Help Wanted: Animal Agriculture Needs to Increase Career Awareness
It feels like every business I enter has a “help wanted” sign right now. The opportunities for hardworking, honest, reliable employees are limitless. Unfortunately, many college students overlook the swine industry entirely.
Nationwide, a large percentage of undergraduate students studying animal science intend to pursue veterinary medicine. While some succeed, most change career paths either by personal choice or after their third attempt at organic chemistry. Ideally, these students identify alternative career paths sooner rather than later so they can prepare by adjusting their courses and extracurricular activities.
My colleagues and I conducted a career awareness survey at the start and end of our institution’s Introduction to Animal Science class during the past two years. The survey asked 352 students to list their demographics and complete an online instrument evaluating their awareness of career options available to them.
More than 49% could not list more than two careers at the beginning of class. Veterinarian was the most common and appeared on 76% of responses. Students are then exposed to careers through lectures and related career-focused assignments. In the post-test evaluation, 57% of students listed more than two careers, with the average increasing from 2.8 to 3.6 careers per student. Additionally, 18.8% of students indicated that their career goals had changed during the course of the semester, with more than two-thirds of those being students who changed from a veterinary path.
These findings might be slightly different in states with more rural populations, but the findings are likely more representative than we would like to think. There are many college students who would be valuable contributors to the swine industry but slip between the cracks and may never identify this field as a career opportunity.
It’s Time for an Intervention
Both animal and human biosecurity concerns are greater than ever. However, nothing replaces in-person experience. I have been fortunate to establish a relationship with Smithfield which has allowed me to annually take the 10 to 15 students in my senior-level pork production class, most of which have no background in production agriculture, to tour a feed mill, sow farm and packing plant in North Carolina. No labs at the UF swine unit, feed mill or meat lab can replicate that experience. Accordingly, several of these students have accepted internships and permanent positions in the pork industry following graduation.
4-H and FFA have been the traditional pipelines of talent recruitment for production agriculture for years. We as educators and industry professionals need to investigate how to make secondary science teachers aware of the opportunities available within production agriculture. This will result in a more diverse group of students aware of the awesome career opportunities available within animal industries.
Let’s do our best to meet potential employees where they are to improve awareness of opportunities with pork production. I have seen some of these successes firsthand and it makes me hopeful we can do better.
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