Editors note: As students and teachers return to school, The Chronicle takes a deeper look at Career and Technical Education in Springfield, Cottage Grove, Pleasant Hill, and Creswell. This is part 2 of 4 of the series. Check this out if you missed part 1, part 2, and the companion piece to this week’s story. A companion piece for this week’s edition is also posted here. This series was made possible in part by donations to The Chronicle Foundation and the Fund for Oregon Rural Journalism (FORJ).
With ambulatory and health care, education, and food services ranking as the top three industries in Lane County, the opportunity for employment is perhaps as great as the need for employees.
For students navigating Career Technical Education (CTE), these relatively broad categories open up a multitude of career paths well before they graduate high school.
In the healthcare arena, PeaceHealth Medical dominates as the county’s largest employer, and the healthcare industry makes up 18% of the workforce in Lane.
Despite this, there has been a significant depletion of healthcare workers around the state. According to a Health Resource and Service Administration study, Oregon is one of the top states with a projected Registered Nurse decline in the next 10 years. The state is expected to lose over 7,000 registered nurses alone.
“We do not have enough people graduating from training programs in healthcare to fill all the jobs in Oregon,” said Dr. Kimberly Ruscher, chief medical officer at PeaceHealth Medical. This expands further than nurses and includes jobs in the sterile processing department, child life specialists, and information technology jobs.
PeaceHealth partners with area high schools to increase CTE in the healthcare industry through mentorships and facility tours. The hospital recently finished its first year of its mentorship program with CTE students at Churchill High School. This program allowed students and mentors to determine what the best industry exposure would be. Students can have job shadows or meetings with a mentor who holds the exact position they are interested in pursuing, Ruscher said.
She also said the hospital is interested in rolling out this mentorship program to other interested schools.
Besides the mentorship program, PeaceHealth also offers interested students to tour the hospital to see the work first-hand and meet people in nursing, sterile processing, or other technical jobs. “Students walk away with this confidence that healthcare is a safe career and a meaningful career,” she said.
Ruscher wants to see local talent stay local, she said, encouraging students to look local for long-term career opportunities rather than leaving to pursue opportunities elsewhere.
“Think about the great career you can have here in Eugene-Springfield by working at this hospital,” she said.
Peacehealth will soon launch a scholarship program which will fund six certified technicians to become certified first assistants.
“That will help us have a higher level of skill in the operating room for our staff, and it helps them because it’s a higher level of income in that role,” Ruscher said.
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RiverBend Materials is a construction and asphalt-mixing company based in Eugene and Salem and offers high school students a plethora of hands-on options.
“CTE programs are benefiting both the industry and RiverBend because students are allowed to get that experience before coming to work for us … we’re focusing on training them on-site,” said Paige Downer, communications specialist for CRH’s Americas Materials, RiverBend’s parent company.
The company offers high school students summer internships where they have the opportunity to get MSHA certifications, QC certifications, and CDL training according to Michelle Imam Bakhsh, the company’s human resource generalist. Most of their interns continue to work part-time throughout high school and gain permanent, full-time employment with RiverBend when they graduate.
The materials industry is facing employee depletion as folks age out of their careers, according to industry leaders. Technological advancements may be a hurdle for some — there are CDL simulators to be trained on and technology controls in the trucks to maneuver — but those advancements have also made way for a change in how they get the job done.
Times have changed.
Less than a decade ago the average age of a driver in their industry was 59 1⁄2 years old and those folks were heading toward retirement, said Keith Martin, Riverbend senior manager.
“There’s a lot of growth in, I’ll call it our community right now, as far as making sure people are properly rewarded financially for what they do, and by making it a friendlier and friendlier place,” said Mark Harrington, of Chambers Construction. “Somebody may say, ‘Oh, those carpenters are a bunch of grumpy old Gusses. We don’t want to hang out with them,” Harington laughs. “Yeah, but we’re getting better.”
Harrington is committed to finding and training students to become the next generation of carpenters for his company.
Harrington has been the recruiter and trainer for the apprenticeship program at Chambers Construction for eight years. He chuckled when he said he is almost 61 years old and doesn’t have any children of his own, but now he has “a dozen of them following me around like the Pied Piper trying to figure out what it is I’m doing.”
The company pays for participants as young as 16 to take its apprenticeship program including the classes and labor, and then typically offers them a position after they finish the program.
He said the program helps boost graduation rates, and will improve the overall quality of the community.
“Not to mention, some people are going to find something they truly love doing for a career along the way,” Harrington said. “If a kid is driven and knows where they want to be, we’re going to help them get there.”
