Career Expo hosts over 3,000 freshmen from Anchorage School District's eight high schools plus Stellar and Polaris so they learn about different careers. My job is to connect industry partners with ASD--and part of that means I coordinate the business effort for the Expo. This event guarantees every student has an experience as part of their Academies of Anchorage involvement. A lot of kids only have traditional careers in mind: doctor, nurse, teacher, lawyer. They don't know that they can choose from hundreds of career paths, and so the Career Expo gives them insight into many options that await them.
On Sept. 26, 2025, more than 100 industry representatives participated in Anchorage School District's Career Expo, which is associated with Academies of Anchorage. We help coordinate Career Expo, focusing on our specialty: convening community members to improve Anchorage and Alaska. For this event, we primarily work to bring together businesses and industry leaders so that ASD freshmen learn about and have hands-on experiences with different career paths.
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We're an educational nonprofit and do classroom outreach all around Alaska, teaching students in kindergarten through 12th grade about natural resource industries and associated careers. Some careers are big mysteries to kids because the work being done isn't happening where they live. So we show them how different jobs (both degreed and non-degreed) help them get paid really well and teach them about up-and-coming technologies being used, like robots and drones, which is pretty cool. For instance, this robotic dog goes underground in mines to improve safety.
- Taylor Burgh, Operations Manager, Alaska Resource Education
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We're here to talk with freshmen about anything from how much we make to how we started our careers, which hopefully inspires a lot of kids to go into the aviation career pathway. Many people don't realize how many career pathways can end up in aviation--it's not just pilots, flight attendants, and maintenance technicians. We have administrative employees, like those who specialize in marketing or IT. Students can feel overwhelmed picking out what they want to do. By answering their questions now, we're giving them a better chance at their future.
