Albany Tech to hold ribbon-cutting for barbering lab
Special Photo: Albany Tech
From staff reports
ALBANY – Albany Technical College will host a virtual ribbon-cutting live on Facebook Thursday in Artisan Hall (building D) at 10 a.m. A small group of college leadership and faculty will be on hand to comment and celebrate the latest addition to Albany Technical College, a new barbering lab.
Barbering is a 56-credit-hour program under the Cosmetology program that rolled out in spring 2020 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Classes are taught at night at the college. This semester, there has been a 145% growth in barbering enrollment, with 32 students currently enrolled. With this growth in the program, additional appropriate teaching space was needed to instruct the students. Nail Technician and Esthetician programs were approved by the Technical College System of Georgia State Board in August 2018 and also will be moved to the newly constructed barbering area of the lab in Cosmetology.
“Barbering is booming in this area; it’s a booming industry,” Arniecesha Price, chair/instructor of the Cosmetology program, said in an Albany Tech news release. “Albany Technical College wanted to fulfill this need to train future barbers. The barbering program is a diploma program that is a sequence of courses designed to educate and prepare upcoming barbers for the industry. Four semesters and a student is then prepared to take boards, which includes a theory and practical exam.”
The barbering expansion construction project, including furnishings and equipment for the new lab, started in 2018. The total project cost was $583,000.
“Students in the Barbering program at Albany Tech must have 1,500 live work-hours before they take the state board exam,” Albany Tech President Anthony Parker said. “Seventy percent of Cosmetology students come right out of high school and attend during the day, with many older students using our evening classes. We are very proud to offer the community Barbering as a night class option.”
On any given day, barbers typically do the following: inspect and analyze hair, skin, and scalp to recommend treatment; discuss hairstyle options; wash, color, lighten and condition hair; cut, dry and style hair; beard and mustache trimming; clean and disinfect all tools and work areas.
Albany Technical College is committed to the process of training and placing employees in decent jobs with decent salaries. Working relationships with employers is an essential part of the process. Albany Tech is proud to hold an average job placement of more than 98% throughout all industry programs on campus. The median hourly wage for barbers was $14.50 in May 2019. The median hourly wage for hairdressers, hairstylists, and cosmetologists was $12.54 in May 2019.
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