Highlights
- On April 16, I went to Hershey, Pennsylvania where I had a great time at the 44th annual SkillsUSA Pennsylvania State Conference. State Association Director Jeri Widdowson told me this was the largest conference held in the state since she became director. There were 1,400 registrants, but with volunteers she’s estimating there were 2,000 people in attendance. They had great competitions and some wonderful teachers. I shook hands with every medalist, and I also had a chance to visit with another champion, board of directors member, Gerald Tylka.
- There’s a lot of movement in career and technical education (CTE) to capture a common vision of the role played by CTE in education and preparation for employment. As a matter of fact, there’s a lot of discussion that education, as a whole, should start to take on more aspects of CTE. That means students should be “college ready” (not requiring remediation at the postsecondary level) and “career ready” among many other things. The National Association of State Directors of Career and Technical Education Consortium (NASDCTEc) has released a vision paper for the field, and I believe it is worthy of a great deal of discussion. The link to read it is http://careertech.org/show/new_vision.
- The week of April 12th, the Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE) released a two-page definition of “Career Ready.” They say career readiness involves three major skill areas: academic skills (and the ability to apply those skills to concrete situations), employability skills and technical, job-specific skills. It’s an excellent addition to the discussion and certainly makes the case for CTE’s role in education overall, and by inference, the value of the student organizations. To give it a review, just click on http://acteonline.org/uploadedFiles/Publications_and_Online_Media/files/Career_Readiness_Paper.pdf.
Tags: ACTE, Career and Technical Education, Highlights, NASDCTEc, State Conferences
