Michael Herrera: Career-Connected Learning in Action

Michael Herrera, Ed.D., Executive Director of Upper Bucks County Technical School and Vice President of Region 1 on the national board of the Association for Career and Technical Education, discusses how high-quality career and technical education connects students' interests to real economic impact. Herrera shares striking results from his school's cooperative education program, including students earning over one million dollars through paid co-op experiences and 93% of participating students receiving full-time job offers from their co-op employers after graduation. He explains how the school's relationships with more than 250 industry partners keep curriculum aligned with current and emerging fields. The conversation explores his distinctive approach to treating language as an economic asset, crediting students' bilingual abilities to open doors in healthcare, law enforcement, and manufacturing, as well as his work building employability skills alongside technical and academic instruction. Herrera makes the case that career-connected learning should be a right for every student, not the exception, and offers a vision for how educators, employers, and policymakers can work together to expand access to high-quality CTE nationwide.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces podcast. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning. Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in.

As we head into summer, we find ourselves reflecting on the school year that is winding down and anticipating the one that is right around the corner yet again. In so many of our conversations on this podcast and in our consulting work, we talk about workforce development and career readiness from the vantage points of higher education, employers, and training organ