North Carolina leaders seek more career prep in K-12 schools

North Carolina businesses and K-12 schools need to work together more closely to training young people for careers soon after high school, North Carolina education and business leaders said Thursday.

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction and the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce on Thursday published a toolkit to help businesses provide more hands-on learning opportunities for K-12 students.

Businesses want to be more involved in workforce education at the K-12 level, but they often don’t know how, North Carolina Chamber of Commerce President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Salamido said. The health care industry is most interested in working with schools, chiefly for direct-care workers, but broad swaths of industries are, as well. That includes manufacturing and technology and even human resources and finance, he said.

The groups released the toolkit Thursday, in the hopes of boosting the relationship between businesses and schools.

“My hope is that we will see business leaders, literally going online, looking at this toolkit and saying, ‘Oh … these are the schools that I can tap into in my community. And so we're going to call the principal, we're going to call the counselors, we're going to create a plan that shows how we can go in and be a part of these workforce development plans,’” North Carolina Superintendent Catherine Truitt said.

Business leaders’ input helped form the toolkit and includes information on case studies, return on investment, contacts, what things businesses need to do before getting involved, and different programs businesses can get involved with.

In 2022, DPI and the Chamber declared it the “Year of the Workforce” and vowed to work to get more businesses involved in K-12 schools. Since then, Truitt and DPI leaders have created a “Portrait of a Graduate” with skillsets that they believe employers are looking for, such as communication or critical thinking skills. They’ve also suggested bills for the General Assembly to require all students to take a computer science course and to require career development plans for students starting in middle school. The computer science requirement passed, and the development plans will be implemented in a limited number of schools for a pilot program.

While it’s true that people don’t have to go to a four-year college to get a well-paying job — and that four-year colleges are less affordable now — people still need preparation to enter the workforce, if they’re seeking a higher-paying job.

Salamido said students can start by learning in high school and either enter the workforce right away or shorten the amount of time they’ll need to earn a degree or credential after high school.

Businesses are projecting job openings that North Carolina residents may not be qualified to fill, Truitt said, and many don’t require a four-year degree.

“I think businesses are generally worried (about) where will the workforce come from?” Truitt said.

Workforces are interconnected, too, Salamido said.

“The health care workforce is critically important to helping us continue to be a competitive place for people to live, work and raise their families,” he said.

Median annual pay for a person with only a bachelor’s degree is still higher than median annual pay for someone who has earned only an associate’s degree, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

But most people never earn a bachelor’s degree and college enrollment has been dropping since 2010, during the Great Recession.

In North Carolina, 12.1% of people ages 16 through 24 years did not have a job and were not enrolled in school in 2021, the latest year for which the U.S. Census Bureau’s “youth disconnection” data are available, according to Measure of America. Those percentages have been mostly going down since 2011 but rose a bit during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s crucial to work with students on a plan for leaving high school, before they graduate, Truitt said.

“it's too late once they've crossed that stage, if they don't have a plan,” she said.

Beyond businesses, students often seek workforce development while they’re school.

“What they tell me is, ‘This is why I come to school, this is this is why school is relevant for me,’” Truitt said. “And, they know that they have to do the other pieces, so that they can meet the state requirements to graduate. But they these kids are itching to graduate and go to work, or go to the community college or finish their apprenticeship. And that, to me, is really exciting.”