TestOut Career Day

One longstanding activity of many high schools and universities is to organize events that bring together students and working professionals. The general idea, in most instances, is for the students to interact, even just on a limited basis, with a real-world workplace environment. At universities, in particular, there is often an active recruitment component to such functions, with hiring managers and others getting a first-crack look at potential future employees.

At the high school level, the atmosphere is often more relaxed and informal, with employers generally aware that they may not actually be able to hire the kids they meet for another four or five years. Instead of recruiting prospective employees, the focus is much more on helping young visitors get a sense of what their future could hold in certain realms of the workaday world. And if the kids like what they see, who knows? They might be back sooner than you'd expect.

Today, TestOut welcomed students from a handful of Utah County high schools and treated them to a behind-the-scenes look at what happens at an actual information technology company between the typical working hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Students visited the conference room in TestOut's developer building, and witnessed live demonstrations of the work our course developers do to create and maintain our premier LabSim IT education plaform.

There was also a tour of the video production and editing center, where many of the instructional segments for TestOut's IT training courses are filmed and assembled. Some of the students got to sit in front of a green screen, and then see preconfigured backdrops magically appear all around them on the video monitor. There was a selfie station nearby in the Building 2 break room, for young visitors who craved further opportunities to appear on camera.

The students also visited the former Grove Theater, adjacent to TestOut's main campus, which the company uses for employee meetings and social gatherings. In former years, under different ownership, the Grove was both a movie theater (known as the Alhambra) and a dinner theater (known as the Little London). The star attraction today was Ladd Timpson of TestOut's Executive Leadership Board (picture above), who spoke one-on-one with the students.

TestOut staffers enjoyed hosting and meeting with the next generation of IT workers. We wish them the best of luck in their studies and hope that at least a couple of them may come back through out doors one day as employees.