Furiously typing and clicking away, thousands of high school students spend hundreds of hours scrolling through several websites trying to find their best option for the next step in their lives.

This vital step in a student’s life is choosing what they want to do for a career later in life. The career a student chooses to pursue will often dictate what that students does in terms of education beyond high school.

In normal circumstances, North Penn would host a career day, during which many people with different careers come to NPHS to tell students as much as they want to know about their jobs. This could obviously not be the case this year. However, North Penn High School guidance counselor, Mr. Patrick Brett, worked on developing another option. Brett also works in the College and Career Center within the high school, which aims to aid and guide students in figuring out their plans once they graduate.

The plan he has come up with in conjunction with North Penn Superintendent, Dr. Curt Dietrich, and Mr. Jim Galante, Director of Pupil Services for NPSD, is known as the North Penn School District Career Speaker Series. Brett believes this is a viable solution to replace Career Day and make up for instructional hours missed out on because of the Friday early dismissals.

“We know that this will benefit [students]. If students take the time to watch these videos and learn, this takes over for career day,” Brett said.

The most important thing Brett wants students to understand is that this series of interviews is really being implemented in order to benefit the students in the high school more than anyone. 

“If the students take the time to watch the videos and fill out the surveys they will benefit themselves down the road. This is North Penn saying we need to fill the time, but we can do this by benefiting students,” Brett stated.

This series came to be over the summer after Brett explained the concept to Dr. Dietrich. Not long after, Dr. Todd Bauer, Assistant Superintendent, said he liked the idea and the idea took off from there.

“Over the summer I talked to Dr. Dietrich about possibly getting some career curriculum together and being able to utilize it during that 2 hour block our students don’t have class on Friday afternoons,” Brett explained. “I was discussing things like this and getting people to speak. He was attentive to it, and then a month later Dr. Bauer came to me and said I think we should do this, I have some things in mind, and we went from there.”

Reasons for the interviews include the need to get more students information based on careers, as well as clearing the state mandated career readiness program. Chapter 339 requirements.

“We need students to have more career information from us for multiple reasons. One, we like students to have more career information to help them figure out what they want to do, and then also we have this thing in Pennsylvania called chapter 339, which is a state-mandated career readiness program for grades K-12 which gives North Penn students access to a survey in Naviance about the speaker series after the first one airs,” Brett stated.

Brett personally finds this as an opportunity to help every student in grades 7-12 when it comes to deciding their future.

“It’s an opportunity I have to help all kids grades 7-12, getting kids to hear more about careers and getting into somewhat of a captive audience benefiting them in the future,” Brett said.

When it comes to exactly who is being interviewed, the plan is to interview anyone they can. The desired result is to have as many interviews with as many different people as they possibly can. This way, any student can watch an interview for a possible interest and get answers to questions they have.

“We have people in the HVAC industry, we have people coming up in the government, we have healthcare, we have lawyers, we have an engineer coming up. We are trying to go from someone who is a manager for a grocery store because those jobs are needed to someone who is the CEO of a company. We want a plumber, a mechanic, and a teacher like a professor in college. We want to be able to have a library of information and interviews for our students to go back to and listen,” Brett explained.

As far as where and when the interviews will be available for students to watch, you can keep a lookout for an email with the video or look on the NPTV youtube channel every Friday starting January 8th.

Any student with an idea or request for careers that they want to see in an interview is encouraged to contact Mr. Brett or Mr. Gallante and they will try their best to fit it in.

Contact Information:

Mr. Brett: [email protected]

Mr. Gallante: [email protected]