Recent grads connect with area job openings through CAI

SYRACUSE — The human-resources manager at American Food & Vending in Salina, calls the Career Apprenticeship Initiative (CAI) “an awesome initiative.” “We hired a graduate last year who is now a full-time employee of ours,” Ian Ballard said in a CenterState CEO announcement. “If it wasn’t for the Initiative, this is an individual who we might have missed had he come through our normal hiring process, and we would have missed a great talent.” American Food & Vending participated in the previous round of the CAI, CenterState CEO noted. CAI is a program that connects recent liberal-arts graduates from the area’s higher-education institutions to a one-year apprenticeship with area employers. Under the initiative, employers agree to hire, mentor, and train the student for a year and receive a $5,000 salary reimbursement for doing so. CenterState CEO members that provided entry-level jobs for graduates this year are Crouse Health, LOTTE Biologics, Syracuse Housing Authority, and SUNY Upstate Medical University. The CAI program in Syracuse was modeled on a similar initiative that has operated successfully in Canada for several years. The Syracuse program was the CAI’s first U.S. pilot. The Collegian Hotel in Syracuse hosted an Aug. 27 event to acknowledge recent graduates starting new positions with participating employers. Those attending the event included representatives from CenterState CEO; Alan Rottenberg, founder of the Canadian Career Apprenticeship Initiative; Donna Gillespie, CEO of the Kingston Economic Development Corporation (KEDCO); representatives of Syracuse University, SUNY Oswego, and Le Moyne College; as well as area employers and recent college graduates. “We imagined our youth, upon graduating from university, launching their careers immediately with full time employment — not in unskilled jobs or living in their parents’ basement. Syracuse, like other communities running the apprenticeship program, has made the imagined real,” Rottenberg said in the CenterState CEO announcement. Besides Rottenberg, the event included remarks from Robert Simpson, president and CEO of CenterState CEO and Kristi Eck, assistant VP for workforce innovation and external relations at SUNY Oswego. “Our region is on a path to new growth. With Micron and its suppliers soon joining our community, it’s more important than ever to look at creative solutions to attracting and retaining talent in Central New York. This includes exposing those who come from across the globe to attend college in this region to significant employment opportunities here,” Simpson said in the release. “We commend the employers that participated in this pilot program to help meet their talent needs while also providing valuable first-time employment opportunities for recent graduates.” The program is an outgrowth of the relationship between Central New York and Kingston, Ontario, known as the Kingston-Syracuse Pathway. The partners in the program include CenterState CEO, KEDCO, SUNY Upstate Medical University, the Kingston Health Sciences Center, and Queen’s University. The pathway started around “common interests,” such as cross-border medical research, and broadened into other areas, such as providing “soft landings” for businesses from either country. Gillespie, who has run the program successfully in Kingston for several years, brought the idea for the apprenticeship initiative to CenterState CEO. The CenterState CEO Foundation, a nonprofit affiliate of CenterState CEO, oversees the apprenticeship program.