ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
Students in some of the area’s smaller school districts will be able to meet with some area employers to help make choices about choosing a career this Wednesday.
Tyrone, Okla., Public Schools is hosting its third annual Panhandle Career Expo, and organizer Tressie Sims said the event was originally created to give small schools an opportunity to expand their knowledge of what careers are available.
“We started inviting local employers in to talk to the students about careers and opportunities and what they would need to have in order to be successful in that career,” she said.
Sims said smaller schools are invited because bigger schools such as Liberal’s tend to put on their own career fairs with local employers. She said the expo is different than college fairs because of the focus on employers rather than colleges.
“Not all kids need to go to college anymore,” she said. “There are a lot of hands-on blue collar jobs, especially in rural areas like ours, where the students would need to go to a trade school or an apprenticeship. That’s what fits them.”
Some of the businesses coming Wednesday to Tyrone include PTCI, Tri-County Electric, Seaboard Foods, National Beef, Jacobs Water Treatment Plant, Keating Tractor, Southwest Medical Center and Beaver County Nursing Home.
Multiple colleges will be on hand as well, including Seward County Community College, Oklahoma Panhandle State University and Fort Hays Tech Northwest.
“We’ll also have the Oklahoma Highway Patrol,” Sims said. “We have a couple of banks coming over. We’ve got a lot of local employers who are willing to send people to come to talk to kids about potential career paths and what it takes to be successful in those careers.”
Sims said invites have also been sent to multiple schools in the area.
Sims said many of the popular career paths for today’s area youth include plumbing, electrical, heating, venting and air conditioning and welding.
“General laborers are in demand,” she said. “If we get these students some skill sets behind them, it’s going to help them in the long term.”
To her knowledge, Sims said the Panhandle Career Expo is the only career fair of its kind in a 100-mile radius.
“Ours is a little different than anything else we’ve taken the students to,” she said.
Sims said events such as Wednesday’s open youth up to more than what they see in the news in terms of career paths.
“They’re talking to real people,” she said. “It opens the doors of what is possible if we don’t have other options to help these kids with. As a small school, we don’t have the ability to offer a lot of AP classes, a shop class or an FFA or ag program.”
Sims said around 200 students are expected Wednesday in Tyrone, and she said employers benefit from the event as well.
“They get to start seeing who’s the next generation coming up,” she said. “They can start opening that dialogue. We had one last year who had a job offer on the spot after she graduated.”
Sims said organizers are excited for Wednesday’s Panhandle Career Expo.
“There’s always some anxiety when you’re putting on something like this,” she said. “We see the vendors. We appreciate it. We do all the scheduling and all the teaching and maintain our regular scheduled programming as far as our responsibilities to our classroom, our teaching outside of the classroom.”
