For the upcoming graduates of Cardinal High School who are looking to join the workforce immediately after graduation, they will have the chance to stay local. In partnership with Cardinal high school, Growscape, a company that specializes in producing products for the horticultural industry, is offering an eight-week apprenticeship for students interested in industrial work.
“A couple of years ago the school reached out to us as a way to help them build a curriculum to make students ready to work in local industries who didn’t necessarily have aspirations of going to college,” Growscape Site Manager Brian Cunningham told The Weekly Villager. “It was an opportunity to support the local community while preparing students to be uniquely qualified for jobs in local industry.”
In the first year of this initiative, 12 Cardinal High School seniors completed a four-week job shadowing and observing the inner workings of the Growscape facility three days a week. According to Cunningham, the seniors visited all four production areas, the tool room where Growscape performs precision machining, the continuous improvement group and the quality assurance group.
“All of the students who came out were very engaged and very interested in learning and asked a ton of great questions,” he said. “I could not have been happier with the first round of candidates. It was a really awesome experience.”
According to Cunningham, Cardinal High School recently developed a specialized curriculum for students to sharpen their industrial skills if they were interested in joining the workforce right after graduation. It is a multi-year curriculum that must be completed before senior year, otherwise students would be ineligible to participate in the work initiative.
“They have installed machinery which allows their students to simulate individual circumstances in a manufacturing environment,” noted Cunningham. “Everything from hydraulic troubleshooting to pneumatic troubleshooting to programming a robot and everything in between.”
In the four weeks of phase 1 of the work initiative, Cunningham said the students gained valuable experience about the routine of the facility.
“I feel like there is no harm in giving a student the exposure because, quite frankly, it not only tells them if they are a good fit. It also tells them if they are not a good fit and then for literally a few weeks they get to know ‘Okay, I want to do something else,’ and they get to cross that off of the list,” added Cunningham.
Growscape is now entering phase 2 of the work initiative, in which the students who are interested in pursuing a career in the industrial field would go through a formal interview process to land one of four part-time positions which would last a total of eight weeks, beginning the week of June 7.
According to Cunningham, only taking four applicants from a larger field was an intentional part of the work initative, as it gives the students a taste of the real world.
“It is a paid opportunity; interview practice is very important in today’s day and age so if we are giving them a job, let us treat it like we are giving them a job,” he said.
The students who earn a part-time job would work four hours per day over an eight-week span. Once the apprenticeship is up, there is an opportunity for a few of the students to remain with the company in a full-time entry-level position.
Cunningham said that a large percentage of Growscape’s production managers are started in entry-level positions, so this work initiative has the potential to be a direct pipeline for Cardinal graduates to enter the work force.
“They came here, they worked hard and they had a great attitude so I want to show the next generation of employees here and the next generation of Cardinal students that this is a good place to work,” Cunningham said. “You don’t have to go away from your family and community to build a career.”
Cunningham said that students who do participate in the eight-week phase of part-time work will also have the opportunity to continue their studies at the collegiate level, as Growscape offers full reimbursement for classes so long as those classes are deemed beneficial by the company.
In the first year of the work initiative’s existence, Cunningham said that he was very encouraged by the number of students who participated in the job shadowing phase of the program. He said that there is a strong possibility that this 12-week program will occur at least twice a year in the future.
