There is a quiet fear that runs through many small towns across Alberta. The fear that the next generation will have to leave to find a future worth staying for. It is a fear born from experience, passed down through communities that have watched their young people pack up and move toward opportunity in bigger cities, leaving behind aging populations and economic uncertainty. For decades, this has felt like an unavoidable reality. But in Camrose and the surrounding communities of the Battle River region, something different is happening. Young people are not just finding work. They are building careers, building buildings, and building lives, right where they were raised.
At the centre of this quiet transformation is CAREERS, an organization that works behind the scenes to connect youth, schools, and local employers. The premise is straightforward, but the impact is profound: students earn high school credits, receive paid work experience, and in some cases, begin accumulating apprenticeship hours before they ever graduate. They enter the workforce not as newcomers, but as people who already know the job, already know the community, and already have a reason to stay.
“Sometimes the best opportunities for students are right in their community,” says Dave Brown, a CAREERS Program Coordinator. That belief, simple but quietly radical, is the foundation on which CAREERS operates.
For students like Chyanne Mairena, CAREERS helped open a door she did not even know to look for. Unsure of her direction and nervous about entering a trade dominated by men, she stepped into a sheet metal shop and found something unexpected: belonging. “I didn’t know where I was going to end up,” she recalls. “I ended up loving it. They were so sweet and warming and it just felt like a second home.” Her story is not an outlier. It is the point. These opportunities meet young people in their uncertainty and gives them not just a skill, but a sense of purpose and place.
That sense of purpose becomes something tangible when you consider what high school students have actually built. In 2022, students in the Registered Apprenticeship Program (RAP) worked alongside tradespeople to construct Chester Ronning School in Camrose, the same hallways and classrooms that local children now walk through every day. More recently, students contributed to the construction of Blessed Carlo Acutis Catholic High School, another community institution built, in part, by the community’s own young people.
The significance of that is not lost on Camrose MLA Jackie Lovely, who spoke with some of the students on site. “They said, ‘How cool is that going to be, if I stay in this community and I get married and I have children and my kids go to the school, I’ll be able to tell them that I helped build the school.'” It is the kind of pride that cannot be manufactured by a recruitment campaign or a relocation incentive. It is rooted, literal, and lasting.
Employers have noticed. DeeJay Plumbing and Heating began hiring RAP students in 2007 and has never looked back. “We’re talking 20 to 30 percent of our staff,” says Clayton Appleby, the company’s Preconstruction Manager, “and a lot of our core staff has come out of the program.” The retention numbers speak to something deeper than good hiring practice. When young people are trained locally, mentored locally, and given a reason to invest locally, they tend to stay. And when they stay, businesses grow stronger, communities grow more viable, and the cycle continues.
Stephanie Schielke is living proof of what that cycle looks like across a career. She entered the Registered Apprenticeship Program 18 years ago as a plumbing and gas fitting apprentice. Today, she is a Project Manager at the same company. “I’m in a position I enjoy a lot,” she says, “and I get to be home every night with my kids.” Her trajectory, from nervous apprentice to project manager to present parent, is the story CAREERS is trying to write for an entire generation.
It is a story that matters at a policy level too. MLA Lovely frames it in terms that are both personal and provincial. Reflecting on watching a generation disappear from her home province of Saskatchewan due to lack of opportunity, she is clear about what drove her into public life: “I don’t want that to happen to Alberta. I want my kids and everyone else’s kids to be able to have a life here, to work here, to raise their families here.”
The Registered Apprenticeship Program, supported by CAREERS and delivered through partnerships with school divisions like Battle River, is one of the most direct tools available to make that vision real. It does not require young people to choose between ambition and home. It asks them to build both at once.
“Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity,” Chyanne Mairena says simply.
That gratitude, genuine and unscripted, is itself a form of evidence. When systems align, when schools, employers, coordinators, and communities move toward the same goal, young people do not just find jobs. They find futures. And Alberta keeps the people it needs most: the ones who know it, love it, and are ready to build it.
