Exciting career exploration!

The Ohio oil and natural gas industry has lots of careers your students should know about! After attending the OOGEEP-sponsored Geology workshop last summer, Alisha Steele, Intervention Specialist for 5th/6th grade students at Harrison Central Elementary, had her students learn more about those opportunities.

The students were given the task of exploring a career within the natural gas and oil industry, chosen from the resource guide teachers received at the OOGEEP workshop. Her students watched several of the videos from the OOGEEP website. Steele said, "They were very excited about all of the careers that included working with their hands and with the large machinery! Many of them were surprised by the jobs' salaries."

Each student researched a career, focusing on the requirements to obtain the job, the salary, and the position's expectations. After researching, each student created an informational poster so that others could see if it would be a career of interest to them. Some of the students went on to create short videos that discussed the information.

Steele said, "This class is mostly made up of males, and they were super excited about the possibility of running large equipment. One of the females decided that she would like to be a welder when she gets older and I think she would be great at it. One of the boys was excited about the option to become a construction coordinator. He was quite taken with this career and began to explore the local colleges that offered training for it."

"The workshop was a great experience and I would definitely recommend others checking it out. The resources are easily accessible. The kits and manuals are very helpful and supportive when it comes to communicating the lessons, and the presenters were engaging and ready to help out with any questions that we had. My favorite part was going on the field trip and being able to see the operations in action, along with being able to dig for fossils to use as classroom resources."