September's OhioMeansJobs Student Employee of the Month is a 2024 Allen East graduate who is getting his start in the skilled trades at Spallinger Millwright.
ALLEN COUNTY, OH (WLIO) - Our OhioMeansJobs Student Employee of the Month is a 2024 Allen East graduate who is getting his start in the skilled trades at Spallinger Millwright.
Landen Poling graduated from Allen East this spring and started working at Spallinger Millwright Services in July.
Landen Poling graduated from Allen East this spring and started working at Spallinger Millwright Services in July. Through his FFA chapter and classes at school, he was introduced to welding and knew immediately that was the kind of work he wanted to do. At Spallinger, he is contracted out to large local manufacturing companies to do installation and fabrication work for their equipment.
"Oh, I love working my hands. I probably couldn't go a day in my life without working at my hands. Just because I'm not big on the high school or college portions and coming out here working with my hands, doing this in the field stuff is way better than going to college in my opinion," stated Landen Poling, install millwright at Spallinger Millwright Services.
Congratulations to OhioMeansJobs Student Employee of the Month for September, Landen Poling.
In highly technical, skilled trades, especially, having a young employee come in so excited about their work is a breath of fresh air to employers that aren't getting as many applicants as they used to.
"Landen has been a really good employee. He came in willing to learn; he's mechanically inclined. Excellent attendance. So he's been a very good employee for us. It's a career; it's a trade that we cannot automate. So we're always going to need people to work hard and learn how to do it," explained Noah Helms, site HSE manager at Spallinger Millwright Services.
One of the ways job coaches from OhioMeansJobs help Landen and students like him get into the workforce is by working with them to build the kind of resume that will get an employer interested.
"We're sending kids out after graduation, watching them pursue their careers. We want to make sure they have their best foot forward, so assisting them in high school with that resume-building is a huge part of that. We sit down with them, figure out what employment they may have had, volunteer experience, sports, all those types of things, skills that they have, put it on their resume in a professional format," stated Cat Neal, a job coach at OhioMeansJobs Allen County.
Congratulations to OhioMeansJobs Student Employee of the Month for September, Landen Poling.
