Video Transcript
[Moises Ramirez]: All right. Good morning, everyone. We're going to go ahead and get started. I mean, we have a lot
of really good information to cover and provide for everybody today. So in order to be able to fit everything within
our time frame, we'll just go ahead and get started in the spirit of National Handshake day. Welcome to the fourth
installment of Train. Local. Grow Global.
Tap into your local talent pipeline. So a little bit of information. As far as we know, handshakes may have
originated as a sign of peaceful intention among two people. Since shaking hands means that a person can't hold a
weapon. Or the handshake could have also begun as a gesture of a promise or an oath, like the ceiling of a bond. One
of the earliest renditions of a handshake that we know of is dated back to 900 BC. Between the kings of Assyria and
Babylon. I just thought that was really fascinating in many cultures around the world. Handshakes have continued to
represent a sense of being welcomed, accepted, honored, respected, and at peace. Founded in 2005 by Miryam Roddy,
National Handshake Day was meant to promote the importance of the handshake as a way to make a good impression.
Roddy, a professional development coach, says that handshakes are a gesture that is key to making first impressions
and growing professional relationships. And that is just what we're here to do today to discuss that hiring locally
doesn't just showcase your focus on community investment. But you may even be eligible to receive financial
incentives and receive purchasing preferences by employing a specific percentage of local workers. Dallas College is
the second largest college in the country with an average of 100,000+ annual enrollment. A massive homegrown,
qualified, skilled, and diverse talent pipeline is in your backyard. Today we have four amazing subject matter
experts that are here to present to you and we'll be covering the programs available to help you tap into your local
talent pipeline. My name is Moses Ramirez, I'm the Director of Business Engagement here at Dallas
College. As today's moderator allow me to introduce to you today's first presenter, which is Sam Anderson. He's the
Director of Employee Engagement. Schools of
Manufacturing, Industrial, and for Schools of Engineering, Technology, Mathematics within the Employee Resource
Center, Sam focuses on connecting employers, offering living wage and entry, or in entry and middle skilled career
opportunities to students. Prior to joining the education sector, Sam worked in numerous family owned businesses.
Providing him with a unique perspective in developing organizational frameworks and business models. Along with
serving in the United States Navy during operation Iraqi freedom and the global war on terrorism. He holds a
bachelor's degree in economics and a minor in corporate entrepreneurship from University of Houston. Our next
presenter is Clint Mclean. Clint is the project lead in the Employee Resource Center and our resident handshake
expert.
Clint has successfully led a range of projects, including institution wide software
implementations, website development, marketing initiatives, and process improvements. His passion lies in leveraging
technology to solve complex problems and build operational effectiveness. Clint came to education from tech and
design industries where he built an expertise in developing creative solutions. He holds a Bachelor's degree in
Architecture from Texas Tech University and a Master's degree in Art and Technology from the University of Texas at
Dallas. Next is Derek Soper. Derek is Associate Dean of Career and Transfer Skills Development. He began with Dallas
College in 2021. However, prior Derek Derek worked for both Blinn College and Midwestern State University. Derek is
a proud graduate of Tarleton State University where he earned his Bachelor's in animal Science and a Master's in
higher Education administration and leadership. Derek has over ten years of experience in higher education and has
worked in multiple areas of post secondary education. Derek aims to build students holistically and ensure every
student has the opportunity to succeed. Derek is also a part of Best Southwest leadership class of 2023 where he
engages with the southwest region of Dallas to shape the future of southwest Dallas County. Lastly but certainly not
least, Dr.
Tim Samuels, this will actually be Dr. Samuels second appearance on the webinar where we're truly excited to have him
a part of the series. Dr.
Samuels has worked in higher education for over 17 plus years as an Executive Dean of Academic Programs, including
several recent years providing leadership. Of college, career and technical programs. Currently, Dr. Samuels is
functioning in the role of Associate Chief Dean, Associate Chief of Workforce, and Senior Director of Corporate
Partnerships for Dallas College, the Ascend Institute. Dr.
Samuels has earned four college degrees, which include a Master's degree in science from Sam Houston State University
in Huntsville, and excuse me, in Huntsville,
Texas, and a master's degree in education from Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. Dr. Samuels
has gone on to complete his doctoral studies with Walden University. And along along the way, he's picked up a
couple of business industry certifications in project management and change management, with the latter focus on the
people side of change. So those are our presenters. With that, I'm just going to go ahead and hand it off to Clint
and Sam. Go ahead and take over guys. Thank you.
[Sam Anderson]: Thank you. Moises. I will say this, with Dallas College being such a vibrant institution, we attract
students from various backgrounds, cultures, and areas of expertise. With over 300 academic and technical degrees
and certificate programs, I feel like Dallas College is positioned to serve as the primary provider in this talent
supply chain throughout the region. Now when we look at Dallas College, the primary purpose for us is to ensure that
Dallas County is vibrant, that is growing and important economically viable for future generations. Now, handshake
allows employers to tap into this rich diversity of talent. Today we're going to explore how employers can
effectively utilize handshake to connect with and recruit top talent from Dallas College.
