High School Recruiting & Horizontal Construction Pathway Update

We have been burning up the roads lately with participating in High School Career Fairs all over the state of Georgia! From opening the eyes of students to our industry for the first time, to interviewing and hiring students on the spot, we are doing it all. In May, we will have our largest pool of Career Signing Day students who are coming on full time after graduation. We will be having three signing day events in Norcross, Macon, and Savannah. And what makes this event even more exciting is that most of our signing day hires are coming out of our Work Based Learning Internship program that has more students than we’ve ever had before. We are constantly making new partnerships with schools across the state that are creating even more sustainable talent pipelines for our future workforce. 

Two years ago, we piloted the Caterpillar Simulator Training program for Caterpillar, and we are now taking our third group of employees through the program with great success. And since we began our in-house program, we’ve been working hard to get this program piloted in a Georgia High School. After many meetings with local and state school officials, state legislature members, we are pleased to announce that in August of 2022, the program we created at C.W. Matthews will be piloted in four Georgia High Schools in a brand-new High School Horizontal Construction Pathway! In recent weeks, Governor Brian Kemp approved the budget that has 1.6 million dollars going to start the program in 4 High Schools and 1.3 million dollars to start the program in 3 technical colleges, with the hope of the same number of schools getting funded next year until this program is offered in schools across the state. We already have calls coming in from other states wanting to know how they can get our program in their states as well! Caterpillar is very supportive in this initiative, and their hope is for this program to sweep across the country, all starting right here at C.W. Matthews. We give all glory to Jesus in making this long time dream a reality. Our prayer is that these new programs will be a tremendous game-changer for talent needs for our company and companies across the country.