Workplace Simulation
Perry Central High School, Leopold
Commodore Manufacturing’s business model is clear: Let young people deliver high-quality products to businesses and you’ll deliver high-quality workers to the marketplace.
With two big manufacturers and a few smaller customers on its client list, Commodore Manufacturing doesn’t limit students’ business experience to classroom exercises or selling shop-class projects to parents and peers. The Perry Central High School program lets students gain skills and knowledge by manufacturing products used in factories and sold to customers’ customers. And they’re doing it well.
Launching Commodore in 2017, Perry Central equips students with technology and equipment that allow them to serve big businesses as well as smaller ones. One marquee project for Commodore has been creating tool holders used on Jasper Engines and Transmissions’ shop floor. Jason Recker, who heads up Jasper Engines’ recruiting and community outreach, says his team described a problem to the students and asked them to design and produce a solution. The teens exceeded expectations, Recker says, delivering a practical and economical tool holder and proposing a better way to attach it to workstations.
While Recker and Greubel are delighted with the products they get from Commodore Manufacturing, they know working with the student-led business serves a higher purpose: It gives them access to potential workers and allows them to shape the future workforce.
They complement this access with internships, Manufacturing Week programs, school presentations and more, and they use it to deliver hands-on experience and technical knowledge as well as the essential soft skills and workplace understanding that will produce workers who are more useful and successful when they enter the job market, regardless of where they end up working.
Other businesses seem to appreciate the impact such programs have on the workforce. Greubel says that, recently, when he was talking with a sign shop about having some signs made, he mentioned that he might get it done at the local high school. “The sign shop guy said, ‘Do it,’” Greubel says. “And then he says, ‘If the kids are good, send them over to me.’”
This kind of reception from the community bodes well for growth of student-led businesses at Perry Central, which also offers programs in ag business and construction technology.
“We might end up with more work than we can handle,” says Jody French, who heads up career and technical education and work-based learning at Perry Central. “But that’s OK.”
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