There’s a particular look on a teenager’s face the first time they sit in the cab of an excavator and realize the machine is going to do exactly what their hands tell it to. That moment is the whole point of Construction Career Days.
The 2026 Southern Colorado Construction Career Days is scheduled for Thursday, September 10, 2026, at the Norris Penrose Event Center in Colorado Springs. If you’re a student, a parent, a teacher, or a contractor with a crew and a spare trailer, now is the time to start planning around that date.
What actually happens that day
Students spend the day from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. moving through hands-on events, stationary equipment activities, and technology demonstrations, with lunch provided. The event invites 11th- and 12th-grade students from area school districts, so it’s aimed squarely at kids who are within a year or two of deciding what comes next.
The format is small groups rather than a lecture hall. Colorado Construction Career Days is built around industry volunteers escorting small groups of students through building, highway, engineering, and architecture career paths, acting as guides and answering the questions students actually have. Things like: what does a first-year job pay, and do you need a degree?
Parents and teachers: the paperwork part
This one trips people up every year. Every student attending must have a signed parent or guardian permission form, and school representatives register online and supply the number of students they plan to bring, with names and signed forms presented at check-in on event day.
So if you’re a counselor, your job starts in the spring, not the week before. And if you’re a parent whose kid comes home with a form, sign it. A free day on a field of running equipment with people who do this for a living is a better career assessment than any online quiz.
Why the industry keeps showing up for this
Career Days exists because of a math problem. Organizers point to predictions that the construction industry needs 250,000 new workers per year to meet growth projections, while the average age of skilled trades workers nationwide sits at 48 to 50, with many nearing retirement.
The hiring data backs that up. In the 2025 AGC/NCCER workforce survey of nearly 1,400 firms, 92 percent of construction companies reported difficulty hiring for open positions. Heavy equipment and crane operators were named hard to fill by 77 percent of surveyed firms, right alongside electricians at 77 percent and iron workers at 78 percent.
Meanwhile Colorado keeps building. The state added 5,600 construction jobs between July 2025 and July 2026, a 3 percent increase that brought statewide construction employment to 189,500. Construction contributes $33 billion, or 5.8 percent, of Colorado’s $569 billion state GDP, spread across 21,700 construction establishments.
And the pay isn’t a consolation prize. Colorado’s mean hourly wage hit $37.11 in 2025, about 10.6 percent above the national average, and the state carries a higher concentration of construction and extraction occupations than the country as a whole.
Contractors: volunteer slots and what they need
The event runs on borrowed people and borrowed iron. Volunteer roles include group leaders plus general volunteers who help with registration, set-up, take-down, lunch, and traffic control. Not glamorous, but nothing happens without it.
The organizing body, the Southern Colorado Construction Career Day Foundation, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit created to help high school students explore trade careers, formed in part because fewer schools now offer vocational-tech or industrial arts classes. If your company has been complaining about the applicant pool, this is the direct fix.
If your kid is younger
Ninth grade can feel early to talk careers, but the research says otherwise. In the Denver metro area, the Adams County Education Consortium runs an 8th Grade Career Expo at Riverdale Regional Park in Brighton, where 5,000 to 6,000 eighth graders from eight school districts participate over two days, based on findings that middle school is the strongest window for career guidance.
What the work looks like now
One thing students often don’t expect: how much of this job is digital. We’ve been building water and sanitary systems, stormwater, earthwork, and concrete structures in Colorado since 1996, and 3D machine control and GPS grading have been standard across our fleet since 2015. Our crews are cross-trained, and our concrete work has been self-performed since 2009.
Translation for a 17-year-old: you can read a screen, run a blade, and finish concrete, all in the same career.
Have a project in mind? Start the conversation with Solid Earth.
Images are presented for illustration purposes only.We use real photographs when we need to show what was happening at a real event.