[Clint McClain]: Yeah, absolutely. So Sam kind of gave the lead in into handshake here. So first I just want to say
good morning everybody and welcome. Thanks for taking the time to sit down on this talk. You know, handshake is
first and foremost a student recruitment platform, right? An early talent recruitment platform. Many of you may have
heard of, many of the folks on this call may have heard of it already. Maybe you haven't. What we're going to do
today, we're going to dig in at a medium to high level of the feature set of handshake, what it offers you all as
hiring entities, as employers. Then Sam is going to come back in here and there to fill in what we at Dallas
College, like how we're utilizing some of these tools and what we've seen work for our employer partners that are
existing now. Like I said, handshake is a student recruitment platform. And how they change the paradigm is they've
taken a network approach to the traditional career services platform years ago. On old platforms, if you wanted to
hire at a college, you had to have a login for that college and you could post your job. You could do all of that.
Then you had to go to the job or the college down the road have a different log in. A lot of recruiters would have a
spreadsheet of all these different entities that they recruited from, and they would probably limit it to about 456,
whatever would work with their institution or with their organization. Handshake allows you to have one log in one
account and to really access a wide range pool of talent across a region or frankly across the US with just one
account. Diving in a little bit to the employer functions, the employer features one of the things that a lot of
people really like to hear is there is a free account. Oftentimes if you want to post your job indeed, or to some of
these other ones, maybe you have to pay. Even some of the old career services platforms for colleges, you'd have to
pay to get your job out there. Here, it's a free, very robust platform. There is a premium account type, which is a
paid account type, of course. But what this means is it's a really easy approach, um, and low stakes, essentially to
dive into this platform and begin recruiting right away. A couple of things and I'm not going to read straight from
the slide here, because we're going to go through quite a bit of these things, but really what this illustrates is
that it's more than just your standard job board, right? It's a holistic recruiting platform. You have a lot of
feature sets, there's networking communication, things like that, It's its own applicant tracking system. All of
that really, it takes that holistic approach to all of this quickly. I'll show the interface here. Again, we're
going to go through some of these things, but just to show it is really easy to navigate. It's up to date. I think
handshakes started about ten years ago there with the times, if you will. And they have a really easy to navigate
interface. Have all the feature sets, all the tools that you need for your recruiting right at your fingertips,
which is really nice. What I'll do here is start diving into some of the things that you, if you're going to partner
with Dallas College, would most utilize with this tool. And first is to of course, connect with us, right? You want
to connect with Dallas
College through the platform. Once you get an account set up, which is super easy, we've got some resources later on
down the way. But basically you just go to the joint handshake website, you would create an account. And then the
first thing you can do is connect with schools. And what that allows you to do is really build that recruitment
network I was referencing earlier. Right?
Right? Most of the colleges in the Dallas region, maybe all of them, I don't have that exact number, but most of them
are on handshape. So if you want to recruit in the Dallas region, even if you're not already working with Dallas
College, it's a great idea to be on this platform because it really is spread across the region. So what this allows
you to do is, like I said earlier, broaden that reach. With that, of course, you want to be intentional, right? As
the Employer Resource Center, or as Dallas College in general. We want to come with the platform as well. And you
can reach out to us, understand the programs that we offer, the types of talent that we offer. And be intentional,
right? If you're not hiring for anything that we offer, which I guarantee we offer it. But if you're not or other
institutions, maybe that's not a school you connect with or post your job to. Right? Or maybe you have different
jobs in different industries and you can be really strategic about your recruitment strategy in that way. The next
thing I'll talk about is probably what everybody's most interested in and that's actually posting your jobs. This is
a job posting platform at its core, It does have all these extra features, but what's great is it's a pretty easy
process to post an opportunity. That could be a job, that could be an internship, apprenticeship, part time, full
time, you name it, you can post any opportunity within handshake. You connect it to Dallas College. You immediately
have access to our full talent pool, that's current students, it's alumni. Anybody that's connected to us that has
activated their handshake account, you have all of that. And what's great is once you post a job, you select all the
institutions you want to post that job to. And then it'll start surfacing students that fit the criteria for that
job. One thing that handshake does really well is this machine learning. Whereas a student's interest, based off of
their actions and based off of their experience, it starts surfacing jobs and connecting them to jobs that align
with the skills and the interests that they have. Which means they're aligning to the jobs that you all are
offering, right? We know that that's really the ultimate goal here, is to find the right talent. And this is a
platform that can really facilitate that, allow you to do that. I mentioned this too.
