Connecting with high school students is an essential step in building your future workforce. It’s a critical time for educating students about your company and careers to foster interest, guide postsecondary school decisions, and help students envision themselves at your company. With many high school juniors and seniors developing a strong idea of what they want to do after graduation, students must be aware of your company and careers. While reaching high school students was once considered optional, it’s now a necessary step in staying competitive in the workforce.
Organizations large and small across all industries are realizing the importance of connecting with students, but many aren’t quite sure how to go about it. That’s where we can help. Through our application Compass and a variety of services, including marketing, driving awareness, building connections, and helping you develop your strategic plan for connecting with students, we can help you reach your workforce goal by connecting with future workforce.
What can Golden Path help me accomplish with students?
We have a wide variety of services that can help market your organization and careers to schools and students, connect you with the specific students with the skills you’re looking for, and secure these students for your future workforce. We can help you connect with schools and join the ecosystem. We can also help you build an overall strategy that incorporates each of these pieces to drive the results you’re looking for. Our specific options include the following:
- The Awareness package: Think of this as your way to market your organization and careers to students. We set up your Compass employer account for schools and students to see, help you build an overview of one career entry point (called a Career Profile), and market it extensively through our network of school professionals, students, social media, email notifications, and classroom activities.
- The Connections package: Where the Awareness package is intended to give interested students the ability to reach out to you, the Connections package is where we proactively introduce you to students who are a good fit for your organization. You choose what to do with those introductions.
- The Premium package: This service provides three career entry points for your organization. You can use these to build different pipelines for a variety of skill sets and/or education levels while also highlighting unique career paths in your organization. You also benefit from features in the Connections package.
- The Partnership package: This is where we work with you hand-in-hand on a comprehensive strategy that includes identifying schools to partner with, careers to highlight, setting up work-based learning to provide connections with students in high school, and continuous monitoring and tweaking of the plan through the year. This is our most advanced and strategic offering.
Each of these offerings includes the Basics, our free service where you create an account, connect with schools, offer work-based learning opportunities if appropriate, and join our ecosystem. The Basics is available at no cost if you choose not to participate in one of the options above. There’s no reason why any employer can’t connect with schools and students in some way through our application.
Now that you understand the options, here are six reasons you need to connect to high school students now to build your future workforce:
1. Tomorrow’s workforce is today’s student.
Reaching students early is key to sharing your company and careers. High school students need to know what careers are available to them long before they need to make decisions about postsecondary education or jobs. By thinking out several years to what you want your workforce to look like, you can reach students while they are still planning their futures. More awareness is better for the student and, ultimately, better for your organization. This is where our Awareness package helps.
2. It takes consistency to build up connections.
You can’t just attend one career fair and expect outstanding results. Reaching students and building connections with them takes time, effort, and a strategic approach. Finding multiple ways to engage and enabling students to experience what it actually means to work at your company will help you be more successful at building your future workforce. We can provide you with a systematic approach with multiple outlets for school and student connections, which all work together to support your goals. You don’t have to create this strategy on your own. We can help you with our Partnership package.
3. Now is the time to get involved.
It’s the perfect time to get ahead of the competition by reaching students now. Connecting employers, schools, and students through opportunities like work-based learning is still relatively new and growing, which makes it an excellent opportunity for you. Taking advantage of our Basic package gets you started.
4. It’s not complicated.
We recognize that you have a full schedule and it’s challenging to find time to take on new responsibilities – but we promise connecting with students and schools is not complicated. Thanks to Compass and our consulting services, we can support you through the entire process. It’s simple to get started by adding your company to Compass, joining the Employer Connections Database, and offering a few work-based learning opportunities, such as internships or cooperative learning experiences. Then, we can help you elevate your involvement by directly matching you to interested and qualified students and creating a personalized strategy for working with schools and students. It’s all easier than you would expect, while yielding the results you are looking for. The Partnership or Connections package has Golden Path take care of these activities for you so you don’t have to worry about it.
5. A strategic and systematic plan can help you reach your goals.
Refresh or replace your current workforce pipeline by creating a strategic and systematic plan to reach more high school students and your goals – with our help! Our professionals will meet with your team to discuss your goals and recommend a personalized plan to help you reach them. You will benefit from our expertise, extensive connection network, and experience working with employers, school professionals, and students. Whether it be our Partnership package or just an initial consulting discussion, we can help you build that plan.
6. It’s worth the investment.
Connecting with high school students is worth your time and resources. You can get started on your own or partner with us from the very beginning to create a plan that works best for you. We offer a variety of commitment levels, from free services that are passive to more sophisticated services that connect you directly with the talent you’re looking for. From the free Basics package to the Partnership package, every employer can participate.
For more information about Golden Path services or to start getting connected to students, contact us today.