Nancy Battet: Well, with many career days, yes.

Frank Caracciolo: And we’re going to talk about that! So in your role at the board, what do you find the easiest part or your favorite part, or and then the most challenging part?

Nancy Battet: I love working with the schools. I love working with the students and the teachers and the support staff and I find everybody is so creative and… I have a marketing background, so I kind of bring that business background to the classroom, which I think is a lot of fun. The teachers and students seem to really enjoy that and challenging wise we have a lot of schools and they’re always wanting to get into as many schools as they can. The year passes quickly when we do all these different projects and sometimes you you wish you had more time.

Frank Caracciolo: Yeah, and it seems to me that as we build momentum, I guess that we’re in momentum time right now. But it seems to me that all of a sudden the career dates start. They start mounting one after another one after another one after another, and so if you just tell us a little bit about what career day is and maybe some schools listening might wanna might want to take part.

Nancy Battet: Sure. Well, like I said, it fits with the new programs within the ministry called ACGC, which is Academic and Career Guidance Content. But it’s also a great way to do authentic learning in the classroom. What better way to show students what might be ahead of them in their future is to have them meet people who are experts in their field doing their jobs.

So what I do with the students is a skills workshop. First, just to have them understand the different careers that they might be interested. They fill out a short survey and also. And tell them that their soft skills are just as important as their academics. It’s very important to do well in school, but also you’re at your skills. I call them skills from the heart.

Like your listening skills, your communication skills, your character, respect for others, those kind of skills will drive you in your career. So once we get all the surveys back from the kids, they tell us basically they often have surprises about careers that they didn’t know they might be interested in.

So what we do is we invite guests into the classroom to talk about their career so that the students have something to aspire to.

And Frank, with your background and your wealth of knowledge in in the arts and fashion and working with the troubled youth and adults and that kind of thing, I’ve had you speak on many, many different topics to the kids.