More than 500 student resumes – and even some job offers – handed out at Henrico Schools’ CTE ‘Career Rodeo’

Henrico School’s Workforce and Career Development program handed out 593 student resumes to employers who attended this year’s CTE Career Rodeo – and at least five students were hired on the spot.

At the event, hosted Jan. 23 at the Richmond Raceway Complex, 480 high school seniors from 36 different specialized trades programs showed off their skills by completing work-based challenges. Culinary students cooked up chili and cornbread, students studying to be emergency medical technicians took vital signs of “patients” and loaded up stretchers onto an ambulance, auto tech students examined car engines, and web design students navigated the video games they had created using advanced coding techniques.

Students from each of the three Advanced Career Education (ACE) Centers – Highland Springs High, Hermitage High, and the Academy at Virginia Randolph – were able to display their skills, interact with, and even be interviewed by 350 potential employers from 101 different companies. Four other school divisions also attended the event, hoping to replicate it for their own students.

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Math teacher David Muncy at Highland Springs’ ACE Center gave his engineering students a challenge: create a functional prosthetic leg out of raw materials including cans, duct tape, cardboard and string in only an hour and a half.

“They started with nothing, just the basic materials, and they have to think about what structures will work for them to walk on it,” he said. “The challenge now is that they can support their weight on it, but then they try to push off to move and they can tell something’s off.”

Muncy’s 14 students are all part of the “High Tech Academy,” which combines high school engineering classes with dual enrollment college math and science courses at Virginia Commonwealth University to create a program tailored for students who want to become engineers. The specialized two-year program is small, but Muncy said it allows him to really get to know his students and their goals, skill sets, and career paths.

“When I was a teacher in a different county, I had 20 students six times a day, so 120 different students,” Muncy said. “This school’s awesome, because these 14 are my students for the whole day. They all want to be some sort of engineer, that’s why they signed up for the program.”

All 480 students wore a number on their back – like a traditional rodeo – so that employers could immediately request the resumes for students who display the desired industry skills. Tanaya, a senior studying sports medicine at Hermitage’s ACE Center, said that many employers interviewed students from the sports med program right at their table.

“We got interviewed, we took pictures, and one dude who used to be my teacher and now works somewhere else, I taught him how to tape his ankle. It was cool,” she said.

Tanaya, who wants to be a college athletic trainer, has been able to shadow high school and university athletic trainers, physical therapists, and even orthopedic surgeons as a part of the ACE program. She even met an athlete at the Career Rodeo who is set to run for Puerto Rico in the 2024 Olympics.

Before the rodeo, all students worked to create a resume and submit it to an online database that employers can access. Terran Evans, a culinary arts teacher at Virginia Randolph, said that many of his students receive interest from employers at each year’s rodeo.

“From what I’ve seen, it’s been a pretty successful program,” he said. “Several employers come through and I’ve had a couple over the years inquire about students here and there.”

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With 593 resumes given out this year, the rodeo has seen even more success than last year, when 440 resumes were handed out. In Virginia and throughout the United States, skilled trades labor shortages in the past few years have led more employers to seek out high schoolers as potential apprentices and new hires. Construction companies in Virginia are particularly eager to find new workers, with 96% reporting that they had open positions in a 2023 survey.

Other students who plan to attend college have already earned some college credit by taking dual enrollment courses at local universities. Isaiah, Steven, and Nekai, all seniors in the website and game design program at Hermitage’s ACE Center, have taken coding classes at ECPI University. Along with their dual enrollment classes, they also helped teach coding to younger students and participated in national CTE student competitions.

“We are in multiple different events and programs,” Isaiah said. “We were in Hour of Code, where we help kids get more intuitive with coding. And we also have a game for a competition that I’m personally making with my partner, and I make the art for the game.”

All three students presented onlookers at the rodeo with their newest project: a video game they created during the past three months using the coding techniques they had learned. The students hope the two-year ACE program will launch them into careers such as software engineering, online game development, and cybersecurity.

Some students in Evans’ culinary course aren’t exactly sure what they want to pursue but are spending their remaining time in the program considering what industries they might want to try.

“Some of them have their minds made up that they want to enter the culinary field, but a lot of them are just kind of figuring it out,” he said. “I have one student, she definitely wants to go into the culinary industry. She does very well with culinary arts, her life skills are impeccable.”

Henrico Schools has taken steps during the past year to expand CTE opportunities to more high-schoolers and even middle-schoolers. HCPS opened two newly-expanded ACE Center buildings during the 2023-2024 school year at Highland Springs and Hermitage, allowing for an additional 900 seats in the programs. The division also established new “Centers for Innovation” to open at two middle schools, with the first opening at John Rolfe Middle in fall 2024.

On April 24, Henrico CTE will host the “CTE Letter of Intent Signing Day,” which will celebrate students and their employers at an event that resembles those held for high school athletes. For CTE students, the upcoming event is another opportunity to connect with employers and illustrate all of their years of hard work.

“The #LifeReady Career Rodeo is over,” a post read on the Henrico CTE social media account. “The students have proven their skills, our business partners have their resumes in hand and Signing Day is right around the corner!”

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Liana Hardy is the Citizen’s Report for America Corps member and education reporter. Her position is dependent upon reader support; make a tax-deductible contribution to the Citizen through RFA here.