By Nathan Prewett, For the Tribune
LEEDS – Career Day at Leeds High School was in its first year since before the COVID pandemic when it took place on Thursday, Feb. 23 and hosted 42 vendors there to give students an idea on what their career path might be when they graduate.
Career Coach Catrice Thomas has been at Leeds High School for around 10 years now and is in the 18th year of her working in education, having taught business and computer science before coming to the high school.
“And then I transitioned to this position, which the official title is ‘career coach’ but I kind of call it like a ‘next steps position,’” she said. “So I work with students on whatever their next step is going to be, whether it’s working with finding a job, a part-time job in high school or scheduling classes that they want to take, getting prepared for college or anything after graduation and kind of everything in between.”
She said that her role is working with career technical education and counseling, a “hybrid” position, she calls it, in order to assist students with gaining success after graduating from high school.
Career Day is one of those ways that she helps students. It’s a day where professionals will set up in the gym of the high school and students are invited to speak with them and see demonstrations. It’s not an event for recruitment but the young people will have the opportunity to possibly apply for these positions after they’ve met with the representatives.
“It’s a day for students to be able to ask, hey, what do you do? What was your path? What do I have to major in if I have to go to college or whatever other educational background,” Thomas said. “We just wanted the opportunity to have students see different careers that were available.”
This year was different from the one in previous times before COVID when several professionals would be invited and they would go from classroom to classroom to talk about their careers.
“We wanted to do something a little bit different this year in which we didn’t want to limit the students to just three,” Thomas said. “And so we wanted to have kind of like an open fair so students can go from table to table and they’ll have the opportunity to meet more people in different fields because if you want to go and talk to the lawyer, well a hundred other people wanted to the lawyer and you may not have gotten in that section. But now it’s open, our seniors and our juniors get an hour, our sophomores and freshmen get 45 minutes to come and walk through.
The 2023 Career Day event resembled a convention with numerous tables setup and students walking from representative to representative. Companies and professionals ranged from locals in the police and fire departments, as well as the chamber of commerce and the recently opened CrossFit Righteous to outside of the city with TriGreen Equipment, Hardy Corporation, Alabama Power and others.
Other fields included companies dealing with trade, piping, energy, nonprofits, entrepreneurs, finance, entertainment and so on that presented the students with a diverse range of options. Thomas said that students are especially drawn the medical field, as well as IT and different types of trades.
“Our goal is to make sure that the students get experience these types of professions and these types of careers because they may find out that they really like this and they want to do this and sometimes they feel like ‘You know what, this really isn’t for me. I thought I wanted to go into nursing but I can’t stand the sight of blood.’ And so they need to change their paths. Our goal is to make sure that they are aware of what’s out there, they get a better understanding because I come from a background of education. I’m not an expert in all of the fields but I’m able to connect you with some experts who can.”
Nathan Prewett can be reached at nthomasp6@gmail.com.