Career program gets girls on board

When you see a worker in a hard hat, chances are the person wearing that hat is male. Women account for only about 1 in 10 people working construction and about a third of the manufacturing workforce. But a Jackson County group is working to change those statistics — one pink hard hat at a time.

Since its founding a year ago, Pink Hard Hat Girls & Women in CTE, Construction and Manufacturing has been introducing young women — primarily students in grades 10 to 12 — to career options they might not have considered. The group meets six times during the school year, with half those meetings bringing industry leaders to speak to the students at the Kevin Dukes Career & Innovation Academy. The other meetings take students on half-day trips to area employers, where they tour the plants, hear from company representatives and are treated to lunch before returning to school.

The Pink Hard Hat Girls & Women program launched on March 2, 2023, by Nancy Griggs, its developer and coordinator, with a kickoff meeting at the Earnest Pruett Center of Technology. Griggs, vice president of workforce solutions and talent development for the Mountain Lakes Chamber of Commerce, says the group’s first outing to WestRock in Bridgeport last May 4 gave its 26 members the chance to experience an on-site work environment.

When the 2023-2024 school year began, the number of girls in the program multiplied to just under 100. Wearing the group’s signature pink hard hats, they visited USG in Bridgeport on Sept. 7, and on Oct. 19 they went to three different plants at Scottsboro’s industrial park. Having 96 girls on that outing required splitting them into three groups for their tours of Johns Manville, HTPG and Sanoh-America.

Pink Hard Hats and many similar chamber programs can trace their beginnings to 2019, when Mountain Lakes Chamber President Rick Roden approached Griggs about creating a workforce-development program for the chamber.

“We’d gone out and interviewed close to 100 business and industry leaders, and hands-down, the No. 1 issue they had was finding qualified workers,” he says. “We knew we had to address that,” as well as industry efforts to add more minority and women employees.

Roden contacted Griggs when he heard she was retiring from her longtime job at Northeast Alabama Community College as a workforce development specialist. She was facing a new role as a caregiver for her parents and needed a very flexible work schedule.

Griggs accepted Roden’s offer. She ended her nearly two-decade tenure at NACC on April 30, 2019, and started at the chamber the next day. Through her work at NACC, she built a vast network of contacts at the college and in the Jackson County and Scottsboro school systems and worked extensively with various industries in the area.

“The first thing I said was that we’ve got to get everyone to work together — not just the school systems but also various programs in the county,” Griggs says. She started hosting monthly meetings where chamber members and educators worked as partners to find workforce solutions. The group quickly built a good foundation, and the Pink Hard Hat program grew from that.

Griggs introduced the idea of giving pink hard hats to program participants. “We had a big meeting with school and industry leaders about starting the group, and we asked for sponsorship to buy the pink hard hats,” Griggs says. All three of the participating local electric utilities — North Alabama Electric Cooperative, Sand Mountain Electric Cooperative and Scottsboro Electric Power Board — agreed to buy the first 100 hats. Then they bought 100 more. And Griggs found the perfect candidate to serve as the Pink Hard Hat group’s first president — recent North Sand Mountain High School graduate Paris Cornelison, who was already working in the construction industry.

An administrative assistant at Chattanooga-based P&C Construction, Cornelison is the third generation to work at the company founded by her grandfather. After starting out as an intern, she now helps with a diverse range of tasks including human resources, tools and equipment, safety procedures and marketing.

At just 19 years old, Cornelison feels a close connection to the young women who want to learn about job options available in construction and manufacturing. She didn’t hesitate when Griggs approached her about serving as the Pink Hard Hat Girls’ first student president

Drawing on her marketing skills, one of Cornelison’s first actions as president was to create a unique group sticker for the pink hard hats. The girls add stickers they receive from companies they visit or company representatives who meet with them at Kevin Dukes Career & Innovation Academy to their hard hats.

A Pink Hard Hats meeting at the KDCIA last November focused featured a dozen construction companies, with some bringing equipment for demonstrations and hands-on access. Brianna Conner, whose seven-year construction career started when she was in high school, showed the girls how to operate a mini-excavator and spoke to the group “about what’s it like to be a woman in construction — that it’s not what everybody thinks it is,” she says.

Conner’s construction career began while she was still a Pisgah High School student. She did in-office estimating at a Fyffe firm, and when she turned 18, she moved into doing hands-on fieldwork and operating heavy equipment, which is her role now at Stevenson-based Lambert Contracting. She’s been involved with the Pink Hard Hats group as a member and speaker since its kickoff. “I’ll speak to these girls anytime, and I 100% think they should give it a try,” Conner says.

“I think the more that these girls see, the more they are inspired,” Griggs says. Roden is a firm believer in the mission, as well. “This program has really opened their eyes, so we’re hoping it will continue,” he says. “These girls are changing their entire thinking because they’re being exposed to jobs and careers they might not have even thought of before.