Students: [00:00:00] One of ours. That’s what I was thinking earlier. He’s one of ours. I seen him earlier. Get the big guy. I said- Yeah. I, am, do you think that’s ours?

Jonathan Hughes: Look at that

So I’ll tell you how I found myself sitting waist deep in a river in Hoosac Valley a little bit later on. In fact, that’s going to be episode two of this two-part series. But to explain what I’m doing there, I have to tell you first about a problem. Two problems: a macro problem and a micro problem.

One at the societal level and one at the personal level, and they both have to do with a different kind of stream, and that is the flow of one generation to another, [00:01:00] replenishing businesses, environments, and communities. Towns in the Hoosac Valley, like any other town, rely on this stream. So how do we match up local businesses and organizations with new generations of emerging talent?

How do we keep students engaged in local life and ensure that they become the lifeblood of their communities? Think about the local business owner who faces the prospect of closing because there aren’t enough young employees ready to take the reins when they retire. And if that happens, of course, closing businesses can lead to a larger uncertainty.

That’s the macro problem: making sure communities have the human resources that they need to continue to thrive. And that’s where the micro problem comes in, the one at the personal level, the one that I see all the time from my work at MEFA, and that is helping students make wise [00:02:00] decisions for their future.

Now, students do this best when they have a clear idea of what they want to do, where they want to study, what they want to become. And what I’ve been learning lately is that the best way to help students figure this out is to offer exposures to different possibilities. And whether it’s choosing the right college or choosing the right career pathway, the struggle’s always been: how do we meet students where they are at the right time to give them that guidance?

How do we match students up with their interests and their interests to careers within reach, sometimes right next door? And in doing so, keep the stream flowing and keep communities thriving. The Commonwealth has a plan to do just this. It’s called MyCAP, My Career and Academic Plan, and I have a guest from the Commonwealth to tell you all about it.

Next time I see you, I’ll be telling [00:03:00] you all about how this works in the classroom or the river, and you’ll meet our student and our teacher guests. But for now, I want you to meet Joe.

Joe Wyman: Hi my name is Joe Wyman. I am a liaison with the Office of College Career and Technical Education with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

In that role, I work with districts in Western Mass supporting any initiatives that are aligned to the sort of functions of our office. So a lot of that work is around implementing pathway programming such as Innovation Career Pathways, Career Technical Education, Career Connections. It also includes things like our MyCAP, My Career and Academic Plan advanced coursework, MassCore, and a variety of others

Jonathan Hughes: Yes.

I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about-

Joe Wyman: MyCAP stands for My Career and Academic Plan, and it really started its general purpose is to help students develop an effective plan for what they want to do after high [00:04:00] school. That could involve post-secondary education, like a two or four-year degree, or some other kind of further education or training, like certification programs or apprenticeships.

It could also involve going directly into the workforce. MyCAP is a process really that’s intended to support students in exploring their options for what they might want to do after high school, making a plan for what they want to do during high school so that they’re prepared to be successful for whatever they choose to do and really develop some of the skills they would need to, that, that they would need in order to be successful in any kind of career.

So thinking about the sort of what’s often referred to as soft skills and career-oriented skills that are not necessarily technical, but that you just generally need to be successful in any workplace

Jonathan Hughes: How long has the MyCAP program been or initiative have, like how long has it been in existence for, and what have you seen from it?

Joe Wyman: MyCAP has been around in one form or another for 10 to 12 years, [00:05:00] I think. I’ve been with DESE for about three years, so it predates when I started with the department. But if I believe it started around 2014, 2015. I think what we’re seeing over time is that MyCAP is a place where students are exploring more and more career fields, and it’s really supporting the growth of our pathway programs as students think about, “Oh, I’m interested in this field.”

We have, like we have an advanced manufacturing engineering kind of program. “That’s something I’m interested in. I’m going to enroll in this pathway program,” and all that with all that, that entails, including a work-based learning experience

Jonathan Hughes: Since Joe mentioned Pathways, I just wanted to break in and tell you that Massachusetts Education Pathways are specific tracks designed to match up a student’s K through 12 education to certain college or career options, and this can take the form of early college programs, specific trade programs, or in-demand industries through innovation career pathways.

We are, in this podcast series, [00:06:00] talking about Hoosic Valley’s environmental science pathway that could lead to a career in anything from air pollution studies to zoology And so I guess that brings us to the work-based learning part of it. Can you tell me how that fits in?

Joe Wyman: Sure. So MyCAP really involves three components: career development emotional and mental health and academic planning.