It's not just posting the job. You can actually track those applicants through this tool, they'll drop an application
in. If you're a small start up, you just don't have your own applicant tracking system or something like that. Use
this, again, free tool for applicant tracking right here at your fingertips. Now, if you do have an applicant
tracking system, if you're a larger company and you have your own way that you do hiring, that's fine too. You can
pop that link in when you're posting these jobs here. And that'll route students over to your side of the platform
to take a pause here. And I've quickly gone through several features and I want to hand it over to Sam to talk about
some of the best practices for getting jobs out in front of our students.
[Sam Anderson]: Thanks Clint.
One of the best practices we've been able to use within Dallas College is number one, making sure that we align the
occupational needs with those opportunities that you post out there. Being able to work with faculty and staff at
the different school of to make sure that we are aligning your job postings with the opportunities that they're
training those students for. On that end also, I want to say this too, and it's just not for the immediate needs.
It's like the best of both worlds, right? Because we also use handshake as a way to offer internships and co ops to
students at Dallas College as well. So you have the immediate need and then you have, if you want to invest in
Dallas College to be able to grow your own or create a talent pipeline on that end. You can also go through that
piece and I think with the experiential learning opportunities, it allows US employers to assess students potential
deal relationships and then potentially hire these students once they're finished into full time positions. And we
use handshake because number one, as Clint said, it has that tracking and it has a really robust internship cop
management feature to streamline this process of just posting, reviewing applicants along with tracking candidates
throughout the program. Once you finish, you can have a homegrown talent pipeline that's just not a one and done
situation, it's a continuous cycle. And with that being said I'll give back over to Clint.
[Clint McClain]: No, thanks for coloring in the rest of the meat and bones of what it is really there it is that
holistic approach, build that pipeline and really utilize the tool of course is there, but the rich ways in which
you can utilize it is pretty exciting. Take it past that main like, oh, I just need to post a job. Take it past that
to again build that recruitment strategy. I did want to highlight the events and fairs. What's great about handshake
is if let's say you have recruitment event at your organization or out in the community, want to promote that to our
students.
Gone are the days of coming to our campus and posting up a physical flyer and hoping and praying that a student would
see that. Right now, you can do that digitally. You can jump into the platform. Click of a button, you can post an
event for our students to see, right? They can see it, they can register for it. You put all the information in
there. If things change, all of that is in here. It's a little bit better way than, like I said, that manual flyer
process. So you can post and promote your own events. But what's great is you can also register for our events. We
host career fairs, we host networking events, things like that. What we do is we post these on the platform for both
our students to register for but also you as employers. Right? If this is something, let's say we're bringing 20
employers to campus and we're opening it up. Right? You can register through this platform. You can find this
through your whole recruitment network. Anybody you're connected to through handshake and see those events and
really build your recruitment strategy and timeline around that. So it's really great feature there.
And I'm going to hand it back to Sam here actually, to talk about some of those actual events that we had last
semester or in prior semesters.
[Sam Anderson]: Yes, we do a lot in terms of just our various career fairs. We have our industry specific career
fairs and just numerous events throughout the year. The great thing about handshake is that you can do some of these
events independently. You can collaborate with the Employer Resource Center in different departments within Dallas
College to put together an event. We look at handshake as that global hub where we can get everything in one
centralized place where everybody can have a meeting ground to just pretty much connect and get to know each other.
On the front end of this year, we did numerous things. We had our regional career affairs across our four campuses
at Nor Flake, El Centro, Cedar Valley, and Richland. And then we also had one virtual career fair on that end. We
did that during the month of all the whole month of April on that series. On that end, we just wanted to get our
students connected to career opportunities because it's during that time of the year when students, they're about to
get ready to graduate and we really want them to be able to get connected with those employers. Also, we've done a
health science career fair on that end for our School of Health. We've done a Cop internship and apprenticeship
mixer for hospitality students. We did a Amazon Web Service mini career fair focusing on those IT, cloud computing,
networking career opportunities.
Did a panel with the Garland Chamber about Manufacturing Project Exodo for our students who are within certain
populations at L Central for internship mixer to meet with employers to get internship opportunities. Bank of
America has done a lot of work with us in terms of offering a grant for economic mobility with the IT program,
healthcare and the security investment in sites certification. And then last but not least, our Veteran career expo.
On that end, as you can see, there's a lot of things happening in Dallas College. And we use handshake to get, get
employers connected and our students connected. Because we understand that we need to have two. And we serve as a
bridge to connect those two pieces together. Because we want to make sure that once our students finish their
educational journey that they're Able to get those high wage demand economic opportunities that lead to economic
mobility. Now participate in these career affairs and doing your events through a handshake. This offers you all a
direct engagement opportunity with students and graduates, Right? And this allows you all to, number one, foster
those meaningful connections, right? And then increase the likelihood of success in your recruitment outcomes.
