Renee Zentz didn’t come from construction. She came from horses. She got her degree in equine science from Colorado State, spent a decade training horses, ended up managing rodeo grounds, and somehow landed a job running a home building association without knowing what one was.
“From horses to housing is kind of what I say.”
Twenty-four years later, she’s built one of the most effective workforce development programs in the country, and it started with a $20,000 check and a question nobody was asking loudly enough: where are the next tradespeople coming from?
In this episode, Michael sits down with Renee to talk about Careers in Construction Colorado (CIC Colorado), the nonprofit she now leads full-time after incubating it inside the Colorado Springs Housing and Building Association for a decade. The program puts pre-apprenticeship curriculum into high schools, pairs students with career navigators from the industry, and tracks real outcomes like W-2s, certifications, and job retention. Not feel-good metrics. Actual employment data.
“What you measure matters. And it wasn’t just about teaching skills, it was about true job skills for work.”
The numbers tell a compelling story. CIC Colorado is now in 91 high schools across the state, student levels are just under 5,000 across the state, with 110 teachers delivering the same Department of Labor-certified curriculum. While not all continue in construction, their guarantee is a life skill learned there.
In 2025 alone, they placed 682 students directly into industry jobs. When they survey students annually, 1 in 2 respond that they are in construction or pursuing a career in construction, earning three to four dollars more per hour than their peers outside the trades.
Their confidence scores jump from 1.3 to 3.6 on a four-point scale between the start and end of the program. And 68 of those 91 schools are Title I, meaning they serve underserved communities where career conversations at the dinner table are often replaced by conversations about making rent.
Michael and Renee dig into how the program actually works on the ground. The framework is straightforward: schools provide the teacher and the facility, CIC Colorado pays for curriculum, materials, certifications, and a stipend for the instructor. Career navigators visit classrooms regularly, bringing in industry professionals and connecting students to real jobs. When Renee calls those companies, she knows exactly who she wants in front of the students:
“I want your cutest, smartest, most tattiest, with the big truck, to show up, male or female, I don’t care, because these kids need to see themselves there. You can’t be it if you can’t see it.”
The key principle is that the program stays agnostic about where kids end up. No single company gets to claim a school’s graduates. Students choose their own path, and if they decide construction isn’t for them, that’s a win too, because at least they know.
They talk about the real barriers: schools built without shop facilities, a shortage of qualified instructors, and parents who until recently viewed the trades as a fallback rather than a legitimate career.
“We told students if you weren’t college bound, you were either military or McDonald’s. We built this system to go directly into college with no exploration in high school, no pathways that would be noble.”
In 2019, only 13% of parents were favorable toward their kids entering the trades. That number has climbed to 35%, and the momentum is building.
Some of the best moments in the conversation come from the stories. There’s Colton, a kid getting kicked out of class who turned his life around after a tattooed sales professional walked in and said, “I used to be you. You have the ability right now to change your life.” There’s the heavy equipment company owner who told a room full of 2A football players that life is 6A, and the coach called the next day to report the best practice the team had ever had. There’s a mom in Summit County who fought against her son taking construction classes, only to watch the program pull him out of depression and send him to CSU for construction management.
These aren’t marketing stories. They’re what happens when the industry shows up in the classroom.
Renee is honest about the impact on teachers too.
“They don’t feel alone. They don’t feel like they have to cut a kid out and say, that kid’s not going to work. They can say, hey, can you give me some help with this young man? Let’s bring a professional in, let’s get him in front of some different career pathways, let’s give him some hope.”
Michael and Renee also get into the bigger picture: the five-to-one ratio of retiring tradespeople to new entrants, the Navy’s search for almost 300,000 skilled workers, and the policy decisions that stripped shop class out of American high schools in the first place. They discuss the legislation CIC Colorado helped pass to create financial incentives for schools offering career technical education, and the early conversations happening with states like Kentucky, Massachusetts, Utah, and Oklahoma about replicating the model.
“The program is simple, but not easy.”
“You put your shoulder into a boulder, eventually it keeps rolling.”
Renee is clear about what makes CIC Colorado different from programs that stay at the awareness level:
“This nonprofit is doers. We’re not facilitators or intermediaries. We have the actual outcomes. And people love that.”
If you’re a builder, a trade association leader, or someone who cares about where the next generation of skilled workers is coming from, this one is worth your time.
“When somebody has a trade, they have confidence, they have competency. They’re not afraid to take risks anymore. The people who don’t have a skill are really, really afraid to take risks.”
About Renee Zentz
Renee Zentz is President and CEO of Careers in Construction Colorado (CICC), a nonprofit dedicated to bringing hands-on vocational education back into high schools across the state. Before launching CICC, Renee served as CEO of the Housing & Building Association of Colorado Springs for 23 years. Under her leadership, CICC has expanded to 92 schools, providing opportunities to over 4,600 students annually. Renee is a graduate of Colorado State University and a recipient of the NAHB Executive Officer Lifetime Achievement Award. She lives in Colorado Springs.
Learn more at https://CICColorado.org.
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