64 Educators. Three Days. A Front-Row Seat to Louisiana Industry.
→Click here to see photos from the event.
Last month, 64 teachers, counselors, and CTE staff from across the region put down their lesson plans and picked up hard hats for GBRIA's 2026 Educator Externship. Over three days, they toured industrial facilities, sat down with the people who run them, and worked their way through a crash course on what a career in Louisiana industry actually looks like.
Day 1 started at ABC Pelican with sessions on safety, workforce development and public affairs led by leaders from GBRIA member companies. On Day 2, the group split up and headed to 12 member facilities for guided plant tours, shadowing maintenance, lab, logistics, and operations teams and exploring the skills needed to succeed in those fields. Day 3 was supposed to wrap up at River Parishes Community College, but a weather call moved things to the Alliance Safety Council ETC Training Center instead. The RPCC presentation happened anyway, alongside a team-building activity, a session on Louisiana's energy workforce, and time for educators to turn the week into actual lesson plans.
According to the feedback surveys, the program landed. Educators rated the program 4.93 out of 5, and every single one said they'd recommend it to a colleague. All of them left with a better sense of what workplace readiness means for their students, and 93% could already point to a specific way to bring it into their classroom. The clearest shift showed up in career knowledge: before the program, only 22% of educators understood what a millwright does. Afterward, 91% did. Process operator understanding climbed from 41% to 88%, and instrumentation technician knowledge went from 40% to 93%. Electrician, welder, and pipefitter knowledge started high and finished at or near 100%.
→Click here to see program outcomes.
Over the past three years, this program has connected more than 170 educators with industry career pathways and reached over 5,000 students through the lessons that come out of it. As one participant put it, the experience gave them knowledge they could take straight back to their students. That's the point: an educator spends three days learning about opportunities right here in our state, and returns to school able to tell a student about a $70,000 career they didn't know existed the week before.