Summer Workshop for Youth Offers a Sense of Business World

May 25, 2011... The Bergen One Stop Career Center, in cooperation with the NJ Chamber of Commerce and the Bergen County Workforce Investment Board, is currently planning a special summer training workshop targeted towards rising tenth grade students with disabilities. The workshop is aptly titled “LearnDoEarn.”

This week-long workshop, to be held on July 11 – July 15, 2011 at Bergen Community College’s Ciarco Learning Center, provides participating students with a real sense of the business world, what their future employers will demand of them, and what they have to do now, while they are still in school, to prepare for college, work, and life. After four days of various workshops featuring interactions with business people, a panel of business judges will decide which student team has done the best job by ‘Becoming American Business.’ While the activities are designed for high school freshman and sophomores, students in eighth, eleventh and twelfth grades can also participate. Approximately 50 students and 10-15 support staff will participate.

Below is a curriculum for LearnDoEarn:

Day One: Becoming American Business

1. Icebreaker activities

2. Students form teams and name their own company. They can elect to be either a toy or sports equipment manufacturer.

3. Students develop a brand, design a logo, and assign each other roles within the company.

4. Students then conceive of a new product, or improvement to an existing product, and fabricate or draw the product with arts and crafts materials provided.

5. Students then develop and practice a 60-second commercial that will become part of a presentation to a panel of business people at the end of the week.

Day Two: The Real World

1. Four experts from the business world present basic business knowledge to students that will help them design a better presentation on the final day. Shared business expertise will include marketing, presentation skills, etc.

2. Experts interact with the students as consultants and advise them on how they can make their product/presentations better.

Day Three: LearnDoEarn Student Achievement System

1. Through presentations and interactions with business representatives, students learn what their future employers will expect from them, and what they need to do now to prepare for college, work, and life.

2. Students participate in the interactive game, LearnDoEarn ‘Hollywood’ Squares and compete in teams against each other for points that will be used as part of the judges’ determination at the end of the week.

Day Four: The LearnDoEarn Hiring Game

1. Students participate in the LearnDoEarn Hiring Game, a competition among ‘student companies’ to hire the best person for the job. Students play the roles of employers who need to hire a manager, secretary/receptionist, and mechanical engineer. Teams must select the best person for the job based on ‘candidate profiles’ supplied by a ‘human resource consultant.’ The competition really heats up when students use a limited amount of hiring bonus money to bid against each other.

2. Students who secure the best individuals for the jobs score the highest points.

3. When finished with The Hiring Game, students spend the rest of the day preparing their presentations for the judges on the final day.

Day Five: Becoming American Business

1. Student teams prepare for final competition in the morning.

2. In the afternoon, student teams make presentations to a panel of judges, revealing their products and ‘performing’ their commercials.

3. Judges present awards in multiple categories to top-performing teams.

The four counties selected for this pilot program – Bergen, Passaic, Burlington and Cumberland – were named Employment Network Counties by the New Jersey Department of Labor & Workforce Development and Social Security Administration earlier this year.  Employment Networks are designed to assist Social Security beneficiaries return to work through the provision of employment services from public and private providers.

Nick Ruggiero, Disability Program Navigator and Sharon Phillips, Youth Counselor are working closely with the NJ Chamber of Commerce and Department of Labor on this exciting project that hopefully will have statewide implications.