About 3,000 middle school and high school students will visit downtown Jacksonville this week to learn about jobs in the building trades alongside peers competing to showcase their skills.
The side-by-side stagings of the Construction Ready CareerEXPO and the SkillsUSA Florida Championships at the Prime Osborn Convention Center spotlight ongoing efforts to recruit young people to a core industry whose workforce is aging into retirement.
Hundreds of representatives from construction businesses, workforce agencies and colleges will be at the expo March 31 and April 1, talking about jobs in fields ranging from framing walls and installing electrical wiring to managing complex construction projects and handling contractors’ business accounts.
A student handles conduit for electrical lines being placed inside a wall during a skills contest happening alongside the 2025 Construction Ready CareerExpo. The 2026 expo happens March 31 and April 1 at Jacksonville’s Prime Osborn Convention Center.
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While that’s happening, SkillsUSA, a national organization that promotes vocational education, will use the convention center as a venue for contests where youths from across Florida show skills in fields from plumbing to masonry and heating and air conditioning.
Students coming from Northeast Florida schools will make up most of the expo crowd, organizers said.
Getting young people to just picture themselves in the building trades can be a key to seeing possibilities for good careers, said Nyree Bowen-Tennant, coordinator for career and technical education in Duval County Public Schools.
Once they’re open to the range of opportunities, she said, students can find job interests they never thought about before.
La’kishma Shaw, who teaches at Lake Shore Middle School, will be taking about 50 kids to the expo. Some have family with construction backgrounds while others don’t, but she said she’s hoping they can all benefit from listening and building relationships with people they meet.
Parents who worry about artificial intelligence programs replacing humans in offices find a lot to like about their kids working in building trades, said Scott Shelar, president and CEO of the Georgia-based nonprofit Construction Ready. While AI could threaten office work, he said it should be a long time before robots are handling house calls for plumbing repairs.
The real change in Shelar’s business may simply be shifting to reaching kids in elementary school.
Construction Ready recently began working with school staff at Duval County’s San Mateo Elementary School and another elementary in Miami-Dade County to expose kids to experiences building simple items with their own hands.
The hope is that kids who enjoy that will later embrace career and technical programs that teach building skills, and Shelar said his group has worked since 2020 with Georgia school districts that incorporate building into early education, some districts having programs in elementary, middle and high schools.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: 3,000 youths headed to Jacksonville building jobs expo, skills contest