Career fair opens youths’ eyes to new opportunities

By Valorie Brecht With 344 youth in attendance, the Clark County Business-to-Business Expo and Career Fair at Clark Electric brought high schoolers from around the county to Greenwood to check out the job opportunities available to them right here in the county they grew up in. The May 1 event featured 62 booths with representatives from area businesses, organizations and colleges.

“We just want to show students that there are things to do here in the county. There are all kinds of good, high quality jobs. You don’t have to venture too far. You can also enjoy a high quality of life, local entertainment and it’s a great place to raise a family,” said Pete Kaz, president of the Clark County Economic Development Corporation and Tourism Bureau (CCEDC), which hosted the event.

Students from Abbotsford, Colby, Granton, Greenwood, Loyal, Neillsville, Owen-Withee and Thorp high schools attended the event, with the groups arriving at staggered times throughout the day. Some of the career fields represented included law enforcement/emergency services, healthcare, agriculture, finances/ accounting, manufacturing, IT and media. Students were also exposed to careers in government, such as working for the Department of Natural Resources or USDA Rural Development office. To encourage students to interact with the exhibitors, each student was given a “bingo” card and had to collect signatures from 16 different career clusters to receive a treat.

The annual event started in 2019, took a break for two years for COVID and resumed in 2022.

“It started as just the business-tobusiness expo. But then we thought, why not make it a career day also? It took us a couple years to get the schools involved. But now, we’ve had it running a couple years and we’ve been getting great feedback from the participants and vendors,” said Kaz.

Along with helping kids to explore new career pathways, the expo offered new modes of exploring those pathways. For example, the North Central Wisconsin Area Health Education Center provided virtual reality headsets which led students through a five-minute healthcare job simulation, such as treating a victim in a car crash, performing an EKG or filling a prescription for a patient. Students were coached on what to do to complete the task until they finished successfully. The goal was to give students a small snippet of a day in the life of a health care professional.

As another example, students in the Chippewa Falls High School drone club coached Clark County students on how to navigate a drone through an obstacle course set up in the building. Drones have many career uses, such as seeding and spraying in agriculture, storm damage assessment, real estate, thermal imaging for law enforcement or providing journalists a bird’s eye view of a local event.

By all accounts, the expo produced positive results. One of the representatives from a local nursing home said her company had hired a couple of high school students that found out about job openings through this event last year, and the students continue to serve as valuable employees. That is just one example of the connections being made, along with students broadening their perspective on what options are available to them after high school.

The event is one of CCEDC’s largest outreaches of the year. For more information on the CCEDC, visit clarkcountywi. org or call 715-255-9100.

VALORIE BRECHT/STAFF PHOTOS AND CONTRIBUTED