Five teams from Sean McSheehy's Web Design III class earned each of the top five slots in a marketing contest for the Florida Energy Workforce Consortium (FEWC). A group of representatives from the FEWC came from across the state to the Niceville campus Friday morning for a ceremony honoring the CHOICE IT students, who created websites, videos, posters and brochures to attract young people to careers in energy.

The contest was open to students from all over Florida, but consortium members agreed that the quality of the Niceville students' work set them apart from the other entries.

"We had 116 students participate in the contest, but they [Niceville students] were clearly head and shoulders above the rest," stated Jennifer Grove, Gulf Power's Workforce Development Coordinator.

Kevin Gay of Progress Energy was equally impressed. He told the group of students and their parents that before becoming involved in the energy industry, he had worked in the software field for a number of years, and the quality of the students' work was as good or better than that of many professionals. "Where were you several years ago?" he asked the students.

"Elementary school!" quipped a member of the audience.

The winning entry came from "Team Andrea," which used the tag line: "Get energized. Jumpstart your career." The website featured original photographs taken by Andrea Todd, the team leader and website designer. Each page of the website featured a photo of a different type of energy source and some interesting facts about energy production and consumption. It also included a section called: "Evaluate your skills" which discussed the type of skills needed for the different jobs available, from lineworkers and welders to nuclear engineers.

Todd, a junior who is currently taking Photoshop and Web Design II and III, already has a few years' experience working with professional clients. She got her start by creating Flash images for her mother, Joy, a website designer, and recently took on a full-scale project of her own. 

Andrea is adamant about the importance of teaching advanced Information Technology skills in schools. She takes out her cell phone and says, "I live by this. It has my whole schedule, my assignments, my contacts - everything. We're the new generation. We're supposed to know about technology. It's always changing, and it's only going to get more complicated."

The consortium decided to use students to create the marketing campaign so that it would appeal to teenagers. According to Grove, the FEWC was formed because of concerns that the industry was not attracting enough young people with technological skills to fill the jobs of those heading into retirement. Individual power companies in Florida realized that the problem was too large for any single entity to address alone and decided to cooperate as an industry to attract young people to the field. The FEWC also encompasses representatives from Workforce Florida, private industry, economic development, organized labor and education (including Jeff Scroggins, Director of Okaloosa's CHOICE Institutes).

Grove stresses that the industry offers high-paying jobs for incoming workers at all levels, starting with those who have a high school degree and industry certifications in IT or trades like welding and electrical, and continuing up to those with Master's degrees on engineering and other fields.

"We are greening our country's entire future," she says, "And these are jobs that can't be outsourced offshore."