A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

The Emergence of Tech-Prep at the State and Local Levels - 1995

Workplace Opportunities For Tech-Prep Students

Facilitating students' entry into career-oriented employment is considered a key Tech-Prep objective and component. Title IIIE of the Perkins legislation encourages training of counselors to promote students' placement in appropriate employment. It also requires state agencies to give special consideration to grant applications that "provide for effective placement activities," although it does not specifically require a workplace learning component.

Although the obvious intent of these provisions was to encourage students' transition to work after their completion of a Tech-Prep program, some consortia now consider workplace experiences during school as a useful feature of Tech-Prep programs. Some consortia are focusing resources on developing the capacity to place students at a worksite as part of a Tech-Prep program. Others rely on existing cooperative education or work-study programs as a structure for making work experiences available to interested students. The availability of grants under the School-to-Work Opportunities Act to expand systems of work-based learning will likely encourage increasing numbers of Tech-Prep consortia to turn their attention to this component.

The national survey examined several issues about the availability of workplace experiences for Tech-Prep students. Coordinators reported the number of districts offering each of several types of workplace opportunities, and the staff or organizations generally responsible for worksite placements. Coordinators' responses should not be interpreted as a measure of the intensity of workplace experiences in Tech-Prep, because the survey did not collect data on the number of Tech-Prep students who actually participated in these experiences or the duration of their participation.

Workplace experiences are relatively widely available in consortium districts

Many consortia report offering workplace activities to Tech-Prep students, and, potentially, other students. Almost two-thirds of the consortia (440 of 702) make some type of workplace opportunity available in at least one member district (Figure VII.5). These opportunities range from occasional activities, such as employer visits or assignment to and interaction with workplace mentors, to more intensive commitments, such as youth apprenticeship. Older grantees were more likely than recent grantees to make workplace experiences available to Tech-Prep students. A somewhat smaller proportion of rural consortia than urban or suburban consortia offer workplace experiences. 

                                  FIGURE VII.5            AVAILABILITY OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF WORKPLACE EXPERIENCES                             TO TECH-PREP STUDENTS         TYPE OF WORKPLACE                 ACTIVITY                      None =============>37%       Visits to Worksites =====================>54%  Related Paid Summer Jobs ============>30%     Related Unpaid Summer ==>4%         Jobs/Internships    Related Paid Part-Time ==================>45%  Jobs During School Year  Related Unpaid Part-Time ==========>26%    Internships During SY          WorkPlace Mentor ========>21%                          +-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+                          0       20      40      60      80      100                                       PERCENTAGE OF CONSORTIA  SOURCE: Inventory of Local Tech-Prep Planning and Implementation, Fall 1993

Most workplace activity is low intensity

Workplace experiences can be divided into low-intensity and high-intensity activities. Low-intensity activities are those in which students participate only occasionally or for a very short-time, and that require less commitment from employers. High-intensity activities are those in which students participate on an ongoing (weekly or daily) basis and for which employers provide substantial resources, including staff time and/or student wages. Most workplace experiences available to Tech-Prep students are low-intensity activities. For example, more consortia and more secondary districts provide some students with occasional worksite visits than any other type of workplace experience (Figure VII.5). Three hundred and seventy-six consortia (54 percent of all consortia) make employer visits available to Tech-Prep students, and they do so in 1,731 districts, or about 60 percent of their secondary school members. Because worksite visits require the least commitment on the part of employers, it is not surprising that these are the most widely available workplace experiences.

Paid jobs are available in more consortia than are unpaid jobs

Paid employment experiences are currently offered in more consortia than are unpaid jobs or internships (Figure VII.5). For example, paid part-time employment during the school year related to students' occupational program (for example, Youth Apprenticeship) is available in 314 (45 percent) of the consortia. In contrast, only 183 consortia (26 percent) make related unpaid school-year employment or internships available.

The greater incidence of paid positions may reflect several factors. Paid workplace activity is likely to include cooperative education programs, which have been available in many schools for some time. In contrast, formal, structured programs that offer students ongoing unpaid workplace instruction are rare. Employers may have to invest greater resources in providing unpaid training and work experience than paid jobs. Students who are paid wages are likely to be filling actual positions, and to be included in a company's production routine. In these cases, students may receive training only as needed. In contrast, employers may devote more staff time--at substantial cost--to students who are receiving structured training but not wages (Corson and Silverberg 1994).

Even in consortia where workplace positions are offered, they are not necessarily widely available. Consortia that make paid nor unpaid workplace positions available do so in fewer than half of their consortium districts.

Workplace experiences are infrequently a core part of the Tech-Prep program

Requiring all Tech-Prep students to participate in workplace activities and developing the capacity to provide them with worksite placements is more difficult to implement than a general program of assisting interested students in finding positions and allowing Tech-Prep students to participate. Few consortia (164) include some type of workplace experience as part of the core program relative to the number of consortia (440) that make these experiences available to Tech-Prep students in at least one member district.

The overlap between consortia that include workplace experiences as part of the core program and those that make them generally available is significant. However, 45 of the 164 consortia that mandated workplace experiences as part of the core program also reported in fall 1993 that none of their member districts actually made these experiences available. A possible explanation for this finding is that consortium coordinators' reports on the elements of their Tech-Prep core programs may have included expected future elements, rather than components that were actually implemented at the time of the survey.

Secondary school staff have primary responsibility for placing students in workplace experiences

Several types of organizations and staff may match students with workplace opportunities, including secondary school staff, postsecondary school staff, an intermediary organization that works with schools and employers (for example, a chamber of commerce), or employers themselves. Data from the survey indicate that, in most districts, secondary school staff have primary responsibility for workplace placements.

This result is not surprising. Despite the increasing contributions of third-party or intermediary organizations in school-to-work transitions programs (Corson and Silverberg 1994), secondary schools have the most experience in placing students at worksites. Many schools and districts still employ cooperative education counselors or work-experience coordinators, whose primary role is to match interested students with appropriate workplace positions.
-###-

[Career Development And Guidance] [Table of Contents] [VIII. Approaches To Staff Development And Promotion Of Tech-Prep]