Page 11 - Delaware Lawyer - Spring 2019

country, to help young people earn cre- dentials proving that they have the skills to participate effectively in a wide range of industries.
After doing extensive due diligence, we decided to pilot the program in Delaware with 27 students in two school districts. These high school juniors and seniors spent hundreds of hours studying ad- vanced manufacturing at Delaware Tech- nical Community College (DTCC), and when they graduated, they had earned high school diplomas, college credits and certificates that indicated to employers they were prepared to enter the workforce with the skills needed to succeed in ad- vanced manufacturing.
Some of these students went on to two- and four-year colleges while others went directly to the workforce. They were en- thusiastic about what they had learned, both in the academic and hands-on set- tings.
While this program was not designed as a drop-out prevention effort, it turns out that many students found a purpose in Pathways that they hadn’t found in their previous academic endeavors. And as we have long realized, many students drop out of high school not because of a lack of intelligence, but rather because they don’t find their education to be relevant to their life goals. For some students, Pathways changed that and they were excited to stay in school.
Just as our students embraced Path- ways, employers were thrilled by the qual- ity of these young people.
Based on those successes, we decided to expand the program. Our state’s high schools have embraced the program en- thusiastically and our institutions of higher education, led by DTCC, have been out- standing partners. After only a few years, we now have more than 8,000 students at 42 high schools participating, pursu- ing opportunities in areas ranging from computer programming to production and logistics to biomedical sciences, envi- ronmental science and the culinary field, among others. We have been so fortunate
The involvement of employers has been critical because they are well-positioned to explain to our students what specific skills they most value and the kinds
of jobs and salaries that are available.
that Delaware’s employers and employer groups — like the Delaware Manufactur- ing Association, Restaurant Association and others — have stepped up to help our students make the most of these oppor- tunities.
In fact, the involvement of employers has been critical because they are well- positioned to explain to our students and their schools what specific skills they most value as well as the kinds of jobs and sala- ries that are available.
The types of connection between edu- cators and employers that are enabled by Pathways must be the future of education. Surely, students attend school for many reasons — including becoming good citi- zens and learning the foundations of our society. But in a highly competitive world, they will be better off by learning tangible career skills. And that wouldn’t be possi- ble without active, consistent engagement by our employers.
Zip Code Wilmington
About six years ago, I called Ben du- Pont to pick his brain about how Dela- ware could enhance our competitiveness and build our economy. Ben is a successful
investor in growing companies and a com- mitted Delawarean.
I’ll never forget Ben’s response: “Dela- ware needs a coding school.”
I admit that I had to ask Ben what a coding school was. He explained that a handful of these schools had popped up across the country to help people from a variety of backgrounds learn how to be- come computer programmers through short but intense training programs. And in our increasingly digital world, those skills are of enormous value.
His idea made a lot of sense to me, as I had been spending significant amounts of time with Delaware’s financial services employers. Banks have been a great source of employment for Delawareans ever since Ben’s father, Pete du Pont, was Governor and secured passage of the Financial Cen- ter Development Act in 1981.
Financial services had grown to be an industry with tens of thousands of work- ers in Delaware, and over time the nature of these jobs had changed from call cen- ters to technology sites.
Unfortunately, many of our employ- ers were having difficulty hiring skilled technology workers. I asked virtually all of them to explain their recruitment strategy and they all gave me essentially the same answer: “We hire away from each other.”
That didn’t make sense to me — or them — so Alan Levin (then our head of the Economic Development Office) and I convened all of these employers and we collectively decided to forge a better path. That path would mean developing new pipelines of talent to fill these high-paying jobs.
After consulting more with Ben and a number of others, including Rod Ward, Jim Stewart and Porter Schutt, Alan and I decided to work with this group to de- velop the coding school idea. We spoke to coding schools across the country and also spoke to many Delaware employ- ers to learn exactly which programming languages they most value as well as how
See Building a Capable Workforce continued on page 27
SPRING 2019 DELAWARE LAWYER 9