NEW PARIS — National Trail Local Schools played host last Friday, Feb. 11, to the Preble County Career and College Fair. The event, typically held annually, was the first in-person Career Fair in several years, due to COVID-19. The overall goal is to let the students know of all the opportunities which can be found here in Preble County, according to organizers.
“Today’s Career Fair was a great success,” Preble County ESC Career Connections Director Harold Niehaus said Friday. “We probably had 90 different vendors that included colleges as well as a lot of local businesses and pre-apprenticeship programs that the kids could explore.”
“I think so often we think that all the jobs are elsewhere, and they’re not. I mean, we have so many great companies here, whether they’re entrepreneurship type businesses, turf and landscape and lawn care and farming — but then we have the manufacturers here. We have a world headquarters. So, it’s just amazing what we can do for kids,” Niehaus said.
“It was exciting because I think the kids had their eyes opened to many opportunities that are out there that are well paying jobs, something they can become passionate about, that would have good health care and benefits.”
“One thing that we’re doing new is to follow up from this event,” Niehaus said. “This was a great day for juniors and seniors to see all the opportunities, but I definitely want the seniors to take advantage of these, so we’re going to have a follow-up job fair. The job fair will take place on May 3, at the Preble County Fairgrounds.”
Participating businesses were given the opportunity to come back to the May 3 event. “The students will learn about those jobs that are interested in hiring this summer, as they graduate. And so, it’ll be great because they can actually sign up for a 10-minute interview with two or three or four different businesses on May 3, and have that private contact and hopefully get a job this summer, even if it’s a job to tide them over to their next steps for college,” he added.
Both seniors and juniors attended. Juniors were added this year so they could visit with the colleges, Niehaus said. “But the seniors here will hopefully more of a concentration on careers, because a lot of the kids already know what they’re doing, if they’re going to college, or they’ve learned the fact that they’re not interested in doing the college experience and they want to go directly into the workforce or military. We had military here as well. And the military folks were able to meet with people and help guide them into different opportunities there.”
“We tried to get businesses that represented all 16 National Career Clusters,” Niehaus added. Everything from human services and health care to manufacturing, lawn care, agriculture and more was represented.
The colleges and business were very thankful to be back in person. “Because you know, now we’re back to a face-to-face environment,” Niehaus said. “You know, there’s no better way to actually communicate with people than to look them in the eye and talk about what you have to offer. Whether it’s a college with a certain experience, a trade, school and apprenticeship, or a business.”
“It’s nice just to be able to have kids being able to interact face-to-face with businesses and other business aspects, because unfortunately through the pandemic, we’ve not been able to do a lot of these things. It’s always been a passion of ours here at Trail, dating back to my days as a principal,” NT Superintendent Bob Fischer said of the event. “Our goal was always to do whatever we could to make sure that kids knew what options they had. You know, being a father of four kids myself, I know how expensive college is.”
“To be able to give these kids an opportunity, so that they know it’s not just about college — college is important, but don’t go into it because you’re being forced to go — but know what career path you want to go down and being able to have things like this out in the public, for kids to be able to go up and talk and get some ideas about the things that we have in our county. I know other counties are looking at us because we truly have a plan. We’ve got an idea of how we want things to progress. We start with career options. We have done internships that we’ve created; the introduction of Harold’s position and the things that he is doing to push career opportunities into kids’ hands,” Fischer said. “We truly are trying to do everything we can to make sure our kids know every option they have before they walk out of their high school when they graduate.”
