As the first month of the New Year was passing away KPC’s Kenai River Campus held their 24th Career Day specifically designed to provide attendees with a wide range of potential career directions. The public, KPC students and area high school students turned out to learn from more than 60 different presenters who talked about what it’s like to work in their chosen occupations. Additionally to the individual career-focused sessions, there were more than 20 businesses and organizations set up in the Brockel and McLane commons offering information on job opportunities, internships and career training.
Bryan Zak, Assistant State director of the Small Business Development Center was impressed with the turn out for the event, “It was motivating for me to see the young people turn out here looking for careers. They are our most important resource for the future so what we offer them were opportunities to think clearly about their futures now. I was able to share our projection model for small businesses with a group of young people interested in becoming entrepreneurs in the future. The technology that is available is amazing but many young people today are hitting information overload in many ways, so having professional experts here at the Career Day to help mentor and guide them in certain career paths certainly was a help to them to navigate the mass of information in the global classroom that they have available to them,” said Zak.
Kenai Peninsula College recently received a generous donation that was used to purchase critical training equipment to augment process technology and instrumentation students’ learning experiences. The BP Exploration, Inc. gift was used to procure an artificial lift trainer that helps students understand the concept of artificial lift in Alaska’s aging oil fields. The $30,000 unit, produced by Bayport Training and Technical Center, is housed in the tools laboratory in the Career and Technical Education Center at the Kenai River Campus. At a recent Soldotna Chamber of Commerce presentation KPC director Gary Turner talked of the tremendous growth that the college is experiencing, “We are the fastest growing college in the University of Alaska system. We have a great team, great faculty and a great staff. When people start with us they stay with us because it’s a great place to work. The process technology and instrumentation program is booming with the Institute of Social & Economic Research for UAA recently did a study looking at where UAA graduates with all the degrees offered from certificates to MA’s where they were five years later and what they were earning and believe it or not process technology graduates from KPC were at the top number one. These graduates on average are earning $105K annually after being out of school five years and number three in that study including all 4 year and engineering degrees offered were the grads of our occupational safety & health program another two year degree KPC does in Anchorage,” said Turner.
