Aaron Armendariz – Ayers Career College Staff Testimonial

My name’s Aaron Armendariz and I am the campus president for Ayers Career College. I pretty much have oversight over the entire campus, and that includes administration, education, career services, and admissions.

How did you get started with Ayers?
The way I ended up here at Ayers is one of the schools I actually started with in the industry in, was what we classify as “Mom & Pop” as in smaller school.

What is your mission at Ayers?
The education of the students, helping the economy, we really serve two different sets of demographics here – What I mean by that is we’re here to help the students, but we’re also here to help employers.

How do you decide what programs to offer?
The way we decide what kind of programs we offer is we do some feasibility studies. We take a look at the population of where we’re at, and we analyze it. We look and see what industries are growing, what industries are expanding, and what’s going away or what’s shrinking.

What do you like most about your job?
What I find rewarding about this job is really seeing the students succeed. There are different levels of success, I mean from the time they step through the door and took that first initial phone call – they made that first call which is very hard for them to do in most cases – and ultimately, get them to graduation. That’s always one of the biggest points that I love about this job is the graduation – it says everything really, it’s the culmination of everyone’s efforts! After that, we have our career services and placement; you know, trying to get these students employed. Throughout the process of their education and training here is making sure that they’re (students) succeeding along the way. We go in, and we talk to them – we’re very friendly with them. We’re very close to our students, it’s almost like a family, so we want to know what’s going on in their lives, and you know, keep tabs on them and help them along the way as best we can. In order for our students to be successful, some of the things that they need to do is to be very committed. It’s not an easy process, but by the same token, it’s a very rewarding process.