JOHNSON CITY — With her previous experience as a high school agriculture teacher in Marble Falls, Mikayla Herron knew that she wanted to help develop a program that could help the future success of students, leading her and Pedernales Electric Cooperative (PEC) to create Learn, Employer, Develop (LED).
Launched at the end of April, the LED program is an online resource aimed at providing overall enhancement strategies to local youth to help them prepare for their future. Whether young adults are graduating high school, looking for a summer job, seeking an internship or looking to prepare for the future, the new program aims to provide students in grades 9-12 with resources to build strong resumes and improve their professionalism.
“It's kind of a thing that all students are struggling with right now, being resumes as the number one thing,” said Herron, PEC community outreach specialist. “We just wanted to create a resource that was practical, flexible and really helpful for all high school students to help bridge that gap between the classroom and the real world.”
PEC’s LED program offers tips to help students build the skills needed for entering the workforce through a video podcast series. Lessons include resume basics, formatting and structure, crafting a standout resume and how to tailor a resume.
Prior to coming to PEC, Herron was a high school agriculture teacher in Marble Falls and then, a county extension agent, so she has a wide experience working with students and educators. Because of this, she saw that there was a disconnect between the classroom and what students will face in the real world.
“Especially when you work with seniors and you start applying for scholarships, college or even if they're going straight into the workforce, realistically, every student is going to have to have a resume at some point in time. So, noticing that they got very overwhelmed by that and the idea was just to kind of create a resource where everything was available in one spot for them,” she explained. “A resume is a required document as part of our scholarship application and our Youth Tour application. So, my first year here, whenever we kind of implemented that, I noticed that students didn't know what a resume was or just kind of the quality of them were not great. That was kind of the final push to really get a program up off the ground that we could share with our contact within the school system.”
While the Class of 2025 recently celebrated its graduation, some students are going off to college and others may still be considering what they want to do next, Herron explained that this resource is geared to help all high school students, but can also be beneficial to adults who are wanting to improve their resume skills.
The LED resource is going to be permanently available through the PEC youth program page on the co-op’s website with a goal to hopefully add something new annually. In 2026, there is some conversation about adding a resource for interviews, where there would be videos of mock interviews with tips and tricks, along with partnering with PEC’s Human Resources Department to provide insight on that.
To learn more about the LED program and to utilize the resource, visit myPEC.com/LED.
“We hope that this is something that teachers can utilize within the classroom, but then also, students have access to it at home, too,” Herron said.
