Mile Marker 62 – JJ Owen on Closing the Connection Gap with Gen Z and Skilled Trades
We sit down with JJ Owen, Executive Director of Skills Jam, a non-profit built to reach Gen Z where they already are and show them what a reaal career in the trades looks like. JJ spent seven years inside a major foundation from 2011 to 2017, learning what storytelling can do when it comes to galvanizing a community, changing hearts and minds, and reframing the trades as a first-choice career, not a fallback.
JJ walks us through why he sees the labor gap as much as a connection gap as anything else, how Skills Jam builds trust with 14-to-29-year-olds through TikTok and YouTube, and what that…
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