What’s Right With Our Schools: Catoosa County College and Career Academy
CATOOSA COUNTY, Ga. (WDEF) – Even the most qualified candidate won’t land the job if they bomb the interview. Students at the Catoosa County College and Career Academy are learning the soft skills they need to make a great first impression. It’s a courteous example of what’s right with our schools.
Keith Jones is the Talent Development Specialist for Catoosa County Schools.
He says, “This program is called the ABCs of Gen Z. It’s our professional development program that is. That is unique to us and our corporate partners, which are part of the academy. A very essential part of our academy made a request that they wanted the students, they knew where they were going to get the technical training, but they needed some soft skills training to go with it. What we’re teaching today is the third iteration of curriculum that I’ve developed on my own. And so the ABCs are 26 modules. AB, every one of them means something. A is accepting responsibility, B is my belief. C is commitment, D is learning how to debrief, E is etiquette. F is friendship, and so on. Each one goes through. And what makes our program unique is that it’s a combination of soft skills training. But I’m also a certified emotional intelligence instructor. S , I’ve intertwined some of the basic precepts of emotional intelligence that we’re teaching our kids that we know will be a differentiator for them as they go into the workplace. I have all of the students that come into our pathway. About 208 come into my classroom each week. I have them once per week. So they’ll go to their regular training, their hard skills training, and then they’ll come to me once per week for soft skills training. And then over the course of the year, we will have taken them through this entire ABCs for Generation Z program.”
Connor Meece is a student at LFO High School.
He says, “About myself, I learned that. Don’t get me wrong, I have a little bit of an anger problem, don’t get me wrong, but I think I’m starting to control it better. I mean, it’s just a matter of, like, I get mad easy. It’s just I’m kind of controlling it better through using that program because he’s teaching us how to deal with it better, how to use emotional better. And it’s just an overall in public kind of deal.”
Keith Jones concludes, ” This generation of kids is very intelligent, but because of technology and with COVID there is a real emotional and social gap that we see in them. That’s really not their fault. They have the skills in there. They’ve just never been coached and trained. So, we start very elementary with shaking hands and eye contact and learning to smile and saying their name clearly. Just some real basic things. We have kids now that are successfully in the workplace, and the companies that they go to work for recognize the difference. Actually, their parents recognize the difference. They go, what have you done with my child? While a lot of it’s basic, some of it gets really deep. We get in a perception we talk about the initial perception. How do you change initial perception and know now that we have kids that have graduated, this is a difference maker.”