Because what I've come to realize is if you're trying to do a
one and done, it's really hard. Because I know for a fact that people like to do business with people that they know
like and trust. The more that you can get in front of our students, the more they get to know you, the more they get
to like you, the more they trust you. When you come to events, they're coming to see you because they already know
you. They're coming to say hi, coming to check on you. I think this right here allows us to do so many things for
our students to connect you and have those meaningful connections at the end of the day. Back to you,
Clint
[Clint McClain]: Yeah, thank you for all that trucking along here. A couple last few slides here on handshake. One is
communication posting a job is great, posting an event is great. But having some communication with the student we
know is important. Sam mentioned like no trust, right? Students if they like no trust you, they're going to work for
you, right? And a way to build trust is consistency and also communication, right? What's great about handshake is
you can reach out to students, you can do some cold outreach. Now, we'll preface this by saying with that free
account, you get about 100 messages cold. Just pure cold messages to students per recruiting cycle, just six months,
if you have that premium, you get more messages. Right? That's really to protect our students from just mass cold
outreach, right? That's not a way to build trust. What's great is if a student messages you first or if they apply
to your job or they attend your event, that's not cold outreach right now, you started a connection with a student
and you can have back and forth communication with that student. And it doesn't count against those 100 or plus
messages, right? So it's really building a strategy around a balance of this proactive messaging or this cold
outreach to students and the inbound messaging coming into them. But the best way to do some of that proactive is a
job search through students, find the ones that are going to be a great fit for that position. Invite them to apply
to that job, right. Invite them to a recruitment event that you're hosting. Right? Not just a pure cold outreach
that has no action tied to it. That's the way to best utilize those things there. One other thing on the
communication side, I'd like to always mention as a best practice for employers, when you post a job, you're going
to have the opportunity to say, hey, do you want students to be able to reach out to you? What it's going to do,
it's going to pop your picture on the job listing and it's immediately going to humanize that job post. Right. I
know as a student, somebody behind this, it's not just me applying to the ether. Right. I see somebody's face. I see
Sam smiling back at me.
Right. He's posted a job and I know I can reach out to him. What you can do is you can decide, do you want them to
reach out to you? Text only It's going to be a message through the platform. They can say, hey, can you explain more
about this job, or I'm really interested, Things like that. But you can also do video calls, which is really
exciting and I highly, highly recommend because then a student can say, cool, I want to find time on Sam's calendar
for a quick 15 minute informational interview on this. What that's done is immediately given a more rich connection
between the two of you. Um, so I always recommend that you can go into the platform, set up your availability, set
those video calls, and it's a really great resource that comes with the platform. Moving on to building your brand.
This is our last little feature slide here. Really what this does is it's to show that this entire feature set
that's here is really about that holistic recruitment approach, right? With that, all of those things included,
you're building a brand, a digital presence on this platform. That is, students really want to see a good brand.
They want to trust the company, They want to know the company. Students can actually review your company if they've
had an interview with you, if they've worked for you, things like that. They can review your company. That goes on
your company profile. And it's always great to have those on there to have that peer to peer trust as well. But I'm
going to pause here and hand back over to Sam to really talk about what it means to build your brand.
[Sam Anderson]: Absolutely.
Now we all know, with the current market conditions and the demand for talent being greater than a supply of talent,
students just have numerous employers they can choose from. It's very important that employers showcase their brand.
Along with creating a compelling employer profile. This can include highlighting your mission, values, culture at
your company. Posting videos about the work that you do, which can significantly impact the attractiveness of your
company to potential candidates. Feel like by actively engaging with Dallas College handshake and using handshake,
employers can increase their visibility, number one, and strengthen their employer brand among faculty staff
students are recent graduates and alumni. With that being said, if you're trying to do more than just connect, but
growing and invest in a local talent, there are numerous, numerous engagement opportunities that you can take a part
of. For the first one, being able to build awareness about your company. You can do meet and greets with faculty and
get to know faculty and students align with those programs that are within those occupational career opportunities
that you have. You can build your exploration with your company with worksite tours, campus visits with faculty and
students. You can build your work experiences through the by offering internships, cops, practicums, clinicals on
that end. So as you all can see, awareness, exploration, and experiences, those are the things that students want to
engage in. Those are the things that faculty want to engage in that is going the extra mile outside of just posting
opportunity, but trying to do more to connect, not just virtually, but in person. On that end, what we do at the
Employer Resource Center, we help our employers build out customize employer engagement plans to engage with all the
different opportunities that we have at Dallas College. So with that being said, continue to elevate your brand. Be
involved with Dallas College because if we know you, if we like you, see you, we trust you. The opportunities are
endless in terms of you being able to have success in recruiting and tapping into the local talent that we have here
at Dallas Couch.
Send it back to you, Clint.
[Clint McClain]: Awesome. Last thing I'll leave you with is this resource slide here. I'm not sure if we're sharing
this slide deck. If so, there's a lot of resources linked here, obviously, the handshake website. There's a robust
help center. There's even E learning training courses called Pathfinders for employers to really go through all of
these things in depth and to really build that training for your recruiters, your recruitment team. I'll just leave
you with this last slide here and hand it back over to Moy. We really appreciate you all.