So the career development is a really core part of MyCAP. MyCAP starts in middle school- … exploring students’ interests and passions and skills and talents and then helps them begin to link those up with potential career fields. Over time, students will have more and more immersive experiences in different potential career fields to learn more about them, learn what’s the potential for being employed in those fields in the future?

What do they pay? What’s it like to work in that field? What’s the work environment? Those sorts of things. And then ultimately, ideally at least, students would be able to engage in an immersive experience [00:07:00] that we call work-based learning their senior year. That’s typically done in their senior year.

And it’s the most in-depth experience a student is likely to have in high school related to work- to career-connected learning. And, Ideally, it’s a- it’s aligned with a potential career field after high school or at least one they’re thinking about. But even if it isn’t, it’s an opportunity for students to explore in depth what it’s like to work in a full-time job or and experience what it’s like to be employed e- after high school in a sort of professional setting.

Jonathan Hughes: And why is that important other than the obvious teaches you how to do the job that they are doing when they’re doing work-based learning? What else is a part of that?

Joe Wyman: I think there’s a couple things. One, it’s really the culminating experience of what we hope will support student engagement throughout their secondary school experience.

So the idea in part is by helping students align their experience in [00:08:00] middle school and especially high school with their own personal goals, with what they want to do, then the students will be more invested in, in, invested and engaged in their education while they’re in high school.

And then the work-based learning is the ult- the culminating experience of they’re really going in depth into a career field that they themselves have identified and expressed interest in.

But it’s more than that. It’s an opportunity to take learning they may have gained from a variety of classes, those aligned to the specific career field and those maybe not directly aligned, to take tho- that learning and then apply it in a real-world way that we think can support the kind of deeper learning and really authentic learning that, that we want for students.

Obviously, we don’t want to wait until their senior year of high school for that to happen fully, but I do think it’s an opportunity to really engage in that kind of learning in a comprehensive way. It’s also a time to, to apply technical skills they may have gained specifically in pathway programming. So if I’m an electrical student in a career technical education program, I’m doing electrical work and [00:09:00] using the skills I’ve practiced in classrooms.

And also ultimately those employability skills, those soft skills to, to… That even if it, even if they end up in a work-based learning experience in a field that’s not necessarily where they’re going to go after high school, they still will deal with coworkers. They’ll deal with managing their time.

They’ll have to deal with how to receive and re- how to receive feedback. And that kind of feedback, I think, from an adult outside the school environment can land differently with students, and they can hear it in a different way than the teachers or other adults that they work with on a day-to-day basis.

Jonathan Hughes: Yeah, and I’m curious about the partnerships that you have with the local employers. What are they looking for as far as future employees, and how do you see work-based learning facilitating that?

Joe Wyman: Sure. So I think that, that partnership between a school and the employer is really critical to the suc- to the success of a work-based learning experience.

There’s no doubt [00:10:00] about that.

And I think that employers come with multiple goals or interests into these programs, and I think one of them for sure is ensuring a pipeline of potential employees to fill needs that they know will be coming do- that will be coming along as they see maybe people retiring or they see growth in their industry.

They know or are very aware that they’re going to need a- adults in– that can fill these roles in a few years and will be… help them grow their own company. So I think they’re– that is definitely an interest in many of our partners. Some of the fields already have work ha- already have shortages of employees.

They don’t have enough people now, and they’re trying to just expand that that pool of potential employees. So I think it’s really working in wonderful ways in a variety of places, and I think, I can think of examples of companies that, a local family maybe has owned for a long time, and they’ve off- they’ve supported their schools and their district th- their schools and the district in a variety of ways over the years, maybe they’ve given to sports teams. They’ve sent their kids to the schools. So there’s [00:11:00] already a deep relationship there on a kind of a personal level, and this is a new and different way for them to engage with the district and continue that even potentially after their h- their kids have graduated high school in other cases I’ve seen maybe larger companies that are working with local districts and really see this as a way of building relationships between their organization and the local community and see the positive benefits of ensuring that kind of relationship, that positive relationship between the community and the business just grows and continues.

And then, you think about even the bigger businesses while they are their own entity and organization obviously, ultimately the people that work there are often from the community that they are where the business is placed. So it may be a bigger company, but the people that work there are from the local area, in many cases have deep relationships with the community, with the school.

And I think it really creates this sort of positive spillover for the schools, for the kids for the companies, and for the community at large.

