Friday, the four of us started by talking more about the worker readiness certificate and we worked on a good paragraph to get people interested in the program and this is what we came up with:
From our experience, finding exceptional employees is difficult. It seems that many students are coming out of college, or high school, with a lack of real-world skills. To us, this demonstrates a need for a more complete educational system. One way we can see to address this is to create our own job training for our interns. We are interested in getting community input on this topic. Do you agree or disagree that the educational system can sometimes be lacking? Students, do you feel you are getting shorted in your education? If so, in what ways? Employers, do you find it difficult to find great employees?
I think that this is very true because schools don’t really provide students with those necessary skills. For example, they’ll teach you how to do math, but they won’t teach you how to make change or they”ll teach public speaking but they won’t specifically teach a student how to greet customers. That’s a gap in the education system that really needs to be changed and that’s what this program hopes to do. After that previous paragraph, we also came up with these two that follow it:
People graduate with knowledge, but often that knowledge is not practiced into wisdom. Through the worker readiness certificate, we believe the people will have an opportunity to live the practices they have studied, and to continuously gain new knowledge and skills.
We hope to use the worker readiness certification to help illuminate the diverse Athens’ network of businesses, and connect students to mentors who can teach them deeper understanding of the connected-ness of the community.
Those both too make sense. The first part means that the students must take whatever skills they have and must apply them directly in a job situation. This program will try to take that student with, for example, the public speaking class skill and turn that into skills like being able to interact really well with customers (or anyone for that matter, business or non-business) and will obviously learn new skills, like holistic management, which is what the second part is about. They will learn more about all the various connections that a given business (like Athens’ Own) haves, how to better make good decisions and how to better view their whole life.