[Moises Ramirez]: Yeah guys, some really amazing information. In fact, all of you guys, if you haven't already, why
don't you use a reaction so we can give these guys around of applause. That was fantastic.
Thank you guys. There you go. Now, before we move on, I just wanted to mention, since I didn't mention this earlier,
across the top you'll actually find AQ and a section. Please feel free to type in and post your questions. And we've
left some time at the end so that we can actually address these, your questions. If for whatever reason we run out
of time, I'll make sure that I end up sending out a communication and email with all of the resources, including the
slides and answers to your questions if we don't get a chance to address them. But with that being said, everything
that you guys just went over is fantastic information. And obviously that's going to be on the employer's side.
Right. But I think it's also important to discuss some of the steps that we're taking to get some of our students
ready to be able to support some of these employers to provide some really good talent. Right. And so with that, I
mean, Derek, please go ahead and take over.
[Derek Soper]: All right. Thank you so much Moy and good morning everybody. Yeah, like Moy said, my office is the one
in charge of training these students and getting them ready for you guys. How I'm going to go through this is
basically taking you through the students journey from when they start here with Dallas College and the things that
we do to get them prepared for the workforce and or transfer like our office has there in the name. But we'll start
here. Dallas College, if you don't know, is a Pathways Institute. So what that means is our learner there, who's in
the middle is the main person. And then our success coaching team is their main point of contact. Then everybody
else. All of our wraparound services like career and transfer skills development, the Employer Resource Center and
all those others that you see there around that student are the spokes. What happens is when our student comes in
and they start meeting with their success coach, then they'll start having questions and being ready to get prepared
for the workforce. And then that's when the success coach then passes them over, warm hands them off to us, and we
continue that journey with them and getting them prepared. So what we are is essentially our transition experts. We
are the ones who are getting them ready to either transition out and go to a university or transition into the
workforce. And then you'll see there that C, as well as our experiential learning teams, are the industry partners.
They're the ones who, like Clint and Sam spoke about very extensively on is getting you guys connected to Dallas
College. With us, we have seven pathways within Dallas College and they're below the School of Business Hospitality,
Global Trade, Creative Arts and Design, Education, Engineering,
Technology, Mathematics and Science, which is traditionally called Stem. But we hear Dallas College like to move the
letters around and make it ETMS, Health
Sciences, Law and Public Service, and the School of Mit. Those are the pathways that when a student comes in, We want
them to select one, and then we want them to select a program of study. And that's the initial beginning journey for
a student. When they start coming to us, we begin to start taking them through these career ready milestones. The
first step, when a student reaches out to us, or they're handed off to us from their success coaches, we start by
putting them through a career assessment. Now we actually just change from Choices 360 to a system called the Light
Cast, but these are what we call career assessment tools. A student essentially goes through and takes a survey. And
that survey then matches them with careers and industries that most align with the answers that they submitted. They
also, from there, meet with our career coaching team or our career and transfer skills development specialist and we
walk them more in depth on how much earning potential there is. What is the outlook on the market as far as in Dfw
goes. Then we dive into more after that of what type of skills are needed for these positions, what work values are
there, and then really clarify their goal as far as career goes. Because a lot of times when a student comes into
our office, they've been influenced by their family members or other friends on what they should do with their life.
And so this really gives them their first opportunity to say, hey, this is what I want to do. These are my own
thoughts and feelings. So we give them a space to do that with that career coaching tool. And then after we do that
initial career assessment and coach, we start to get them engaged on handshake. We want them to activate their
profile. Because the other great thing about handshake, and
Sam and Clint mentioned it, is that the more that a student puts into their profile, the better matches they're going
to get for employment. And employers out there. We really want them to start getting engaged and making their
profiles because at the end of the day, when they're done with us, after two or three years, they're going to have a
lot more information that they're going to have to put on their profile or want to put on their profile than when
they first started. And getting that started early is a key for us. And then from there, we start to create their
resume as well as get their online profiles, their portfolios started again,
I think most of us may know in this meeting. But resumes are something that are ever changing, right? Not only just
in the way that we supply these employers, but also just the way that students look at them. We've seen resumes, now
that some companies are doing Tik, tok type resumes, it's always, ever changing. And we want to make sure that we're
on top of that with our students. And that they understand too, that these are things that continually change and
evolve throughout their entire life as long as they're seeking employment. Then after those first initial steps, we
go to Step 2.3, Step two is attending a mock interview and branding workshop. Now we here Dallas College offer
hundreds of workshops and presentations throughout the semester that students can attend, and those are always
virtual that way it's easily accessible for students because that's the other reality that we know with this
student, is that they want things now and they want it at their fingertips. And being able to provide that virtually
where they can do it from anywhere, anyplace anytime is how we set those up in the modality behind that. And then
the mock interviewing session. Most of the time those are done with our career and transfer specialists where
they'll come in and we'll provide them with a mock interview session. But also we begin to look at artificial
intelligence technology and leveraging that a student can again sit there with AI generated person. And then after
they do that mock interview, it'll be able to tell them how their pitch was and body language and how they answered
the questions and things like that.
