Kimmins is proud to offer a new Civil Technician Apprenticeship Program designed to provide participants with a lifetime of skills and benefits that will allow them to grow and prosper in a variety of rewarding careers.

The program is a first-of-its-kind internal career-advancement resource that we launched in 2021, and one from which our first class of employees will soon graduate, in December 2023.

The program’s early promise points to a new foundation for the way we cultivate our future leaders. The program also exemplifies a core pillar of our organization, Community, and the way we strive to give back to both the outside Tampa Bay community where we operate and the inside Kimmins community where we all support each other.

*A Civil Technician Apprenticeship Program class in session in October.*

Making the Best Better

The Kimmins Civil Tech Apprenticeship Program is like a “Top Gun” school for civil construction in which we take some of the best of our junior-level team members and aim to make them even stronger.

To do this, we’ve devised an intensive two-year series of courses that provides employees with advanced knowledge in major civil construction processes, in-depth training on heavy equipment machinery and its operation, and basic skills in project management and team supervision.

Our goal is to accelerate the career advancement of each participant by enabling them to become trained specialists in civil construction as well as team leaders in project management.

*Classes for the program meet once a week for three hours, and participants must attend 144 hours of class for each of the two years of the program.*

Partnering with the Best

To design the most productive and well-rounded apprenticeship program, we have teamed with three strategic partners.

The first is the National Center for Construction Education and Research (NCCER), a not-for-profit education foundation created by the construction industry to develop standardized curriculum and assessments with portable credentials and certifications for skilled craft professionals. This organization provides the program content and certifies each participant’s progress in the program through online tests.

The second partner is Associated Builders and Contactors (ABC) Florida Gulf Coast, which designs the curriculum and administers the structure and staffing for the program. The syllabus includes special areas of concentration on such major civil construction areas as grading, trenching, pipe laying, concrete work and heavy equipment operation.

Our third strategic partner is Strategist Project Support Services, which leads the classroom instruction of the program courses. This instruction includes one three-hour class each week and 144 hours of classroom time that the participants must attend for each of the two years of the program.

*Instructor Robert Ward from Strategist Project Support Services leads a class through soil volumes and weights.*

Wealth of Rewards

As the first class nears graduation, the Civil Tech Apprenticeship Program is opening a wealth of rewards to the participants as well as to all of us at Kimmins.

For participants, the biggest reward is the advanced knowledge they are gaining and the career-advancement opportunities they are positioning themselves for. An almost equally as significant reward is the tremendous sense of accomplishment they can take after having taken on two years of extra work along with their regular Kimmins day jobs.

Likewise, for us at Kimmins as a whole, the biggest reward is the tremendous pride we can take in witnessing the amazing commitment that these colleagues have made to their careers and to the success of our business.

We congratulate each member of the initial class for attending a three-hour class one day a week on top of a regular eight-hour workday, tackling several hours of homework each month, and passing a battery of online tests over a two-year period. The participants truly represent the finest qualities the Kimmins family holds dear: our core values of Community, Character, Considerate, and Competence.

We applaud all of them and look forward to establishing a long legacy of apprenticeship at our company.