Top Student Placement Tips For Vocational Education
The 2024 job market is hot, with competition on the rise even as employee shortages remain. Plus, with gainful employment regulations currently moving through the court, ensuring students get placed in the most lucrative career possible is top of mind for many vocational education programs.
We caught up with Rich Camacho, CEO and Founder of BlueRecruit, a jobs platform for the skilled trades, for a recent webinar, where he shared valuable data insights from his platform and top tips for helping your students get placed in 2024.
Check out the recording, or keep reading for a high-level overview.
Level-up your curriculum with additional hard skills trainings and certifications
Think about your current curriculum. What extra skills or certifications can you provide to your students that they don’t currently have?
For example, he’s seen skilled trades companies asking for extra OSHA certifications thanks to insurance benefits in recent years. In the beauty and wellness sector, he frequently sees estheticians with additional certifications selected over those without.
Consider how you make it easy for students to get these extra certifications. You can implement this training into your curriculum or leverage outside training courses to give your students the extra leg up.
Establish employer relationships
The number one thing that Rich hears from employers is that recent grads aren’t ready for the field because they’re training on older technology with retired instructors.
Rich’s question to them is always the same: “Have you called up a school and told them that?”
And the employers’ answer is always the same: “No, I hadn’t thought about doing that.”
Don’t wait for employers to get in contact with you. Make a list of your region’s top 10-20 employers, and call them up to explore partnership opportunities. You can collaborate with them on your curriculum to ensure your students learn the latest and greatest techniques. In return, employers have peace of mind that the next generation of talent has the skills they need.
You can even open up your school to employers for them to speak to your students or leverage your resources when it comes time to interview. According to Rich, one automotive tech school opened up its garage on Saturdays for employers to come in and perform hands-on employment tests with the students to help students get placed faster.
Train soft skills so their employer doesn't have to
Who do you want to work with? Someone with or without good people skills? Someone who is always late or prompt?
It’s simple. Your students need the soft skills you seek in your colleagues and employees. This is particularly important as Gen Z enters the workforce, with early reports saying that many of this digital-first generation lack soft skills.
Some of the easiest ways to include soft skill training in your curriculum are:
- Holding mock interviews: Even talented students may struggle to get a job if they can’t ace an interview. Being a good interviewer is a skill that needs to be practiced alongside the hard skills they’re learning throughout their education.
- Hold students accountable: Sometimes, a student may fall behind without even realizing it, and they’ll say: “No one told me I was behind.” Giving students visibility into their time and progress also gives them the necessary resources to be accountable. When they can see their progress and how much missed/makeup time they have, they’re accountable for their education like they’ll be in their future career.
- Model professionalism early: Some schools use daily checklists to ensure students are professional, with questions like whether or not they’re dressed appropriately or have the tools they need to prepare for the day. Modeling professionalism throughout the student journey will build positive habits for the student’s future career.
Double-down on customer service training
While this could be considered a soft skill, it’s important enough that we had to call it out for itself.
Even in the hard trades, customer service is critical for success. If I own a plumbing company and I’m sending an employee to someone’s house, I want to know that they’re representing my company well because it’s my reputation on the line. In beauty and wellness, where many students go into business for themselves, poor customer service skills can prevent their long-term success.
This also ties into the sales and marketing side of customer service and an idea Rich has heard from many employers, known as “upselling with integrity.” Say a plumber goes to a job site and discovers that a customer will need $10K of work due to branches in their plumbing. The customer doesn’t want to hear that, regardless of its necessity, so the plumber must “upsell” that work to the customer. Ultimately, someone with hard skills and sales/customer service skills is more valuable to an employer than someone with hard skills alone.
Getting your students placed in 2024 and beyond
Check out our friends at BlueRecruit to learn more about how their software matches your students with employers at no cost to you or your students.
If you’d like to learn more about how CourseKey helps foster the soft skill training that students need to succeed in the 2024 workforce, request a demo.
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