Sky Lakes Medical Center’s remarkable Earn & Learn program is helping high school students enter the health care workforce and supporting the community in Klamath County, where the program’s graduates are already helping to expand access to care.
Earn & Learn is a partnership between Sky Lakes, Klamath County School District, Klamath Falls City Schools, and Klamath Community College. Bryan Fix, vice president and chief human resources officer at Sky Lakes, says the program gives students at three area high schools a chance to do something they might not have thought possible: pursue a career in health care, and do it without leaving their hometown and without accruing debt.
“Earn & Learn starts with observation, which quickly moves into a high school employment opportunity,” said Fix, describing the “ambassador” position. “We now have them in three areas: we have them in the hospital as unit ambassadors, in our medical group as medical apprentices, and then in our surgical centers we have them as surgery ambassadors.”
Fix said the program gives young people an expanded view of what’s possible in their lives. Observations allow students to see career opportunities firsthand. “So now they see, ‘Oh wow, I could work in the medical office,’ or ‘I can work in the surgical theater and change people’s lives by doing life-improving surgeries,’ or ‘I can work in the hospital and serve them on their worst day,’” he said. “They didn’t know there’s, like, 90 different jobs in health care. And as they see those, they connect their passion with their aptitude and then we can put them on a pathway to change their life.”
Sky Lakes’ 10-week Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) program was the first of the Earn & Learn programs. Its success served as a foundation for developing new programs in other health care fields. Recently, Sky Lakes was able to fill most of its open CNA positions with recent program graduates.
The new employees have helped grow access to care by enabling new care team models, especially in rural southern Oregon. “We have thousands of people with no access to care,” Fix said. “We need medical apprentices, and we need, like, 50 of them this year.” Earn & Learn now has a pre-apprenticeship program in high schools.
Fix and the Earn & Learn program have garnered national attention. He received the Champion award from the Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE), an organization recognizing outstanding CTE programs across the country.
In addition to job training, the Earn & Learn programs allow students to start contributing to a 401(k) plan, and Sky Lakes offers tuition coverage or reimbursement for many of these programs to ensure students can start their careers with no student debt.
Fix has many gratifying success stories, but he said one stands out.
At a symposium day at Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls, a student named Maria shared her dream of becoming an ultrasound technician—but admitted, “I have no idea how to do that.” Her school, located outside the Klamath Basin, didn’t offer a health occupations program. After initially losing track of her during the busy event, Fix recalled how, as they were leaving, Maria “jumped off of her bus with her teacher and just stood in front of me and said, ‘Mr. Fix, don’t forget about me.’” That moment stuck with him. Maria, a first-generation student from a migrant farmworker family, hadn’t seen college—or a health career—as an option. But thanks to the connection made that day, she was later placed in an observation opportunity and eventually brought into an Earn & Learn program.
“That’s the sort of thing that changes futures and just gives us a lot of energy,” he said.
