Blog

Let’s face it: with its traditional focus on the highest academically achieving new high school graduates, our U.S. system of higher education was “developed to successfully support a certain demographic of student.”

The words in quotation marks above come from Kristi Wellington-Baker, who is Director of Washington State’s Student Success Center & its Guided Pathways program. She took the time to tell us about her professional mission to bring the idea of valuable post-secondary education opportunities to all K-12 students.

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The Implicit Bias Institute was launched to further flesh out the Centers of Excellence’s commitment to diversity, inclusion and training on issues of unintentional bias against students, job applicants and workers who might vary from the majority in some way.

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With May being Mental Health Awareness month, now seems like a fitting time to talk about mental and emotional health and wellbeing in the workplace!

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As assembly processes have transitioned from manual operations to semi-automated to heavily automated, the skill sets needed to operate and maintain new equipment are changing too. Companies must be able to recruit qualified engineers with university degrees, as well as retrain incumbent employees to deal with newer technologies.

We spoke with Ben Hempstead, a mechanical engineer and chief of staff at Electroimpact, a multinational aerospace automation and tooling supplier, to hear how automation is changing the face of Washington’s aerospace industry.

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Students with job shadow or internship experience often receive more job offers after graduation. That’s because many employers are looking for previous work experience, even in new hires. We sat down with Curry Mayer, an Emergency Manager in the city of Bellevue and Shane Moore, Catastrophic Planner with Washington State’s Emergency Management Division. They each shared with us their insights about job shadowing and internship opportunities.

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Good data on the workforce needs of employers is very important for educators who want to equip students with the most relevant, in demand skills for nearby jobs available now and in the next few years. Unfortunately, it appears that perusing individual local and regional employers’ websites and their job listings under a Careers tab might be the best bet for now -- because government agencies do not track or report workforce needs in a useful way.

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Programs and initiatives that support education, employment and job skills for U.S. military veterans should be a priority government policy at every level.

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The Associated General Contractors Education Foundation (AGCEF) is a nonprofit created by the construction industry to promote and develop careers in construction through education and training. 

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Whether the job is repairing aircraft, manufacturing parts or flying a plane, most employers want to train new hires “their way” before somebody’s else’s techniques or technology intrude. 

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High school students in Washington State are experiencing amazing possibilities in the world of work in innovative ways, thanks to the Centers of Excellence (COE) outreach model and the efforts of proactive employers, both public and private.

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Colleges want to help their students find good jobs. Employers looking to fill good jobs need help finding and training qualified candidates.

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With U.S. unemployment at historic lows and soaring costs of a 4-year college degree turning many college students and young people off, how can employers find and develop the qualified employees they need?

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