That's something brand new that we are just now getting off the ground. There'll be more to come with that, but
there's lots of technology in the realm of getting students prepared for careers that is coming forward now, which
is great. Then we also want attend one of our events, the career affairs like Sam was talking about or any of our
networking opportunities. When we bring employers to campus for a table visit, that's along with the second step is
we want them to go and attend one of those events. And then finally, the third is apply for internships and
employment. Obviously, we want them to, at the end of the day, want them to apply for the type of employment that
they want to obtain. And that aligns with their career goals, really, once they get through those steps, then we say
that they're ready and that they have met their career ready milestones real quick. Just some services and tools
that we offer here for our students and training them is our career coaching, our career exploration, career
assessment, resume writing, most of the things that I've already talked about. But the thing that I want to also
just touch on real quick is the marketable skills development workshops. We know that within the world of employment
now, that it's also really important that students are learning marketable skills, it's not just getting a resume to
them. It's not just them knowing how to interview, but what is going to happen when that student actually obtains
employment? Are they going to be ready and have those skills that can be transition from either position to position
within the company or from workplace to workplace. And we really focused on that and we partnered with our faculty
on this. And I'm going to jump in here on this next slide and talk about our integrated marketable skills. And
again, this is in partnership with our faculty here at Dallas College where last year we had 30 faculty that were on
board with us. This year we're getting more. But essentially what this is, is a program where the faculty member is
integrating a marketable skills component within their class for students. And at the end, they have a project that
is just based on these marketable skills. And the four steps that we have to integrate marketable skills are. One,
awareness, we want them to know that even though they're just taking a government class or English class, that they
are gaining a marketable skill in this class. Two is the connection, using the marketable skills inventory. You'll
see some of these, the actual marketable skills that are being taught in the next slide. But then we go into
demonstration and allowing students to practice those.
They're practicing those in the classroom by doing these projects and other modalities that the professors are
putting in front of our students. And then reflection. And that's where they're getting to think about what they're
learning and how they're
going to be able to use this in their future employment when they complete at Dallas College. So these are the
marketable skills that we took. These came from the Nas competencies because we also here, career and transfer use
Na competencies in regards to any type of skills or just career based learning. We took these and this was not just
myself and our lead faculty integrator saying, hey, these are what we're going to do. We took the ideas from all of
our faculty that are within the program. And these are the marketable skills that they came up with, wanting to
teach, that also aligned with our Nas competencies. They're pretty much the ones that you could all think about,
right? Or that you know of. Critical thinking, communication, teamwork, and social responsibility, and personal
responsibility.
This program has really been one that Dallas College has not only gotten recognition for here locally, but now
nationwide. As we just brought this to the Nas conference in Orlando last month, this is a really great program for
training our students and getting them prepared, not only in the resume side and mock interviewing when they come to
us, but also the skills side, really flipping the classroom, right? They're not just taking one of these basic
classes and say, no, I have to take this. How am I going to use this in my life after college? I'm not a
math person, I'm not going to use this in my job. But it turns into them saying like, oh, I'm actually learning more
skills than I thought that I can use in my work from in the future. Just real quickly talking about job placement
assistance, we have a special team of career specialists here within the Career and Transfer Skills Development
office, and they are part of the JLD grant. Those specialists are here just to place students in outside of
employment. That is the goal, That's the only thing they do. So that's a really great addition to the career and
transfer team that we have, is then being able to place students in these off campus employment opportunities. Also
case managed students looking for a part time employment, so they have a running case load of students that they
manage throughout the entire year. And hopefully we get them placed before a year is up, but sometimes it takes a
little bit longer is okay. But they also keep track of those students and check in with them after they gain
employment with you all. And making sure that if there's anything that they feel like they might need in addition to
what they're getting on the job, that we provide that to them. That's just to make sure that what we're doing, our
due diligence and training them and being good partners for you all as our employee partners. Again, I say they
locate and develop off campus job opportunities for students and they also assist with resumes, interview skills,
job search, and job placement. That's really our special team, Jl Specialist, but also all my full time career and
transfer specialists do the same thing. They just more do it on a larger scale and don't necessarily have a case
load of students that they see. I hope that that information was helpful to you. Just how we're training students.
One piece I will just mention real brief because I don't want to make sure I run over time on Moses here, but is
that we also handle the student employment area of Dallas College. What that means is we host professional
development sessions throughout the semester. We have three to four of those a year. I'm a semester and that's where
we are bringing in every student employee that currently works for Dallas College. And we're training them in the
areas of career transfer skill. And then we also have the opportunity to bring in outside employers or outside
assistance from you guys. And I want to put that out there as if you are a company who would like to be a part of
that.
