Area high schoolers invited to Heat Up their Futures with UA Local 400 and MCA

KEWAUNEE COUNTY – High school teams from across northeastern Wisconsin, including Algoma and Luxemburg-Casco, showcased their craftsmanship and creativity at the sixth annual Heat Up Your Future skills competition, hosted by Plumbers and Steamfitters UA Local 400 and the Mechanical Contractors Association (MCA) of North Central Wisconsin.

Over the past month, teams built custom pipe stoves to exact specifications in their schools before bringing their finished projects to the UA Local 400 Training Center in Kaukauna for judging on Nov. 11.

“We’re proud to have welcomed a record number of nineteen schools this year,” said Nick Johnsen, UA Local 400 training director. “The quality of work these students produced was nothing short of amazing. Their projects reflect the same problem-solving, precision and pride we value in our trade — and it’s exciting to see that level of skill and curiosity at the high school level.”

By participating in the challenge, students had the opportunity to put their existing skills to use in a new way and work collaboratively.

Luxemburg-Casco High School promotes trade expertise, preparing students for the workforce with real-world skills. The school offers work-based learning experiences such as job shadows and paid youth apprenticeships through its Youth Apprenticeship Program, which almost 58% of juniors and seniors at the school participate in. The program is conducted and managed in partnership with CESA 7 and the Green Bay Chamber of Commerce, and is overseen by the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development.

The school also has elective and college programs in auto and diesel technician, agriculture, manufacturing and healthcare.

Similarly, the Algoma Venture Academy strives to educate students with community- and project-based learning, which the Heat Up Your Future competition mirrors. According to the Venture Academy’s website, students retain knowledge longer and understand the relevance of their studies when projects are centered on authentic, real-world challenges, allowing them to apply what they learn in practical situations.

“A lot of [the competition] is building their confidence that they can actually accomplish something like this and resorting back to kind of fundamental skills,” said Nick Cochart, who served as a mentor to the student teams from Algoma Venture Academy. “None of it is terribly difficult, but it requires some attention to detail and a willingness to do math… And working with other people to finish [the project], I try to teach them. I don’t know everything about it either, so if we don’t know something, then we go to people that do.”

Instructors from UA Local 400 evaluated each project on weld quality, dimensional accuracy and overall creativity.

During the judging period, students toured the training center, met field professionals and explored career pathways in the plumbing, steamfitting and HVACR trades.

“There’s so much of the real world that happens outside of a classroom,” Cochart said. “I’m a huge proponent of getting kids out of schools, not to avoid what’s going on in schools, but because they need to be a part of stuff like this… There’s just a whole world outside of schools that sometimes we forget about. Schools operate in a totally different way than a training center does and doing projects like this, I think, allows kids to see how many different entities play into things… There’s a lot of pieces to the puzzle and it’s hard to replicate in the classroom sometimes.”

And organizers hope that being exposed to events like the Heat Up Your Future skills competition might encourage students to consider a career in the trades.

“Jobs in welding and the pipe trades are in high demand,” said Jeff Gaecke, executive vice president of the MCA of North Central Wisconsin. “Seeing so many young people interested in learning these skills gives me great confidence in the future of our industry.”

According to the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, the pipe trades rank among the state’s “Top 50 Hot Jobs” projected through 2032.
The Heat Up Your Future Skills Competition is designed to introduce high school students to rewarding careers in the pipe trades — fields that provide excellent pay, job stability and long-term advancement opportunities.

“It’s a really neat, sustaining thing not only for the students, but for the whole community… We’re getting students involved as sophomores or juniors in high school that then can kind of see a future ahead of them and thinking like, ‘How does that relate to the real world? How could I use that in an industry? How could I use that for a contractor or to earn a living and have a really great career?’ I think it’s really exciting that they get to start to see the stuff at an early age… These are the types of things that really can stand out, maybe more so than a test or a quiz that they took at school or a book report or whatever — a real life project.”