Onondaga Pathways to Careers (OPC) at Onondaga Community College (OCC) …for Young People with Disabilities

Greetings!

OPC Students Welcome Lockheed Martin Speakers

Shown in Image Above: A classroom with students sitting at desks watching a screen presentation by a guest speaker.

The Onondaga Pathways to Careers program welcomed guests from Lockheed Martin to speak at a monthly student meeting. The meeting was held this past October and 15 OPC students were there. The Lockheed Martin speakers talked about how to be successful in their business environment. They focused on the soft-skills other aspects of hiring and career success. These include what one needs to be hired, how employees should behave and opportunities to move up within their company. The students at the presentation were actively engaged in discussion with the company guests. They were also open and comfortable with asking questions they might have about employment. Many thanks to the folks at Lockheed Martin for giving their time to inform and educate our students!

Teaching Group Problem Solving with Shoes Shown in Image Above: Three people's feet with shoes shown standing side-by-side. Imagine 40 high school  students  split up into three groups trying to form a line according to their shoe size. The challenge? They can’t talk to each other. At first,  students  were visually comparing the sizes of shoes by matching them up side-by-side. This was rather frustrating and time consuming. Then  students  started holding up the number of fingers indicating their shoe size. What happens when you get past ten? One group used the numbers from pages of books and signing “1/2” to indicate a half-size shoe. In the end, two of the groups successfully completed their task using multiple approaches. In fact, one group was split right down the middle by gender on which approach was the best to use. At this point you may be asking yourself, "How do activities like these prepare a student for college?" The answer is that they do so by focusing on ‘soft-skills’. Soft-skills include communication, problem-solving, leadership, collaboration, and teamwork. The students completed the activity as a group, using the soft-skills they already possessed and were maybe not even aware they had. After evaluating their successes and failures, we identified and talked about the soft-skills they had unknowingly employed. Activities like this and the great group of scholars make me look forward to these monthly  OPC  scholar workshops. ~ C. Ohrazda

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Training - Skills - Jobs

Preparation of this item was fully funded by the United States Department of Labor, Office of Disability Employment Policy under Cooperative Agreement No. OD-26453-14-75-4-36 ($4,772,418).

Onondaga Pathways to Careers | 315-498-2945 | OPC@sunyocc.edu | Sunyocc.edu/opc