Hiller Plumbing, Heating, Cooling & Electrical proudly partners with Public Education Needs Community Involvement and Leadership (PENCIL), a Nashville nonprofit that links community resources to Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS), to achieve academic success and prepare for life.
Through PENCIL’s relationship with the Academies of Nashville, businesses like Hiller provide hands-on education in five industry-related areas encompassing over 40 subjects, at no cost to MNPS. These business and community partnerships enrich student learning by giving coursework relevance to future careers, improving graduation rates, building positive adult role model relationships and showing young people opportunities to enter into successful careers.
Hiller has already begun hosting regular, on-site lessons and demonstrations with students from John Overton High School, providing students with career pathways in the heating and cooling trades. Seasoned professional technicians demonstrate common trade skills, talk about their work and answer students’ questions in a close, hands-on environment that fosters future career interest.
“Hearing from experienced, practicing professionals, seeing demonstrations up close and watching the students engage and ask questions was time well spent,” noted Sandra Harris, Senior Partnership Manager. “We look forward to a continued successful collaboration as we build this partnership.”
Expanding upon an already successful career pathways initiative, Mayor Megan Barry’s office launched Opportunity NOW, which offers employment opportunities for young people in Davidson County. This program allows teenagers and young adults to develop invaluable social skills and “soft” employment skills learned through actual work experience with after-school and summer jobs andinternships. In the first year of the program, 11,587 jobs were posted and over 7,800 young people were employed.
“We want to connect youth to hope, and that means connecting them to opportunity and jobs”, remarked Mayor Megan Barry on the Nashville Government’s website. “I want for our youth what I want for everyone in our city a chance to succeed”.
Hiller will also offer employment opportunities and internships for these young men and women in the trades through the PENCIL Partners program. These internships will provide an opportunity to learn alongside Hiller team members across multiple business and technical functions, giving them real-world experience and training for their future careers. Jimmy Hiller, the company’s CEO and founder, started his own career in the trades at an early age, making the Academy PENCIL Partners program particularly meaningful to him.
“I am excited about our participation in this program because I started my own career in the trades at an early age,” remarked Mr. Hiller. “There is tremendous value in giving young people a roadmap into careers that can provide for their future and the education to make it easier to succeed.”
Launched in 1990 out of a duplex in Antioch, Tennessee, with a single employee and just $500, Hiller has grown to include over 480 trucks, 15 locations, and more than 630 employees across the southeast. In the past decade alone, Hiller has experienced over 900% growth in revenue.
For more information about Hiller, visit: http://www.happyhiller.com.
