Many people are not aware that CAST Schools was initially born out of an industry-led effort that also led to SA Worx, which is now an arm of Greater SATX. In those early years, a small group of business leaders and consultants, including myself, tackled two tasks:
- We scheduled one on one interviews with other business leaders and HR departments asking about their persistent skill gaps, and whether they would be open to hiring young people either as interns, or straight from high school, should they have the appropriate technical and soft skills.
- We met with high school career-and-technical education (CTE) leads to determine what programs existed to meet the needs those industry leaders had identified.
What we learned from those interviews was, yes, industry was open to building talent pools directly from high school in what we later termed “the long interview.” We learned that there were some extremely strong CTE programs that prepared students to enter real careers after high school, but there were also large gaps, and there were few that approached career learning in a way that integrated career and college preparation.
CAST Schools was split from SA Worx in order to create schools to explicitly fill that gap.
I am reminded of the interviews with industry, as we have identified as one of three major goals this year to deepen the career-connected focus of our work, and strengthen our industry partnerships. We moved senior leader Eddie Rodriguez into a new role as Sr. Partnership Director to oversee this focal area.
Over the last few months, Eddie and I have been visiting with business leaders, some current and some new, to determine how we might a) grow our relationships, b) add a new element to our work: pre-apprenticeships.
Jeanne Russell
Executive Director
CAST Schools
