Preparing Our Emerging Workforce — Continued Evolution
As with all design projects, feedback and subsequent iteration continues to help refine the understanding of the problem and the development of a solution. It is no different with an entrepreneur project. We had the privilege of additional input and can proceed to assessing and developing our projects further.
Problem Development
In a nutshell: high school students are not being well-prepared for workplace culture. This can, to differing degrees, have an effect on the business in terms of efficiency and therefore the bottom line, and it can have an effect on the young worker’s current and future working life by costing him/her the job and/or creating a potentially long-lasting blemish on their employment history, limiting their next opportunities.
Solution Evolution
Many possible solutions could be developed, however, I started from the in-school internship experience, and resultant general job preparation, available to students of high school newspaper and yearbook staffs. Branching out from there, I found out more about internships in general and ones for high school students in particular, both around the country and around town. A couple internships abroad had some peripheral relevance.
Since the value, in terms of hours and pay, of an internship varies, and the availability is often considered limited to those with help finding out about them as well as transportation to get to wherever in town the position might be, internships are generally not accessible for those students without these types of support systems. Without dedicated transportation, and often with other family obligations, these students may not have the flexibility for off-campus, afterschool, or across-town options. Additionally, schools do not usually have additional space or equipment to provide for extra-curricular efforts.
These concerns led me to consider the mobile classroom model of bringing a self-contained workspace to a high school campus. As presented previously, this would be a meeting place brought on-site where the participating employer(s) and students would convene to work on the employer’s real-world projects. This type of on-site workplace would be valuable to those students who do not have dependable transportation and those who do not have flexibility after school. This provides these students the opportunity to benefit from all an internship has to offer.
The specific form(s) of this workspace is still under investigation. Originally, it was conceived of as a small, retrofitted shipping container, not unlike the Curiosity Cube which can be hauled around on a trailer by a regular pickup truck. Against some initial personal resistance, the form began to take that of a repurposed city bus. In feedback sessions, other possible solutions were suggested, including even a tent, acting as a pop-up event.
The mobile model, and potentially even the pop-up, would be appropriate to the short duration of each internship — lasting the length of one 6-week grading period for each different internship, with the industry/employer changing with the next 6-week cycle. This variety allows students to explore different areas and develop versatility and adaptability, valuable traits for the student workers and the workplace, too.
Along with the form of the solution, the branding is still evolving. Starting out as a version of NXGen WorkShop, becoming BizBus/Earning in school, this will need to develop along with the particulars of the rest of the solution. In the meantime, business partnership branding will definitely be included, likely dominating the experience for the sake of the participating partner(s).
The form, name, and branding can all be influenced by further investigations into the best business model to deliver the mobile internship experience. While we can consider the students a customer/user, the business/employers can be a primary user/customer, and the school/district are also engaged in the partnership. Feedback suggested that a viable model could be to package this as a turn-key product to large businesses, connecting them to students and utilizing social/media to help promote the value and philanthropic activity of the company, while helping out emerging workers and the workplace as well.
Another possibility would be working with schools and curriculum developers to create a space within the schools and their curricula to specifically address workplace culture and varied internship experience opportunities, different from what is currently offered. Currently, AISD students in 8th grade, who decide to elect a Career and Technology Education track (an initiative intended to help prepare students for the workforce), select a subject area/industry to which they have to remain committed for the entirety of their high school tenure. This four+ year program does include an internship in the student’s senior year, however, it does not provide the opportunity for exploration into other fields.
The industries and fields would focus on those growing and expected to grow over the next several years, in general and specifically in the Austin area. This list is long and varied depending on the sources and include health care sectors, emerging technologies, communication and digital media, and construction, real estate, and facilities management, as well as food service.
Each of these areas has project work that could be done away from the originating office. Specific examples of tasks and workflow would depend on the partner company and would differ based on the company’s needs at the time. Even within these industries, management and administrative skills will be needed and would be helpful for the students to learn. The office aspects of these areas does not deny the value of trades and food service, but provides additional skills and confidence that could provide a boost for the students to look to the next level in a current or future job.
Whatever form this internship proposal would take, it has the potential to begin as a one-bus, one business partner, one-time operation at one Title 1 school, as described previously, and then grow to include many busses, company partners, and schools across the area and beyond.
Conclusion Evolution
All in all, this proposed internship project has a lot left to narrow and refine, but the process has been valuable. Beginning with a broad prompt/supposition at the beginning of the semester, finding a problem to solve within that assertion, conducting ongoing secondary and primary research as the project developed, and following the paths to potential forms of the solution, I learned something new at each step in the experience, even while wrestling and struggling at some points along the way. The depth and breadth of thinking through from problem to preliminary entrepreneurial solution pertains to many different areas, in design as well as in life.
