Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1108006
APRIL 2019 I FLEX007 MAGAZINE 63 supply chain management processes. They also interact with the people working at the facility who act as mentors to the students and can describe their jobs and what they studied to get their job. Afterward, the students participate in a product development workshop and have the chance to begin defining the components of their devices. We tell them to not treat this as a field trip but as a work trip so that they can gain a full experience of what a day at work could be like in the advanced manufacturing and technology sector. On another day, we would take them to a college partner to tour the campus, meet instructors and students, and learn about the education programs they can study to acquire the knowledge needed to work at a company like the one they toured the previous week. Matties: You're tour guides of their future. Parmeter: Exactly. Matties: How does the school become engaged? Do they approach you or do you approach the schools? McGrath: Locally, the program has grown very naturally in Santa Clara County (California) where we run it with our industry partners and our primary college partner, Evergreen Valley College. We usually engage with the school district through the career technical education (CTE) coordinator who identifies a principal in their school district who further identifies the teachers who are creative enough to run the program. Johnson: Are you expanding nationally? McGrath: Yes. We're in the middle of a national expansion of the program. We currently have several expansion sites underway, including one in Elyria, Ohio, with Lorrain County Com- munity College and two in Huntsville, Ala- bama, in partnership with the Alabama Com- munity College System and Boeing. We're fur- ther expanding across both New England, the southern portion of the U.S., and several other regions throughout 2019 and early 2020. Matties: Do you track the progress of a student who has been at this for a number of years? Parmeter: One of the aspects of the program that we're working on is developing a series of national metrics so that we can track the students who have gone through the program to chart their subsequent education and career pathways. The program is still very young— we launched our initial pilot in 2016 with eight students—so the majority of FlexFactor stu- dents are still in high school (e.g., the sopho- mores are now in 11 th grade, etc.). In the interim period before we launch our formal national study on the program, we're measuring the impact through survey tools with the students before and after to gather an initial set of data points and feedback. One metric we have as a result of these surveys is that upward of 80% of our students indicate a higher degree of familiarity and affinity for this type of career field than they did before the program, which is a huge win for us going back to our goal of helping them see potential futures in the sector. Further, students are impacted by the oppor- tunity to engage with the educational pathways that they are exposed to as part of the pro- gram. In Santa Clara, for example, all students who go through the program are enrolled with our partner Evergreen Valley College. We also track the impact on teachers, and one of the metrics that we're very proud of is that every Students are impacted by the opportunity to engage with the educational pathways that they are exposed to as part of the program.