TULSA, Okla. — Tulsa Tech exposed local high school students to various job paths at their “Achieving the Dream; Career Strategies for Success” event on Wednesday.
The university partnered with professionals in various fields including, Welding, EMS, Cosmetology, Aviation, Early Childhood Care and more.
The Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office also came out to discuss career options and paths for students interested in criminal justice careers.
“Today, in partnership with Tulsa Tech, we are holding a Career Strategies for Success program,” said Tulsa County Sheriff Vic Regalado. “We do this about twice a year and what it’s targeting is high school students 10th grade through 12th to present them with guidance in the career fields…It’s just an opportunity for them to kind of get a hands-on, eyeball on, potential careers that they may be interested in.”
Sheriff Regalado discussed one of the programs in his field that has seen a lot of success in helping people enter various criminal justice careers.
“One of the most incredible programs, we’ve been doing this for the last five, six years, is the criminal justice program where these students actually can apply for and attend a detention academy while going to Tulsa Tech and upon graduation, immediately—if they choose to—immediately walk into a job at the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office Justice Center, which is the Tulsa County Jail. From there, we’ve had a lot of success. We are now starting to see students who applied for that program five years ago, worked as detention officers and are now becoming deputies and so they have followed that career path that we laid down for them during this program and so it’s been extremely successful.”
The goal of the career strategies event is to allow high school students to contemplate career opportunities they might not have considered before.
“It’s really about opportunities and guiding them. Sometimes, more often than not probably, kids don’t know what they want to do when they’re getting ready to leave high school and so we want to introduce them to alternatives. You don’t have to go to university. You can do this path and still have a wonderful career and so once we expand that knowledge base, it really serves them well.”
The program also provides opportunities for students to learn the realities of each career by speaking with representatives from those fields.
“After the opening ceremony, they’ll have opportunities to talk to people in those fields and find out more about it and realize, ‘oh my gosh, this is interesting and I never even thought about it’ and hopefully they follow those interests and find a career that suits them.”
Around 120 high school students were able to attend Wednesday’s program.