Entrée to Employment – Dr. Tiffany Morse

In 805conversations by Mark Sylvester

What we don’t know about contemporary Career and Technical Education

Sitting in the business community is to learn by listening.Dr. Tiffany Morse

Dr. Tiffany Morse is the Executive Director of Career Education at Ventura County Office of Education. She helps explain the power of this work and it’s importance to our Community.

There are a lot of misconceptions about what the role of Career and Technical education is all about in the year 2017. Learning about work is not what it was like when I went to school. Shop class is so 1970’s. (Read this article by TEDster Sir Ken Robinson about shop class)

Here’s a bit of what’s in store in this episode:

• She tells a great story of the partnership with her department and Ventura-based Harbor Freight and how that led to a $100K Grant
• What’s the difference between Vocational Education and what she’s doing now
• How the mission now is about preparing students for career (hence the name)
• How the diverse nature of the Community’s population is reflected in the diversity of interests of potential jobs by the students
• What’s her thoughts about Girls in Tech – and how behavior modeled by the family or people like guest speakers in school can affect decisions made at an early age
• How she thinks about setting an entrepreneurial mindset throughout the department
• How Career Ed works with students who are being home-schooled
• “What is the role of education in a Community?
• How Community Colleges have changed from vocational schools to schools that prepare students for transfer to four-year colleges and Universities
• How to think about College AND Career
• Where’s Career Education going? It’s Integrating Academics and Vocational Ed
VC Innovates – 12 employees
• The title of this episode is a program that Dr. Morse invented that brings the business community together with students in a dinner and networking setting. They’ve had over 2,000 people go through this program. Note: Mark signed up!

Tiffany helped us create an incredibly insightful episode. We challenge you to reach out to your local school district and find a way to give some of your time to a program like this. Both the students you meet, and you will benefit.

Thanks to Greg VanNess at Tolman & Wiker Insurance Services for introducing us to Tiffany. She helped us understand the role of Insurance in Education.