I also think [00:12:00] though that a lot of our partners come here with a very sort of civic-mindedness where they want to partner with and support the local school district, and they see the value of supporting the community and supporting the young people in the community to help it be a place that’s growing and thriving and, is a good place to live for everybody.

So I think that, I don’t want to- they see, I think, some direct value and benefit for them and their company, and that’s a good and positive thing, but I don’t want to say that’s all that brings our employees here employers into these partnerships. And I think some of them have a really genuine interest in supporting kids and supporting our schools and supporting our communities.

Jonathan Hughes: And so thinking about it again from the student perspective, I know that they start the work-based learning, actually going out and, doing the work at the occupations in their senior year. But when do they you mentioned post-secondary directly into the workforce or vocational training. When do students really get set along a pathway?

Joe Wyman: Yeah. So that definitely looks different for different kids. So th- but I’ll [00:13:00] give you a few different ways it can work. One way particularly for some of our pathway programs like our career technical education, commonly known as vocational education they’re often having to decide whether they want to participate in that kind of program while they’re in middle school.

Many of our CTE, career technical education schools fill up with students as they enter ninth grade. If you’re getting a spot, you really, most of the time in many of our programs, you have to get a spot in ninth grade. So students are applying as eighth graders. Now that’s not always true.

Some of our programs have spaces that are available later on, and students can enroll in, during their ninth grade year or 10th grade year, something like that, 11th grade year even. It becomes t- tough to finish a program the later you start but it’s definitely possible in some cases for students to enroll in those programs later.

Other pathway programming are more accessible and you maybe you go to your traditional high school and you’re in- you’re a student there, and you complete a year or two, and then you decide you want to become involved with something like an innovation career pathway program, and you can participate in [00:14:00] those in those pathways even, 10th, 11th grade, something like that, and still might be able to finish it.

So that can vary. The other piece of it is we have a w- a career development model where we’re trying to lay out the kinds of experiences students should have as they investigate and learn more about potential careers after high school Now, if looking at that model, it’s a pretty linear description of how the experience…

So students start out exploring very broadly. Over time, they get more and more immersive, more focused and specific about s- career fields, and ultimately do a work-based learning experience or something like it in one field, right? But of course, we know we’re talking about kids that are 12 and 13 years old, so it’s ends up in some cases, poten- potentially many cases, where students will start along that path, think they’re interested in a field, discover it’s different than they expected or learn more things about themselves and find that they have different interests than they, they had, two or three years prior, and they’ll come back to that process of exploring again.

So [00:15:00] there, there are a lot of there are a lot of paths students can take to lead to, that lead to the where they end up after high school, and I think what we’re trying to do is create flexible paths that meets students where they’re at and gives them opportunities to enter and we call them on and off ramps for some of these programs so that they can they can change their mind as they grow and learn.

And I think tho- that sort of flexibility is a big piece of what we’re trying to do in these programs.

Jonathan Hughes: What do you foresee the long-term impact of MyCAP and work-based learning is in the future across Massachusetts?

Joe Wyman: I think what we’re hoping to see over time is more and more sort of continuity between the experiences students are having as they go from middle to high school.

Early on, this program was really focused on high school students, but we started seeing that really we needed to do that, implement that in middle school.

Partly to help students access pathway programming that may be beneficial to them, [00:16:00] and also- … because that’s when students are ready to start looking around and thinking about what are they interested in.

Not that they’re making lifetime commitments to anything, but they’re really ready to explore the potential career fields, and they want to see how the education they’re engaging in is aligned to the goals they have for themselves.

Jonathan Hughes: Joe, thank you so much. Is there anything else you’d like to say before we go?

Joe Wyman: I– And the only thing I would just say is that the work-based learning is such a great opportunity for students. I think a lot of our, young people really enjoy the opportunity to go out and do what they consider real-world sort of experiences. And I think they– it’s an opportunity for s-some kids to step up and do things that maybe they hadn’t demonstrated they could do in the past.

And for others, it’s an opportunity to really build on skills and strengths that they already had. And I also think it’s an opportunity for kids to form relationships with adults in a different setting that where they may be more ready and more willing to hear [00:17:00] feedback from that supports their continued growth.

And, I just, I love seeing this kind of experience grow and hope more kids can participate

Jonathan Hughes: All right. Thanks to Joe Wyman. Joe, come back anytime. And everyone listening, come back next time to see how this all works at Hoosac Valley Regional High School. Please follow us if you liked what you saw. Until next time, my name is Jonathan Hughes, and this has been the MEFA Podcast.