“Bring me a student that is reliable, detail oriented, technologically agile, learning resilient, a critical thinker that communicates well, and we will teach them the rest” — Paul Uhler, MSA Safety.
At Nazareth Prep, we heard this enough from our corporate partners that we decided to take their advice. Now, we’re making sure all of our students can develop 21st century employee readiness skills in a real-world classroom—the workplace.
Results not only continue to astound us, they prove real-world learning inspires, connects, and constructs an employee talent pool. This is not done alone. Corporate dedication and support for real world learning experiences is the solution to education inequity, employee skill development and economic stability. Successful demonstration of this is in our internship & apprenticeship program where we have over 100 corporate partners committed to this mission. Our ardent workplace mentors build critical thinking and resilient mindsets pliable for any career in our certain yet unknown career revolution.
Employer Testimonials
Internships Develop Communication Skills
“Sean attended Safety meetings and participated in vendor phone calls. He worked on a powerpoint presentation and received many compliments from the Safety team.” — Marcy Dipasquale, FedEx Ground.
Internships Foster Self Initiative
“I had some meetings pop-up and could not devote as much time to Xavier this week. But what impressed me was that we have a lot of filing that needs to be done in our HR area. He was also given a task by our payroll area to review some data. When he finished reviewing the payroll data, he went and started the filing without needing any direction from me at all. He takes the instruction given to him and can quickly figure out how to do a task and then when he completes that, he knows what he needs to do. Our HR department is very impressed with him!” — Amy Leonard, Peoples Gas
Internships Build Creative Thinking
“Isaiah did a great job working independently and with other staff today. He was extremely helpful continuing on a new web content project assisting with with our Web and Multimedia Designer. Isaiah is helping the Conservancy update an important part of our website and he’s doing it so well!” — Western Pennsylvania Conservancy
Developing higher-order thinking through internships
One child at a time, mentors in a real-world workplace provide an equitable education that develops 21st century characteristics needed for college or career success in fields our region needs to maintain a healthy economy. Our mentors help us measure student growth in how they: effectively communicate, creatively solve problems, contribute to the work community, self manage their learning, and produces quality work.
The Allegheny Conference states, industries need to frame and support a more effective and sustainable model to enable education and training providers to better understand changing skill demands. At Nazareth Prep, we bridge the gap with our dedicated partners. Teachers do internship site visits, meet their students’ mentors and facilitate a cross curriculum capstone project.
Our leadership teachers unite what is being learned at work with real world projects in which students identify an opportunity to improve or innovate something they have observed in their workplace. This higher-order thinking assignment utilizes a hybrid of skills needed for any post-secondary success.