According to recent social media trends, modern Americans, especially Millennials, would happily trade traditional gift-giving for the gift of travel or experience in relation to how they most want to enjoy a contribution toward life.
Because we know this (or had at least heard about it on our own perusing around social media), my husband and I offered a last time adventure opportunity for our oldest daughter the summer before she left for college.  We decided to embark on a family trip from our home in Florida all the way out west to Yellowstone.
This trip was, of course meaningful on all parenting levels, but it also made me wonder about all the states we had not explored.  With the passing thru of all, I rattled off state statistics, highlights, and fun facts of each one, and we all learned a little something new.  I started to wonder, how many children actually know things about states that make them appealing outside of the wonders they maybe once had to do a diorama about in grade school.
For instance, do the students of Alabama know that their state built the rocket ship that took the first Americans to the moon?  What about Utah—do the students there know it was here that the Jarvik-7, the first artificial heart was created and surgically implanted? Or how about Massachusetts’ claim toward the invention of the World Wide Web.
This trip made the former educator in me wonder what if we ever actually explore the benefits of our own backyards—the inventions, the manufacturing, the industries that create and contribute to our own communities?   Are we aware of how our state contributes toward the greater vision of the entire nation and even global economic advancements? Do our children know?
Thankfully, with workforce incentive programs, placing an emphasis on classroom content that pairs students to the particulars of their own home states, can make some real headway into bringing back a tradition of career-leveled job opportunities. And students won’t have to travel halfway across the world to see this as new or innovative.  In fact, with content paired directly to local industries, students should be able to not only define what it is their state might claim as bragging rights, but they can also see where they might fit in the local workforce.
As Americans, we all deserve an opportunity to contribute in some way toward the appreciation of our own state industry.  We need to know what exists there, how we might contribute toward it, or how we might advance it toward a far-reaching goal only before imagined. Like me, Ohana Solutions believes in this promise for American students as well.  We want to see industries highlighted and communities enhanced–and the content we created for specific career pathways will do just that.
Using the localized careers found within the career and technical industries of each state, students will be able to cite off those statistics necessary for prosper and advancement. I hope to find the careers those states produce being enhanced in great ways by a generation who wants to lead it toward greater findings and contributions.
And I hope to someday see, on those push-pinned maps of teenage bedrooms, the industries lead by a team of innovators who successfully contributed toward putting their states on that map simply because they were taught about it in grade school, and they believed they could.