Clusters’21st Century Attitude’
This career development program helps students prepare for the challenges and opportunities of their future professions, connecting them to the relevance of their education while creating a pathway for their vocational success. Our community fostered expos provide a format for businesses to educate students first hand, about their industry which in turn helps schools learn more about the requirements of these industries in order to prepare students to set and meet realistic industry goals. History 2006: CDF classmates, Sue Gloss, (Career Specialist Community District 303, St Charles, Illinois) and Jane Harris, (former career specialist from Geneva High school, Illinois) came together with a fantastic idea. To hold career expos for high school students hosted by local businesses in these professional industries and coordinated by the schools in the region. Jane asked came up with the Health Careers expo, which turned out to be the firs step in getting these expos together. We contacted Delnor Hospital and they gladly agreed to host our very first community Health careers expo for high school students which turned out to be a huge success with over 500 students in attendance.
2007: We decided to take a step further by contacting Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, IL to host a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) expo. Fermilab complied with our request and in February 2008, they hosted our very first STEM career expo for DuPage and Kane County high school students. This was another very successful venture and has become an annual event with the most recent expo having been held in April of 2009.
2008: We contacted Pheasant Run Resort and Spa and asked them to host the very first Annual Hospitality, Tourism, Arts and Athletics career expo and they were happy to participate. This expo is now scheduled to take place in November of 2009.
2009: We hosted our very first partners for career expos meeting and recruited a few more businesses as hosts for the other career clusters: Transportation, Distribution and Logistics expo (Illinois Aviation Academy, October 2009); finance, Marketing, Sales and Service expo (Charlestown Mall, February 2010). The expos are spearheaded by the 16 educational career clusters: 2. Architecture and Construction. 3. Arts, A/V Technology and Communication. 4. Business, Management and Administration Clusters 5. Education and Training 6. Finance 7. Government and Public Administration 8. Health Science 9. Hospitality and Tourism 10. Human Services 11. Information technology 12. Law, Public Safety, Corrections and Security 13. Manufacturing 14. Marketing, Sales and Service 15. Science, technology, Engineering and Mathematics 16. Transportation, Distribution and Logistics. |