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 or part 2. 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).
After spending approximately 900 hours each year in class over the course of 12 years, finishing high school is an accomplishment that warrants a sigh of relief.
However, those sighs of relief could quickly turn into heavy sighs of struggle if recent high school grads walk away from their alma mater without the work-ready skill sets needed to stay afloat.
It can be rough out there; 47% of the households in Lane County have reported experiencing financial hardships, where the average rural county in Oregon has a rate of 48.2% of households in financial hardships.
Being the state’s third-largest and fourth-most populated county, it only has an 18% rural population, according to the Oregon by the Numbers report released this year, but the people of this county experience more financial hardship than any other urban county in the state. The average cost of living in Oregon is $47,779 per year, according to 2023 SoFi research from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Compared nationally, that means only Massachusetts, California, New York, Hawaii, Maryland, Alaska, and Washington, D.C., are more expensive to live in.
So the question industry leaders are faced with is how can they retain graduating students in the local workforce while still making sure they have prepared and quality candidates.
John Stapleton, Principal Architect at PIVOT Architecture and treasurer of the Lane Workforce Partnership Board, is preparing graduating students to enter the workforce by providing experiences that benefit industry partners, students, and the community. The students are able to learn these skills in their CTE classes and then apply them to the community programs.
“We have to show that students can get out of the classrooms or do something that delivers a work-life environment,” Stapleton said.
Constructing a Brighter Future was the Lane Workforce Board’s first time connecting schools, industries, and community organizations in order to teach students work-ready skills in construction. The program helped high school students throughout the county build temporary homes for local unhoused residents.
Now, Stapleton said, they have expanded into helping build structures for victims of wildfires in eastern Oregon as well as creating projects for other CTE areas such as forestry. He describes it as a “collective impact program” in which students are being prepared for the construction industry in high school, resulting in the industries receiving more prepared people, and increasing the number of housing units around the state that couldn’t be built without these CTE students. Stapleton explains that without these students as the workforce, many people experiencing homelessness would not be able to start the journey out of financial hardship. “Going from homeless to success is so much harder,” Stapleton said.
Besides these collective impact programs, local organizations such as the Springfield Chamber of Commerce works with students across the county to connect them with local business partners to fuel the next generation of workers.
“We make sure that businesses and industries understand what public schools are doing. And then making sure that our public sector understands what the industry needs are,” said Paige Walters, director of advocacy & economic development for Springfield Chamber of Commerce.
Walters said that the Chamber originally started by organizing job fairs for students to meet local business leaders and now has a place on their website where businesses can promote themselves and students can access those business connections easier.
But since Walters explains she is an advocate for businesses doing their part in connecting with students, she and the Springfield Chamber have developed a new program called the Student Access Pass. “This is us inviting students into the chamber,” Walters said. Before businesses were meeting students at the schools or Walters was helping students here and there with resume work and job shadows, but now students in the Access Pass program can partake in networking and mentorship in the industry with Chamber members. Paige said the program is open to any student including college students, but they are targeting CTE students that are already developing those career skills.
Industry leaders like Stapleton said there is a need for students with work-ready skills upon arrival due to a decline in the workforce for many industries post-pandemic. Between February and April of 2020 the state lost a total of 285,000 nonfarm payroll jobs according to a University of Oregon Institute for Policy Research and Engagement. While the study shows that a lot of these industries are working their way back after the pandemic, industry leaders said it is time for the next generation to take the positions of those ready for retirement.
According to the Oregon Employment Department (OED), within the next 10 years, there will be almost 40 open construction manager positions annually in Lane County, and the position will be the second most needed job in the state that requires an associate degree alone. As of 2022, a construction manager with an associate degree makes almost $100,000 a year.
According to the most recent data provided by the OED, in 2022 the percentage of residents working in construction is as follows:
- 18% of Pleasant Hill residents
- 17% of Springfield residents
- 14% of Creswell residents
- 9% of Cottage Grove residents
Other starving industries — such as health care and social assistance — also make up over 15% of total jobs in the Springfield, Creswell, and Cottage Grove communities individually.
Nurses and medical assistants are also some of the most needed jobs requiring only post-secondary training in Lane County in the next 10 years, according to OED’s projections.
In Lane County, there are almost 2,000 annual job openings expected for people with post-secondary training alone for the next 10 years. This number jumps to 23,000 on the state level.
Industry leaders and educators agree that CTE classes are opening up students’ possibilities to supply the local workforce, while also showing them that these paths do not always include a college education. “[It is a] cultural shift of making sure students understand that whatever path they choose for success, it is the right one,” Walters said.
