Akron Life August 2023

EDUCATION

Portage Lakes Career Center also offers a CNC manufacturing technologies program, and it works to add programs to respond to needs for specific employees in the local job market. That’s why they added the emergency dispatcher program, which provides a safe place for students to learn if they can handle the stressful job. Employers work with the career center too. The career center is one of 49 Ohio Technical Centers, and it’s also a Center for Training Excellence that offers contract training for employers. They use its facilities to help their employees get certifications like ServSafe for restaurant workers. And employer and industry advisory committees help keep each program up to date, so students can enter the job market equipped. “[They] come in each year at least once and take a look at not only our curriculum,” Tripney says, “but they advise us as to what’s new, what’s trending, what’s leaving that par ticular industry so that the folks that we’ve pulled from the industry to teach maintain current industry standards.”

Other learning environments that mirror the real world include a salon with areas for hair, nails and estheticians, a manufacturing lab with CNC lathes and mills, a kitchen and Neon Lime restaurant that has the same point-of-sale system as Green restaurants, an area with HVAC systems, a car garage, a welding lab and a dispatch area that uses the same CAD dispatch program as Summit County. While the welding program utilizes a textbook, lectures and educational videos, Sanderson didn’t mind because they were all relevant to welding and bypassed the general education component that many degrees require. He enjoyed working in the welding lab, where students were taught skills and made projects like tiered trays. To make those, students worked in stations that included cut ting metal, bending it, heating and twisting it and welding pieces of the trays together, which was Sanderson’s role. “[It’s] going from zero knowledge of the trade,” he says, “to over the course of the year, being able to do stuff all on my own. … I learned stuff that is going to stick with me no matter

CAREER READY Students can leave career technical schools not just after completing a program but after earning certifications or licensures, which all programs at the career center offer. For example, for welding, Sanderson received two American Welding Society D1.1 structural welding code steel qualifications, one general welding certificate and an OSHA 10 certifica tion. Other career center programs, which vary from part-time to full-time, include cos metology, esthetician, nail technician, auto motive service technician, HVAC, culinary and hospitality, EKG and phlebotomy, and practical nursing. Health care students work in a nursing lab to practice patient interactions, and it has a new high-tech Anatomage table. “It’s a huge table that allows you to look at what a human looks like inside,” Tripney says. “It is a lot of active learning. You’re not just lis tening to someone tell you what you’re going to do. You hear it, you learn the safety of it and then you go do it.”

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akronlife.com | AUGUST 2023