A Different Route to a Successful Career

In the past, if students weren’t planning on seeking a higher education after high school, there weren’t many options for them to have a successful career. Now there are many avenues for students to seek out outside of college that allow for highly successful careers. One of these is going into a trade. At North, students have the option of going into Lewis & Clark, a program that gets students ready for their careers.

“There’s lots to do there,” Lewis & Clark Coordinator Stephanie Johnson said. “There’s auto collision, auto service tech, early childhood, a couple different healthcare programs. There’s also IT classes like computer programming and there’s building trades.”

Lewis & Clark provides a way for students to explore a career outside of the traditional four-year college education. Every year, Lewis & Clark comes and gives a presentation to all sophomores and juniors to inform them about the program. Students have the option of AM classes or PM classes, where transportation is provided to the Lewis & Clark school. Students get experience in the trade they’re looking to go into and they get hands-on learning. The experience students get from Lewis & Clark is even transferable to trades other than the one they studied at Lewis & Clark.

“I mean it teaches me obviously about the trade I’m looking for but it’s also getting me ready to work in that environment,” senior and second year student at Lewis & Clark, Charles Bodine said. “I don’t just go there and work on cars, they also teach us about the employability [of trade jobs] and what they expect.”

This program opens doors for students, making it easier for them to explore their own interests. Before a student joins the program, they are able to shadow the trade they’re interested in to get an idea about how their day would look if they decided to join the program. Lewis & Clark can even help students get jobs right out of high school. Since students work towards getting certifications in their trade throughout the program. Some trades allow for students to get a job right after graduation because Lewis & Clark has already prepared them. Students can also use the qualifications they earned from the program to get placed in the technical school of their trade. There are even scholarships that can be earned to help students pay for the rest of their technical school journey.

“They have a very high placement rate, which means that once a student is completed with their Lewis & Clark program and can get placed into a technical school to continue that programming, they offer all sorts of scholarships,” Johnson said. “We’ve actually had students go through the program junior/senior year and get placed right away at a job site because those jobs see that they’ve completed those certifications [and] they have the qualifications they need and they go straight into that, so lots of good opportunities.”