Local businesses looking to boost their talent pipelines may find that connecting with K-12 and higher education programs is one way to succeed. Building on what’s known as “career connected learning,” or CCL, is an ongoing effort for Educational Service District 123, which represents 77,000 local students.

As the ESD’s career connected learning coordinator, Jim Kindle said the Pasco-based organization is now a leader for the region in workforce and education partnerships, and he wants to keep expanding it.

“We have the relationships with K-12. We want to create an intermediary program where industry (workplaces) knows what they need,” he said. “They come to us, and we connect them to K-12, or the exact opposite. I could connect K-12 to industry.”

Kindle said these connections have amounted to more than 15,000 touchpoints with local students in recent years through career exploration, mentorship and hands-on learning.

“By meeting them where they’re at and finding out what their goals are, we create that program that I could go to K-12 and say, ‘OK, we've got a business who needs employees, and I know you have this class,’” he said.

Kindle said the goal is to expose students to a range of careers to let them explore what’s out there, especially locally, including how those careers are connected to classes they might be taking now or later in their schooling.

“Career connected learning might be as simple as showing videos to kids in math, and say, ‘Here’s some jobs you could be looking toward.’ Math just isn’t math. You can use it for a career. Same thing with English. Same thing with technology, PE,” Kindle said.

While his position was first created in 2019 and supported in the budget by state lawmakers, that original funding source is changing. Fortunately, Kindle said the ESD recognizes CCL is important enough to keep supporting the position.

Kindle helped create a framework that aims for a “seamless transition” between a student’s education and their entry into a high-demand career in Washington, especially within the region.

“I call it my five E’s. Learning starts at exposure, it goes to exploration, it goes to education, it goes to experience and it ends with employment,” Kindle said.

Each step is considered important to translate a student’s interest into marketable skills that gain them real-world experience valuable to a potential employer.

ESD 123 supports 23 school districts in southeast Washington, covering seven counties, and serves as a liaison between local schools and the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. Some of the larger school districts represented by ESD 123 tend to have more opportunities for outreach versus the more rural ones, but Kindle aims to support them all.

“Pasco has what they call community engagement managers who bring guest speakers in or take field trips,” he said. “But there’s not a lot that happens from there, so thinking about how to go from that exploration to education.”

This is where a CCL coordinator can work with educators to build workforce development into their curriculum. Many schools already have career and technical education programs, commonly known as CTE, but Kindle said this is bigger than that. He’s excited about Pasco’s next high school, Orion, also known as the Career & College Academy, opening this fall on East Salt Lake Street.

“We call it a 2-by-2 model, so ninth- and tenth-graders will come in, and they're getting all of their foundational skills. But as a junior and senior, how do we get them out on the job sites and still get their 24 credits to graduate? I’m working with the Pasco School District to build what we call career launch programs,” Kindle said.

The hope is to align curriculum so that students end up with a paid internship and potentially an industry-recognized credential by the time they’re graduating, making them candidates for living wage jobs in the local community. Kindle said ESD 123 has already supported eight higher education institutions with aligning their coursework to meet the workforce needs of today.

It’s the workforce needs of tomorrow they still want to tap into. “We have high demand industries in our region now, but we also have some industries that are going to be upcoming in that we don’t know what they look like,” he said. “In the next five to 10 years, we can go talk to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory or Energy Northwest or Port of Benton and these new nuclear-related jobs. We don’t know what those jobs even look like, and our kids and our educators sometimes don’t know what the jobs are even at Hanford.”

Kindle is referring to the effort to bring advanced clean energy technologies to land in north Richland, which promises to include those sought-after living wage jobs, and ESD 123 wants to make sure local students are prepared to fill them. “If we don't know what the title or what that job really entails on the education side, we can't be teaching the kids to have the right skills,” he said.

Bringing education and industry to the table together is what can improve on that, Kindle said.  “Education doesn’t do a really good job of onboarding industry and so I want to start that conversation,” he said.

ESD 123 said it has already hosted hundreds of career connected learning events and partnered with nearly 500 industry leaders to develop career experiences, job shadows, internships and registered apprenticeships, but companies also want to see more of a return on their investment. He said many don’t want to send employees to half-day career fairs and not get anything out of it.

“We have so many people on the K-12 side asking our industry partners to do the same things over and over, and they want to do it, but they're starting to get at capacity. They can't do it. And pretty soon, they're going to start saying no,” Kindle said.

Rather than ask the same people or workplaces to offer a guest speaker, field trip or attend a career fair, Kindle wants to think outside the box to find more meaningful relationships.

“Let’s say it’s a reverse career fair. Instead of an industry partner sitting at the table, now kids are sitting at the table showing off their skills and industry partners are walking around meeting these kids, and they create this relationship where they can go back to another table and say, ‘OK, I want to know more about this person.’ Or we've got resumes pulled and maybe we do a hiring event at that same time. When we’ve done things like that, we even end up getting parents or relatives hired.”

The state has a goal of placing 60% of young adults, starting with today’s seventh-graders, in Career Launch programs that provide on-the-job experience with classroom learning.