Skills USA is a CTE (Career Technological Education) based organization that prepares students for their career paths. It focuses on resume building, interviewing skills, career specific knowledge, and more. Three seniors at Friendswood High School spent their first semester learning these skills in the classroom, and are now carrying out their service project.
“We’re competing in the community service portion of the competition,” Elizabeth Sala said. “It’s about how we impact the community.”
For the last several weeks, Elise Marx, Elizabeth Sala, and Zoe Sellers have been traveling to FJH to teach a career prep class as their project for the Community Service Action competition.
“Since they are closer to the age of entering the workforce, we get a lot of students who are really interested in career prep and students really seem to love learning,” Elizabeth said.
Presentations and interactive activities are used to engage students in the classes, which average about six students. According to Elizabeth, leading with conversation and interview practices has been important to help students understand how their responses to certain questions might not convey what they hope to convey.
“My favorite part of the project is talking to the students and just getting their opinions… I’m like, ‘you’re not going to get a job [with that kind of response],” Elizabeth said. “We usually give them a different answer that means the same thing.”
Along with interview skills, Elizabeth, Elise, and Zoe have been teaching other professional skills such as handshakes, resumé building, cover letter writing, job applications, and time management.
“I think finding a way [to teach] it that would get them interested is the hardest part,” Sala explained. “Once we made it more interactive, they started caring a lot more about it, and a lot more students started showing up.”
The goals of the project are rooted in personal experience. Marx, Sala, and Sellers felt they were underprepared and unaided when entering the workforce as teenagers.
“I work at Chick- Fil- A,” Sala said. “I knew people who worked there already, that’s how I learned to finish my application and get the interview. I don’t think I would be able to do it by myself.”
They feel that it is important that information about choosing a career is shared with others, especially young people who are, more often than not, uninformed and unsure about starting in the workforce.
“They are closer to the age of entering the workforce,” Sala said. “We get a lot of students who are really interested in this [class] and the students really seem to love it.”
In fact, the course is being extended due to the positive feedback from the middle schoolers. The program draws inspiration from the high school’s career prep course.
“In the career prep program we learn about all of those skills like interviewing,” Sala adds. “Everything we learned in the beginning of the class, we teach to them.”
Now with the experience from the classroom and from teaching the junior high kids, these students are going to compete at Skills USA on February 26, 2022. Their service project was only meant to be for the competition, but now they are thinking about continuing it.
“We were only supposed to do the course for five weeks and they asked us about high school and had a lot of questions about that.” Elizabeth said. “We’re going to continue past the competition but we might try to get the juniors to continue the program into next year.”
