On STEM Career Skills and Career Opportunities
Lumity is thrilled about our new STEMWorks partnership with Simeon Career Academy and carpentry teacher Isiah Rowsey.
A Simeon alum and owner of a contracting business, Isiah has been teaching carpentry at Simeon for more than 16 years, helping students learn a breadth of mechanical, mathematics, and problem-solving skills both in class and in the school’s woodshop.
“Our courses cover a lot of the real estate industry, including building and rehabbing houses,” explains Isiah. “With our Lumity partnership, we can now bridge the gap between what our students are learning here and their careers after school. There is only so much I can teach and do in the classroom. Students need support in building their soft skills, connecting to contractors, doing apprenticeships, and going to college or getting jobs. That’s where Lumity is critical. They help with those things that we can’t do on the school side.”
Lumity will work with more than 30 of Isiah’s seniors and recent graduates this year in a construction career pathway that results in job certifications from the National Center for Construction Education and Research (NCEER) and apprenticeship opportunities. Lumity’s upcoming experiences for students include intensive career readiness training, as well as site visits to our corporate partners and trade unions for work experience. Upcoming student opportunities this summer will include visits to USG, as well as Discover where students will lend a hand in building their new call center.
“Students need support in building their soft skills, connecting to contractors, doing apprenticeships, and going to college or getting jobs. That’s where Lumity is critical. They help with those things that we can’t do on the school side.”
– Isiah Rowsey, teacher, Simeon career academy
“We are teaching kids life skills that they all need and can always use to take care of themselves and their families—whether they are going to college or straight into a job,” Isiah says. “The payoff is seeing kids’ reactions when they learn something and apply it. Of course, it’s even more so when students take it to the next level and go into construction because of what we are teaching them here.”
Lumity’s STEMWorks for Construction program is supported by the Illinois Department of Commerce & Economic Opportunity’s Illinois Works, as well as by our corporate and foundation partners. STEMWorks is an intensive, holistic employment program for upcoming and recent graduates of Chicagoland’s high schools. Working with our partners, we engage, train, and place young adults into high-quality STEM-related, entry positions in construction, the trades, manufacturing, IT, healthcare, and more. We then guide and support them for success in their first job and onto their STEM career pathway.
