YouScience® data used to recruit and engage students in CTE

PROBLEM

Overcoming recruitment

challenges for CTE

programs

The Aiken County Career and Technology Center offers

CTE programs and qualiﬁcations in nine ﬁelds. It’s part

of the Aiken County Public School District, located in

Aiken, South Carolina, which includes 42 schools with a

student population of approximately 22,500.

Dr. Christie Palladino is a teacher in the Biomedical

Science Program at the Aiken County Career and

Technology Center. This program, like others at the

center, relies on high school students all across the

district to apply for enrollment but has struggled

recently with recruitment.

In the past, teachers from the center would go out and

host hands-on activities with prospective students,

but changes in the recruitment protocol ended that

strategy. Like many CTE programs elsewhere, it lacked

an effective way to recruit the right students for the right

CTE courses. In addition, teachers at students’ home

high schools are the ones who talk to students most

often, but they may not have the training or knowledge

about a CTE course to talk to students about their

career pathways.

YouScience

data

used to recruit

and engage

students in

CTE program

ORGANINIZATION AT A GLANCE

Aiken County Public Schools

Aiken, South Carolina

• ~22,500 sudents

• 42 schools

INTRO

An educator in South Carolina boosts

enrollment in her Biomedical Science career

and technical education (CTE) program by

using insights gleaned from YouScience

Aptitude & Career Discovery to recruit

engaged students with an aptitude for

health sciences.

That all changed after Dr. Palladino attended a

presentation hosted by Ivey Harrison, a Senior Territory

Manager at YouScience. The presentation focused on

how to use data from the Aptitude & Career Discovery

assessment to talk to students about their aptitudes and

help them ﬁnd best-ﬁt careers. Dr. Palladino decided

to implement this data to recruit students for her

Biomedical Science program.

“Even though we’re a career center, career-oriented

guidance is a piece that we’ve been missing,’ said Dr.

Palladino. “I think most of us as instructors feel a little lost

when it comes to career development.

“That’s the thing that got us together with YouScience—

we identiﬁed a need to use its data for recruitment

purposes.” Dr. Palladino continued. “It’s very easy to pull

data from, and it’s personalized to each student. Anyone

can pick it up and start using it.”

SOLUTION

Identifying students with

the right aptitudes

Along with Suman Marks-Johnson, Assistant Principal

at the Aiken County Career and Technology Center,

and fellow teachers in the Health Sciences cluster,

Dr. Palladino designed a recruitment strategy for the

center’s ﬁrst-ever Health Science Night.

To target students for the event, Dr. Palladino leveraged

Aptitude & Career Discovery data to identify students

who had Health Science as one of their top three career

clusters and personally invited them to attend. She also

targeted students who had Biomedical Science as a

top 10 career to receive a further personalized invitation

from her to learn about laboratory-based careers. Doing

so helped Dr. Palladino generate buzz and excitement

for the program and ensured she reached the right

students who had previously identiﬁed aptitudes and

interests in the health sciences and particularly in

Biomedical Science.

“We had students coming up to us that night saying,

‘I didn’t even know this was even a job; that there were

careers in this area,’” Dr. Palladino recalled. “Being

able to show students this possibility—that they can

take their skills and apply them to a career is really

important to us.”

“

Being able to show students

this possibility—that they

can take their skills and apply

them to a career is really

important to us.

—Dr. Christie Palladino, Teacher, Biomedical Science

Program, Aiken County Career and Technology Center

IMPACTS

Boosting enrollment and

student engagement

The Health Science Night was a smashing success.

Typically at an open house, attendance is sparse,

and there’s little participation, but not at this event.

More than 30% of Health Science Night attendees

applied to at least one of the center’s health science

programs (Biomedical Science, EMS/Fire, Health

Science, and Sports Medicine). Students excitedly

responded to Dr. Palladino’s (or Dr. P, as they call

her) personal invitation and were fully engaged.

Even parents were getting in on the fun by putting on

gloves and doing lab work themselves. As a result,

the Biomedical Science program experienced its

biggest spike in student applications, with 57.8% of

student applicants responding to at least one of the

email invitations, resulting in a 73.3% increase in

applications.

“I’ve had more applications from this event than I

ever had from recruitment visits to high schools,” Dr.

Palladino noted. “It’s a really important piece of our

recruitment strategy.”

Entertaining additional

career possibilities

Aptitude & Career Discovery also helps students

identify additional career options that they may

not have considered before. Dr. Palladino got

approval from the district to launch a pilot program

in 2022 to implement a YouScience-supported

career development curriculum with her second-

year students. She discovered that the district

had access to Aptitude & Career Discovery, but it

had been underutilized. Fortunately, a majority of

students had already taken an assessment and had

created a YouScience proﬁle. Using data during

career development lessons allowed students to

dive deeper into their aptitudes and career ﬁts. For

example, one biomedical science student who plans

to pursue a clinical career in nursing discovered

that she has strong reasoning aptitudes, particularly

with sequential reasoning. As a result, the student

signed up to take a research course in the program,

which Dr. Palladino believes it will help her become a

better clinician because she thinks like a researcher,

evidence-based.

“At ﬁrst, I think students are surprised, but once they

dive deeper, it identiﬁes options they might not have

considered,” Dr. Palladino said. “When students

see that, it validates the feeling of ‘hey, I’ve been

interested in this.’”

Helping students ﬁnd

the words to express

their aptitudes

YouScience makes the career search process more

personal for students by providing them with the

language they need to create a resume or write cover

letters. Students can pull words and phrases from their

proﬁles that match their aptitudes to attach to their

portfolios or complete job applications to better describe

their abilities. Dr. Palladino’s students utilized speciﬁc,

aptitude-based language on their portfolio proﬁle pages,

resumes, and even in their mock interviews.

“YouScience helps students move from aptitudes

directly into a career search,” Dr. Palladino said. “They

can use the actual phrases from their proﬁles and

match them with careers and their aptitudes. That’s

one of the most helpful things, just being able to

identify the language to use.”

To learn how YouScience can help

your program, schedule a demo at

youscience.com/demo-request/

or contact our sales team at

sales@youscience.com.

STATS

Challenges

• Increasing enrollment in Health Sciences

CTE programs

• Generating awareness about Health Sciences

courses and careers

• Identifying students with aptitudes for health

sciences and related ﬁelds

• Helping teachers better provide career guidance

Solution

YouScience

Aptitude & Career Discovery

Results

• 30.7% of students attending Health Science Night

applied to at least one of four programs the center

offers within the Health Science cluster

• 13.8% of program applications occurred during

the event or right after

• 73.3% increase in the number of applications

after the open house

About YouScience

YouScience

is the leading technology provider

in solving the skills-gap crisis for students and

employers. YouScience

Brightpath is the ﬁrst-

of-its-kind aptitude-based guidance platform that

leverages data and artiﬁcial intelligence to help

individuals identify their aptitudes, validate their

skills, and get matched with educational and

career pathways.

“

YouScience helps students

move from aptitudes directly

into a career search. That’s

one of the most helpful things,

just being able to identify the

language to use.

—Dr. Christie Palladino, Teacher, Biomedical Science

Program, Aiken County Career and Technology Center

The open house event worked so well for the center’s

recruitment that it plans to hold another one next

year, but earlier in the semester. Ms. Marks-Johnson,

Assistant Principal, has also replicated the process

for a Manufacturing Night. Data from Aptitude & Career

Discovery will continue to play a critical role in targeting

the right students to invite to the center’s events.