education resource center that we have. What we chose to do this last year, was to partner with one of our local training institutions at Craft Training Center and use the students that were being bussed in from the local ISD’s directly to the Craft classes. We invited their parents to come in and local employers to bring them all into the room and have them sign. We had 77 students from 9 area school districts. Part of the ease of it was that we already had that established relationship with that training provider and that the students were already being bused in. I would say what worked well is that the relationship and the logistics already existed and that we had the open line of communication. Even with those big things being overcome, we still had you know the Devils in the details and there was a lot of coordination that had to occur. Between the organizations that open line of communication is important. I think it was great! Amy Villareal: You saw the news story and the parents that were in the room. They liked the fact that we live streamed it on social media and on Facebook. This helped the parents who couldn’t come in. They were able to watch it on their phones or on their computers which was beneficial. We had done that for a couple years with a rural school district that we had that wanted to do this as well. There are some logistics you must consider. Amy Villareal: I appreciate the information that Jen and her team and provided to us and the toolkit that was available. These tools enhanced things that we had thought about. The posters that we did were blown up and we had our logos and training information on there. It made it easy to do. Then the letters and the certificates were useful as we had them sign those during the event. We even provided some frames for them. It was all great!Jennifer Troke: That's awesome Amy! I'm particularly happy that you mentioned this livestream idea. That's a great idea for people in those rural communities. Tell me how your plans are shaping up for 2020. Are you guys hosting another event? I hope the answer is ‘yes’! Amy Villareal: Yes! We have been doing this for several years now. Allen Law and I talk frequently about many things. This one has come up but I'm sure we will do something again in March or April of this year. We will probably continue with San Diego ISD, which is our rural school districts. We have been working with local CTE and ISD’s committees. Those schools that have those established that are strong, we want to grow it into those areas as well. We had our local educational service center come in last week to talk about JET grants. We had about 15 ISD’s with their superintendents and grant writers there. We went ahead and pitched the idea of Career Signing Day to those ISD’s as well. We hope to grow it, not just have one of it. We want to have several throughout the region because we're so spread out it's not necessarily easy for us to get a bunch of school districts in one place. We will probably have several events over this next year.Jennifer Troke: That sounds awesome! I thank you very much! If people have questions they should go ahead and put those in the chat. I am committed to keeping us moving here. So, let me also introduce Jesse Jennings and Aaron Ennis and I will let them get started on talking about their Signing Day events. Welcome Jessie and Arron.Side 11: About BrazosportAaron Ennis: This is Arron and I have Jessie with me. We are going to talk about Brazosport ISD. I will touch on our organization to give everyone an idea on how we teamed up with BCPC. We will also talk about our Signing Day. I am going to give it over to Jessie. We will go back and forth through the slides. So, I will give it up to her right now.Jessie Jennings: Thanks, Aaron. As Aaron said, we kind of piggyback of each other within our Signing Day presentations. I will tell you a little about Brazosport and where we are located to start. We are located about 40 minutes south of Houston. Along the Gulf, we have Lake Jackson, Freeport, and about 8 different municipalities. We have 19 campuses. Brazosport is our Highschool Campus. We have about 12,000 students. Of those 12,000, 55% are considered At-Risk. 13% are English Learners. 54% of our student populations reports as being Economically Disadvantaged. For the Student Demographics, we have 56% Hispanic, 32% White, and 7% African- American.Aaron Ennis: If we could go to the Wood Slide.Slide 12: About WoodAaron Ennis: I will tell you a little bit about Wood. We are here on the Gulf Coast. We are just south of Houston. We have several offices throughout the state of Texas. We have a lot of different offices globally. We used to be a family-owned organization and we were purchased by the Wood group three years ago. Now that we've meshed with Amex Foster Wheeler, we're known as Wood globally. Here in my local area, we support probably anywhere between 2,000 to 2,500 employees on any given calendar year. But a little bit about the history here as we have 160 plus years of business. We have over 60,000 employees globally in 400 plus offices. We are in 60 countries with ten billion in revenue. The area in which I work is in the downstream of Chemicals Market and we specialize in the construction and maintenance trades. We are out on the Gulf Coast, in our backyard, we have a lot of different customers and partners. This includes the school districts, to your local ABC chapters, to the BCPC which we're about to talk about, along with locations like Chevron Phillips Chemical company.Side 13: BCPC Community and IndustryJessie Jennings: The way this all came about and developed is that we noticed that we had a lot of different needs. We are working towards preparing our students for the workforce. As we know, in the upcoming years there is going to be a big job gap. And how can we as a school district prepare these students? We are all trying to prepare different silos. We realized we were all working on our own island. The goal was why don't we come together as a machine to have a common voice that's a common goal. I think that's where the BCPC truly aligned and formed. We created what was known as the Workforce Committee. The committee represented many companies and school districts. We had higher education which had a Community College representative. There were also contractor companies. It had Turner and others within there that worked for larger corporations such as Dow and our training companies which were ABC and the MSPI group.Side 14: Career & Technical Partnering with IndustryAaron Ennis: What Wood set out to do along with the BCPC school district is that we want to continue education inside the school system to grow and continue to expand. This is kind of a circle here of how we think of career technical education partnering with industry. You can see the first mark here that says Career and Technical Education that will yield to the workforce where it will enter the industry. Which in return, once they come into the industry, will develop a more competent workforce that will provide skilled labor to the industry. Which then will yield better products, services, and jobs. Which in return, will continue to grow and expand the school system.Side 14: May 16, 2019 Career