 Would you rather pay $650 or $66 for a smartphone? Simple. With the Appalachian Advantage plan, pay less upfront and then just a few dollars more every month. Better service, bigger savings. That's today's Appalachian Wireless. The Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program has established a new internship program this year which looks to connect eligible applicants with employers in need of new workers all throughout our region. We caught up with Michael Cornette, Deputy Director for Employment Engagement and Program Operations for EKCEP for more information. Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program this year started a new internship program that we've called 1UP and the goal of 1UP is to create meaningful experiences for students who are either in post-secondary training or education programs at all of our institutions in the region or local students in places like UK, Eastern, or Moorhead who are out of region create meaningful opportunities for those students and also graduates of either certification training programs or other things at colleges who are no further out than 12 months from graduation to plug them into experiences that are in alignment with a couple of things. One is what employers in our region have a need to seek and find in trained individuals and also to plug those students into opportunities that are in alignment with their programs of study. Cornette says that their main focus is on helping both employers and students who may be looking for work feel the jobs that are considered to be the most in demand locally. With this, EKCEP hopes to help bolster local economies throughout our area which will help to keep our workforce here and fully employed. As we work with potential internship hosts for interns under the 1UP program at EKCEP that we're doing now, we really want to emphasize our workforce board sectors of emphasis within our region. So it's not that we wouldn't consider each and every potential host opportunity but we do want to hone in on several specific sectors and that's healthcare, manufacturing skilled trades, IT, business services, and energy production and transmission. So that is our workforce boards list of priority sectors that mirrors the Kentucky Workforce Innovation Board's sectors of emphasis too. That's really important in our workforce services programming and the things that we do at EKCEP. And I think for the purposes of 1UP it's very important because it helps us focus on targeting employers to be potential hosts who are in those sectors but it's going to create a meaningful experience and one that is in alignment with the priorities of our workforce board and what we'd like to see happen in the region to move the needle forward when new opportunities come about. All sectors are needed right now especially I mean even you know retail everything else but in terms of moving the needle with major efforts mass employment things to that effect. I mean we've got to take care of the employers that we have who have needs right now and pretty much all of them do. For more information on how you can register for either the internship program or to be considered as a host company, Cornet encourages viewers to visit them online at www.ekcep.org forward slash one o-n-e-up-up. For Mountain Top News, I'm Joshua Sloan.