Photo Credit Meredith Symonds
Excitement was not the only thing being built in the months leading up to the 2024 Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo™ as more than 190 students from 17 Gulf Coast-area high school vocational programs banged, clanged and fabricated their way to potentially winning Grand Champion belt buckles and team trophies in one of several categories in the Industrial Craft Competition (ICC).
The 2024 competition began in the Fall 2023 semester, with the ICC providing participating students from Houston-area schools, as well as from as far east as Beaumont and as far south as Corpus Christi, with an as-close-to-realistic-as-possible experience in industrial fabrication and that simulated a real industrial project.
In this invitation-only contest, student teams built an industrial skid, a simulation of a pipe rack and pump loop used to transport liquids. Students planned and executed the skid’s construction using the drawings, donated materials, tools, methods and safety standards used in industrial construction. The students complied with daily industrial safety expectations and were required to develop detailed schedules for the work as well as track their progress.
A twist on this year’s competition was adding a second level of build complexity for the students to tackle. Schools participating in Tier 1 were required to fabricate and incorporate electrical elements onto the skid for operation, while Tier 2 projects were fabrication of the skid only. For each tier, teams can place in five categories: Safety Program, Project Presentation, Project Execution, Built to Specification and Best of Show.
On March 2, the ICC held its fifth annual event, tasking the students to present their projects to a panel of industry-expert judges within a 15-minute timeframe. The presentations occurred after a week-long technical inspection and scoring of the projects by industry experts at NRG Arena, where the projects were moved from the schools after build completion in early February.
The event is planned and conducted by the ICC Committee, which is responsible for the design of the yearly project and provides all the necessary raw materials to complete the project. Additionally, each participating school was assigned a subject matter expert from the committee to assist with the technical aspects of the project and overall project management.
“For certain jobs in the industrial construction industry, there’s not a clear path to find those jobs,” ICC Committee Chairman J.D. Slaughter said. “We did a study with the Greater Houston Partnership and found that the pipeline into jobs like pipefitting, welding, ironworking and project controls was not well defined.”
He noted that a key goal of the competition is to improve this pipeline by working with participating schools’ career and technical education programs using industrial curriculum and teaching, and by improving their shop tools and equipment availability.
Slaughter added that the ICC provides students with an opportunity to gain hands-on experience as they prepare to join the workforce. Students also develop connections with local companies looking to hire students after graduation.
“Many of the people who are in the industry now knew someone who shepherded them through the process of getting into the industry,” he said. He added that “if you didn’t have connections in the industry, then it was unlikely that you would find a path that would take you into the business. We needed to improve that pipeline of talent.”
Phillips 66, which operates refineries and midstream assets along the Gulf Coast, was the lead sponsor of ICC for the first time this year. “These kids are learning the skills that we need in the industry,” Phillips 66 Senior Vice President of HSE and Field Operations Todd Denton said in a news release. “In addition to gaining construction skills, they were asked to look at the project controls, the schedule and the cost.”
Slaughter said that for him, the most exciting part of the ICC is “seeing kids graduate from high school and then go to work for one of the companies that helped out with the program.” He recalled one former participant who started with such a company after graduating from high school two years ago and is now making close to a six-figure salary as a journeyman pipe fitter. “Getting to see that is the exciting part for me,” Slaughter said. “To see the competition’s purpose come to fruition is a great thing.”