Northern Kentucky Partnerships Point Students in Right Direction
Collaboration with YouScience helps young people find the right career paths by discovering what they do well.
Collaboration is key when it comes to creating a strong workforce, and in Northern Kentucky, numerous partnerships have formed to not only keep that base intact but to build upon it. One recent grouping took place between YouScience, NaviGo College and Career Prep Services and the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce.
These organizations met with the chamber to identify business partners that can introduce students to careers in Northern Kentucky based on their YouScience assessment.
“Our goal was to help provide better guidance and direction for students and educators,” says Amanda Johannemann, former director of talent strategies for the Northern Kentucky Young Professionals. “From the standpoint of a workforce collective, we want to increase the number of students across Northern Kentucky high schools that ultimately graduate with a solid college or career plan. We are finding that the schools using YouScience — it is helping them really dig in and have conversations with students about where their natural aptitudes lie and areas where they might excel, especially those in high-demand industry sectors, such as IT.”
Helping Students Find Their Path
YouScience is the nation’s leading aptitude-based career guidance platform that helps students discover what they do well and then connect those skills to a career path, while NaviGo works with students, their parents and schools to help map out realistic options for college and careers.
The data collected by YouScience is also put to great use by other organizations. For example, INTERAlliance, a nonprofit group that works to inspire students to pursue local careers in the IT field, uses YouScience data to identify students with an aptitude for computer science.
“Once we have this input from the YouScience assessments, we’re able to home in on specific high schools,” says Heather Ackels, executive director of the INTERAlliance of Greater Cincinnati. “I work as a connector between the high schools, universities and the local business partners, so I work with a business partner to identify their needs, and then I work with our high schools to help build the skill sets and some of those soft skills that will ultimately fill those needs.”
Johannemann says the assessments are an important economic development tool, as well.
“How powerful is it that we can walk into any company in our region and say, ‘we have X percent of our high school talent force that lines up exactly with what your needs are,” she says. “You don’t have to look anywhere else. Put your recruiting and training dollars — put all of that right here.’”