Employees, my information will be at the end, reach out to me and we'll bring you in for some of those professional
development sessions. So you all can also speak to the great work that you do. And not only use it as a recruiting
tool, but also be able to teach our students things as far as if it's career based or a skill based learning
opportunity for our students. So with that, I will stop talking and give it back over to Moy.
[Moises Ramirez]: No, it's a lot of really great information, especially when you consider how much we're trying to
benefit both our community, local employers as well as our students. Right. It's a twofold process. And a round of
applause for Derek.
Thank you again. That was some really good information and of course we can't move on from talking about employers
without including Dr. Samuels. He has some fantastic insight and information. Please Dr.
Samuels, go ahead and take over.
[Dr. Tim Samuels]: Happy to Moy.
Thank you so much and I'll tell you what, Now I have the unenviable task of following the lead of my colleagues, Sam
and Clint. Outstanding work as Moy introduced me in the beginning, I had the pleasure and good fortune to lead a
special group at Dallas College. And we call ourselves the Ascended Institute, which is fairly new, much like the
reorg of Dallas College today, the one college model we came about during the pandemic. If you can believe that in
2020, the framework we started to build out the Ascended Institute in 2019. Our focus is not like your typical
traditional academia where our students are our employers, there are our customers, and that's who we pretty much
serve 100% of the time, Much of my team is outward facing, external facing towards employers. The work that we do in
some respects is not new. We have done work in contract training and customizing solutions for many, many years. In
fact, most 50 community college districts across the state of Texas has a workforce unit that does that work. But
one of the things we learned and found out about ourselves, 2019-2020 in working with employers, they tell us, Tim,
we love the training, the customized approach that you guys take. It hits the sweet spot for us and we get exactly
what we want.
us and we get exactly what we want. We love that. But what the law also tell us in the same vein is while the
training is great, where is the talent pipeline? And over the last ten years that question back to us and my team
members, some of which are on this call today, We feel that question every day. We've embraced the talent
acquisition and development as a niche of the SN Institute, much like you heard from Sam and clan and Derick, The
entire college is front and center on this element to assist employers. Because at the end of the day, it is about
that. But as we dive into some of this from an employer standpoint, in terms of my team and the training that we do,
let's look at some quick stats and facts. I'm not going to kill you with data today. You will see a lot. A lot of
which I won't go over in interest of time, but we see the governor see in linked in every month, every week where
we'll post numbers about the unemployment rates. And when I printed this and did this from a data analytic
standpoint, we were about 3.9% of unemployment in
North Texas. There's another slide, you'll see here momentarily, where it'll report
4.1% That number is fluid and it vacillates based on the economy every single day and the great state of Texas. But
what I want to focus on, and I'd ask you to look
at, to examine, is really our greatest opportunity gap. I call that the underemployment. We're talking about
population groups, typically in sectors across
North Texas that are underserved, underrepresented populations in North Texas.
These are folks that aren't unemployed. They, in fact, are working maybe at fast food restaurants, or they have a
minimum wage job. And things such as that, the opportunity for them to upskill, perhaps reskill or cross skill to
move them into a position of employment with a living wage job. That is our focus and that is our sweet spot that we
work to serve through data analytics, We can pinpoint and hone in on zip codes and sectors of our communities to
identify who those are and where they're at so that we can be impacting in their lives. And of course, changing not
only the economic development across North Texas, but really creating lifestyle changes for the individuals that we
serve. Just as a frame of reference to US.
Unemployment rate hovering around 22.8% Right now, this fourth bullet, I'll bring this back to you in a more
depictive slide momentarily. And it's going to talk about middle skilled jobs because we have tens of thousands of
workers, they just, with a little upskilling and reskilling again, can move into gainful employment with living wage
jobs and high demand occupations. More of that to come here momentarily. Let me back up here. How many of you've
heard of this, the silver tsunami of retirees?
silver tsunami of retirees? I love this slide. It gets to me every time we're looking at the exiting of workforce in
massive attrition numbers. The baby boomers, right, for every day to day, Tomorrow, the next day, this goes back to
2000 folks. 10,000 baby boomers are turning 65 years of age today and again tomorrow, as this slide will illustrate,
through the rest of 2029 into 2030. In fact, we've not even peaked yet. If you look at it closely, 2025 is the
highest peak of this, and we'll be right at about 11,000 people every day of that year at 65 years of age now, Are
they retiring automatically? Of course not, but that is a benchmark. 65.
And that is a lot of talent walking out of the doors of these employers across any industry sector. And the question
is for educators such as all of us on the call, my colleagues on the call presenting today, how do we address that?
Sam, and Derek, and Clint have talked about it through various tools and technologies that we, the college have.
