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Guest Speaker – Jenica Dietrich

In our 8th Grade Careers class, we have been learning about career clusters. This is to help us start thinking about our potential future career. We just recently had the opportunity for Jenica Dietrich to come talk to us about her career, an Insurance Agent with Cedar Valley Insurance Agency. She has been with CVIA for 9 years!

In college, she originally studied personal and athletic training and focused on sports, including softball in which she played. When asked the most difficult part of her education, she said it was test taking because she wasn’t the best at it, but later learned better test taking strategies to help. She earned a business minor, which Jenica said really helped her figure out how she could use that knowledge in other careers. 

Jenica has been out of school since 2010. Right out of college, she lived in Norfolk, and started working at a daycare. Later, she opened up her own daycare after moving to Albion. With her business minor, she saw CVIA was hiring, so she decided to start looking into that. 

To work in insurance you must complete tests online that are pass/fail, which took Jenica 3-4 months to study for. After passing, she was then hired at Cedar Valley. Jenica is certified in Property & Casualty, Crop Insurance, and Life & Health Insurance. To begin with, being an insurance agent is not a very profitable job, but that can be helped by working hard and advertising, meeting people, and recruiting customers to strengthen your business. Starting salary can be expected to be around $21,000-$24,000, but earned commissions on top of that.

An Insurance Agent covers anything where insurance is needed. A majority of Jenica’s time is handling car accidents and insuring new cars. Other things you’ll see in that career are covering businesses in case they would have to close or get struck by a natural disaster, getting newborn babies life insurance, and helping families through all the stages of life. 

For work, Jenica gets to travel about two days a week. Clarkson is the furthest east site for CVIA offices, so Jenica covers a lot of the eastern part of the region, which includes northeast Nebraska and Iowa, and traveling to Omaha quite often. Jenica puts on about 3,800-4,200 miles a month traveling to meet customers. 

Jenica says her favorite part of her job is meeting people and learning their stories. For example, when you insure a baby for life insurance, you get to follow that family through the good times and the bad. When asked her least favorite part, she said it had to be sitting at a desk and handling paperwork. Even though paperwork isn’t that bad, she would much rather be out traveling and meeting people. 

Some advice Jenica left us with was to not limit ourselves in any aspect, and to do what we love, as for her this was playing softball, which she believes helped blend her interests into her current occupation. One big strength she mentioned was to be bilingual. The company is always on the lookout for bilingual employees, as CVIA has no bilingual employees and they want to be able to better communicate with all their customers.

Thank you Jenica Dietrich for taking the time to come educate us about this career! We as a class all enjoyed it and are curious to learn more about this area of careers! Thanks again!

By: Maizie Stoklasa

Bahns Automotive

By: Wyatt Langhorst

In Junior High Careers Class we have been learning about different careers. On Tuesday, February 28^th, the class was lucky enough to hear from Michael Bahns from Bahns Automotive. We were glad he could make the time to teach us about his business, which he started in Clarkson about two years ago. Prior to owning his own shop, he got experience from other mechanic shops and dealerships he worked at.

He graduated from Milford with an Associate’s Degree in General Automotive Technology opposed to specializing in brands. He was third in his class and a dealership he worked at sent him to lots of trainings. He went to places like Texas and Kansas City and learned about new vehicles.

The best and most challenging part of this job is problem solving and diagnostics. There is a lot of gratification when you solve a problem. Having his own business, there are a lot of pluses like making your own schedule and good pay if you can establish your own business and customer base. Dealerships are also competitive and will pay for the skills of a valued employee.

While Mr. Bahns enjoys being self-employed it is also challenging because of taxes and keeping information for the state. He also has to balance the mass of customer’s big and small jobs with the workload necessary to get everything done. Although it can be chaotic, he enjoys the relationship he has with customers and his parts vendors.

Mr. Bahns recommended that getting into this field, you should work for someone first. This will let you learn from their experience and build your own. When he looks for an employee, he wants someone ambitious, willing to learn, punctual and someone able to develop a skill set. He wants someone who wants to learn and grow over the course of the job.

In high school Mr. Bahns was interested in computer programming and robotics, but he was also interested in the automotive industry. What really drove home to him that this was to be his career, was working on his own vehicle. This experience with his own vehicle showed him that one day he wanted to own his own shop.

His advice to the Careers Class was to plan ahead and figure out what it is you want. Owning his own business was a lot of work and he wouldn’t have been able to do it without proper planning but he believes it was a worthwhile investment.

Here are you 2023 State Speech Qualifiers. 

Program of Oral Interpretation:  Ashly Guillen 
Humorous:  Drew Beeson
Informative:  Teagan Baumert
Poetry:  Samuel Pocasangre
Duet Acting:  Drew Beeson and Samuel Pocasangre
Oral Interpretation of Drama:  Drew Beeson, Teagan Baumert, Korbin Lemburg, Alyssa Gurnsey

Please click here to view the PDF version of the March 2023 newsletter.pdf