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. Roughly 10 years ago, a small group of business leaders and consultants sought to understand where our education system and jobs were potentially not speaking to each other. We started with 2 tasks:
- We scheduled one-on-one interviews with business and HR leaders asking about their persistent skill gaps, and whether they would be open to hiring young people either as interns, or straight from high school. If they said yes, we dug into what technical and soft skills those young people would need to be ready.
- 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.
We learned that, 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. Few schools or programs integrated career and college preparation.
CAST Schools was created to fill that gap, to prepare students for college AND careers.
I am reminded of the interviews with industry, because this year we are deepening our career-connected focus and strengthening our industry partnerships. We moved senior leader Eddie Rodriguez into a new role as Sr. Partnership Director to oversee this focal area, and we won a national Catalyze Challenge grant to start pre-apprenticeships and build seamless paths into apprenticeships.
Over the last few months, Eddie and I have been visiting with business leaders, some current and some new. We’re asking how we can do more and better with our career-connected learning, and we’re also seeking businesses that may want to play in the apprenticeship sandbox with us.
When CAST first started, we immediately began hiring our high school students as interns at the nonprofit, because we wanted to have the same experience we were asking of our employer partners.
Because we learned so much from that experience, this year, we hired our first two apprentices. We have partnered with the City’s Ready to Work program to develop tailored, online training so that they can advance in their careers, one as a data analyst and the other as a project manager.
They started in January, and we’ve already reaped some unexpected benefits. Unlike interns, they work with us year round, 30 hours per week, regularly attending staff meetings and other events. That means we receive continual feedback from a youth perspective much more connected to our student experience, a net positive for us.
One lesson for us was that the onboarding process for an apprenticeship is much more complex than traditional hiring, especially when customized training is involved. We planned for a year-long apprenticeship program, but in hindsight it took several months for the training to be in place, and if we were going to do it again we would design a longer apprenticeship than the one-year program we planned.
In the last few weeks, we’ve met with employers who are already doing something that looks like a pre-apprenticeship, though not in a formal way. We hope to be able to announce some new partnerships in the coming months with some partners who are committing to walking alongside us in this journey, and we’ll continue to share that exciting news, as well as the lessons we learn along the way.
Jeanne Russell
Executive Director
CAST Schools