This is an opportunity. It's actually something we have to do is to meet the talent gaps in the talent needs of our
employers with so many folks leaving the employment ranks and for us to bring in the new talent that we need to
continue to sustain ourselves economically. This slide is just an illustration that we use from a data
analytic standpoint as a data analyst by trade or at least through some certification routes that I've taken an
opportunity to look at this on a weekly basis, if not monthly basis. So that Dallas College, we had ascend can stay
on top of what are the occupations that are very pertinent, very relevant to North Texas. The biggest occupations
with the highest demand, the best occupations with living wage jobs. We keep our finger on the pulse of this
literally living and breathing all the time so that we're prepared to pivot and do what we need to do. To develop
customized training programs to assist our academic partners, such as what Derek talked about with the schools of
and the career pathways. So that we're working in concert with one another to really facilitate and adopt and adapt
to the changing needs of our economic thriving North Texas region. Another infographic here. Let me back up again. I
apologize.
Just to illustrate again some numbers that are staggering to me. When you look at the top employments by industry,
you can see their administration and support and waste management services, 160,000 jobs in professional, scientific
and technical services. And the list goes on, and it even identifies a few of our major employers, and probably not
to anybody's surprise on this call, three of the five employers that you see in this infographic are all from the
healthcare sector. We know the shortage of nursing, but that's just a starting point to the conversation. We have a
shortage of all of the support services and health care things in dental and radiology and pharmacy tech. Again,
that list goes on and on and on. But I would ask you to look at the highest in demand occupations. There's other
opportunities for employment for jobs that don't require a four year degree.
Sometimes in many cases, not even a two year degree. Something just beyond a high school education. And we want to be
able to foster that to develop those training opportunities. One real business case that I'll share with you real
quickly is with
Texas Health Resources, THR, we're currently working with them as the Ascendant
Institute. We've trained roughly 300 patient care technicians. Fast track boot camp, accelerated PCT programs, that
have turned out 300 completers into better paying jobs for the local hospital. And this is just one example of so
many that we could talk about. The key element for me on this slide folks, is really about retention of employees.
We talk a lot about the new hires. Again, the unemployment rate, as we saw while I go 3.94 0.1% But what is the cost
doing business when we lose employees? You see the number there in your top left hand corner. You're going to spend
35 to $45,000 to replace any given individual that leaves your employment. You extrapolate that out over multiple
positions of multiple people, especially if you're a large company. It becomes a real cost issue for employers. The
best way to manage is to retain. And by doing that, upskilling and reskilling the employees that you serve At the
Ascend Institute. Our focus is on those customized training solutions that I mentioned to you. We've currently
trained 20,000 people just across North Texas. With the help of my colleagues here, our schools of and many other
facets of the Dallas College community. But 20,000 people that we've trained primarily of the income being workforce
existing employees. But we also are the arm that leverages Texas Workforce Commissions skills training, grant
dollars, and we do that through a multitude of ways through TWC, which helps employers defray the cost of training.
And of course, apprenticeships, a third wheel in the wheel house, if you will, because we also have that in
internships and externships. And Sam talked about clinicals and practicums and some of those other opportunities.
Clearly, as you heard from my colleagues today, we want to leverage these types of resources. We want to be able to
assess the participants to understand where they're at, what kind of job readiness skills they need, if any, create
awareness to the career choices pre. Employ them with training and leveling up and certification programs. And we do
this on a daily basis with many individuals that we train. And who do we serve. Again, it's all about those middle
skilled jobs. And
I'll show you another what will be really the last slide here. Coming up after this, those middle skilled jobs that
require, again, more than a high school education, but less than a formal degree. Maybe some business industry
certifications they can pick up along the way. These are opportunities, again, focusing on the under served, under
represented, the underemployed. Again, that's a sweet spot for us at the Ascended Institute of Dallas College. I
love this slide.
It came out by the US Department of Ed several years ago now, but it remains relevant today. As you look at the grade
areas at the top and the bottom, almost suggesting as though we have more workers than we have in those jobs. But
yet, the middle skilled jobs in the center there, there's 52% that are categorically considered middle skilled jobs
across North Texas today. And only 42% are workers. That 10% gap is the real sweet spot because that represents tens
of thousands of people that would just a little bit of training, we can move into better paying jobs for themselves
and for their families. Finally, just for your edification with the Ascend Institute, these are the five industry
sectors that we focus on, just based on labor market intelligence. We're about to add a 61 hot off the press and new
for a lot of my colleagues. We're about to add aerospace and aviation to this. I'll be updating this slide very,
very quickly. And with that I believe more I may be out of time. I'll turn it back over to you sir.
[Moises Ramirez]: Right of applause Guys, to all of the presenters, that was phenomenal. Thank you all very much.
But yes, you're absolutely right, we are. At a time, there were some great questions that were posted to the Q and A
and our chat. I just want to go ahead and let everybody know that I'm going to send out a email with answers to all
of your questions with a copy of the slide. And I will also be providing a copy of the recording for today's
session. If you have any questions or comments, concerns, you can always feel free to communicate with me directly
if you'd like. But again, all of these resources that you see on your screen right now, you'll be able to find in
that communication that I'll be sending out. With that, thank you all very much for participating today. Again,
thank you to all of our presenters, and that concludes our presentation for today.