Signing Day at WoodJessie Jennings: What we ended up doing is we came together with the help of Aaron from Wood, we were able to create an opportunity for these students who had experience in industries like construction and welding. There were several processes that we went through, and Wood was able to provide opportunity to these students after graduation. Their letter of intern meant that they were going to be hired on for a full-time position upon graduation. Not only that, they would receive full tuition reimbursement as well. What we did was on May 16, 2019, we held our Signing Day for students who were selected from the application process that we did. Jessie Jennings: If you look on here, one of the big things we wanted to highlight within our Signing Day is shown on the left picture. You can see what was important to us is that we brought in key stakeholders to the table to really highlight these students and showcase them. Behind the student you'll see Mr. Massey, who is the superintendent of Bradford. In the middle is Mr. Rich Well, who is the VP of Dow Chemical Operations along the Texas Gulf Coast. This is one of our larger corporations. Then there's Aaron on the right-hand side, who's the training manager of Wood. He is with me here today. We held it at ABC as we thought that that was a good central location for everybody. Aaron Ennis: If you look on the right-hand side of the picture, each student has a ball cap on like the model that athletes will have their Signing Day. What we wanted to do was incorporate a Wood hat with the colors of their high school. That Jazzed things up a little bit. It made them a little bit more excited about what was going on. The red, white, and blue is the Brazosport color. The Danbury Panthers color is gold and black and Assets Academy is the maroon color. This is something to think about if you ever decide to do have a Signing Day. Side 15: BCPC Signing DayJessie Jennings: On the left-hand side, we kept the invite simple. We came together as the BCPC council to help create. We included overall information about what would be conducted. I think we did a pretty good job. We kept the event within an hour on May 16th at 6:30 at ABC Texas Gold Coast. We also had a quick program outlined. Side 16: Signing & Trade ArticleAaron Ennis: Here is a news clip from our local newspaper. It's vital that you use any type of media social media, local newspapers, national media, state media, or whatever you can get to continue to boost up these programs. I think this gives a better and response for our first 90 days. I would expect in the years to come, it's going to continue to grow. They ran stories about the students and some of their parents. They talked a little bit about some of our larger partners like Dow Chemical at BASF. With that being said, it only boosted the program where now we're going to have some different players that are coming in through the Signing Day from different angles of industry for our second event. Anytime you can get the media involved the better off you'll be. Side 17: Thank You to our Guest PresentersJennifer Troke: Great! Thank you all so much. Aaron and Jesse, I'm absolutely inspired by your presentation. We applaud y ‘all! We applaud you as well, Amy.Side 18: Who’s Ready to ‘Sign’ on?Jennifer Troke: We did get a question about this slide deck. We will be posting this deck along with the transcript on the webpage that it's on the TWC site. There's a Signing Day page. Amy was kind enough to include the link in the chat. All the materials that you've seen, and all the resources here today will go up on the page soon. Jennifer Troke: This is our last big push. I want to just ask, are you ready to sign on? We hope that the answer is yes! That is why you are here today. What we ask of you is to start thinking about those high school seniors who are in these technical programs. Start thinking about the employers that you're working with. Think about who might be a good fit for an event. Also think about those employers that really have opportunities in demand occupations in your areas. That is another big piece of it. Start grabbing the materials and downloading from the website. Think about customizing the materials. I would encourage you again to start with the checklist. You'll see when you go to our website, that we do have a calendar of events. As events are getting booked, we would love for you to submit that information to our email. The email address is signingday@twc.state.tx.us. What we're going to do is we're going to promote your event through our web page. We are also going to ask our leadership to join you if they're available and if you're interested in having somebody to join you. We are going to promote the event through our social media. Therefore, we ask for you all to get those photos and those photo releases at the same time. We want to really lift you all up for all your hard work and success. Side 19: Time for QuestionsJennifer Troke: With that, I think we have almost made it. We have three whole minutes left. Do we have any questions? Sandra from South Plains is excited, and they are going to do this. That is awesome! We are going to be looking for your information on the Signing Day email. Let us know if you have any questions or need any technical assistance. We are here to help. Do you have any other questions? You may come off mute. We are a small enough group here today that I would welcome those questions now or via the chat. We have about two minutes left. Jessie Jennings: Hi, this is Jessie. One thing I would like to stress to people when wondering where to start is to open lines of commutation in your industry. Developing repour and the relationship in committees help to lay the ground work and foundation.Jennifer Troke: Great tip! Yes, absolutely Jessie. That's excellent. Sandra Hester: Are we going to get notes from this webinar? Jennifer Troke: Yes, absolutely. We will provide a transcript the full slide deck. We are going to put this up on the web page that is dedicated to Signing Day. You will have access to all this information. Any other final thoughts from any of our presenters? Amy, Jesse, and Aaron, I again really want to thank you all. Thank you everybody for joining. Any finals tips in our last minute here together this afternoon?Amy Villareal: I would say communication and partnerships. Jennifer Troke: Perfect! Jessie or Aaron, any final thoughts?Aaron Ennis: I just echo the communication and partnership piece. There are a lot of organizations out there. If you open up the dialog and find out what their needs are then more Signing Days and programs will continue to grow. Jessie Jennings: Don’t be afraid taking the initial leap of faith. It’s a big endeavor. You will really learn from your first pilot year. When you have success with your pilot year, they will all come on board.Jennifer Troke: Absolutely! Thank you all so much for joining. This was a very helpful and excellent presentation. We will get this information on the site soon. I hope everybody has a wonderful afternoon. Take care.CitationKRIS 6 News , “High School Seniors Sign Letters of Intent to Further Industrial Careers”, YouTube, May 9, 2019, ................
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