Why a Children's Career Fair Welcomes 2-Year-Olds

A children's career fair in Scranton spent Saturday morning handing paper "career passports" to kids as young as 2, then stamping them booth by booth as those kids tried on jobs they'd mostly only seen on a screen. The fair ran from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 431 North 7th Avenue, hosted by Outreach – Center for Community Resources, and none of it cost a family anything.

The scale is what surprises people. More than 40 careers were laid out for children aged 2 to 12 — science, technology, health care, finance, education, the skilled trades, creative work — each station run by someone from a local employer who actually does the job. Fill the passport, and a child picks a prize out of a free children's store on the way out.

This year the event added a second audience. The theme was "Professions for Parents, Too!", and adults walked the same floor with a different assignment: sitting down with local employers to talk about their own career paths in Lackawanna County. For a morning that began as a kids' event, that's a meaningful change, and it says something about who has been showing up.

What Happens Inside a Children's Career Fair

Picture a school gym crossed with a block party. There's face painting and live music, STEAM projects kids can put their hands on, and tables where a police officer, a nurse or a welder demonstrates a piece of the daily work in about ninety seconds. Nobody hands a five-year-old a brochure. The whole design assumes a short attention span and leans into it.

The career passport and the free store

The passport is the engine of the thing. Each child carries a booklet from booth to booth and collects a mark at every stop, which turns wandering into a game with an ending. A completed passport buys a pick from a free children's store stocked with educational items. It's a small bribe with a real function: it gets a kid to talk to 40 strangers about work.

Haircuts, backpacks and lunch

Around the career tables sits a second layer of help timed to the school calendar. Families leave with backpacks and school supplies, kids can get a free back-to-school haircut, and there's food and treats on site. Last year, a Scranton barber shop did the cutting. It's the kind of bundling that gets a parent through the door when a career fair alone might not.

Why Age 2 Isn't Too Early

It sounds like a joke — a career fair for toddlers — until you look at what researchers have found about when ambition sets. The UK charity Education and Employers surveyed more than 20,000 primary-age children across a dozen countries for its "Drawing the Future" report and found the gap between what a seven-year-old wants to be and what a 17-year-old wants to be is startlingly small.

The same research found kids mostly learn about jobs from parents, their parents' friends, and television, and that fewer than one in a hundred had heard about a job from someone from the working world visiting their school. Aspirations also split along gender and income lines early. In other words, a child's list of possible futures is short by age seven, and it's short because of who they happen to know.

When a child has a future orientation and an idea of what they want to be, it helps reduce teen pregnancy, it keeps them on track to graduate high school, it reduces the likelihood to drug or substance abuse. — Lori Chaffers, president and CEO of Outreach – Center for Community Resources, speaking at last year's fair

The Part Parents Weren't Expecting

The 2025 edition, held on a Saturday in mid-August at the same North 7th Avenue site, was built entirely around the children. Adding a parents' track in 2026 reframes the morning as a household event rather than a childcare event. A caregiver who came for a backpack can walk out with a name at a regional employer — and Northeast Pennsylvania's health care, logistics and trades employers all hire year-round.

What a Free Morning Is Actually Worth

Put a dollar figure on it. A parent at last year's fair told FOX56 that her son's haircut alone would have run about $30, and that even if the backpacks went unused, everything inside them got used. Stack a haircut, a loaded backpack and lunch for two or three kids against an August paycheck and you're looking at real money kept in the household during the most expensive week of the school year.

How to Get In Next August

Outreach runs this fair annually, always in the back-to-school stretch of August, so watch for the announcement in early summer rather than the week of. Families can contact Liz Ratchford at Outreach – Center for Community Resources at (570) 558-7562 for details. If you run a local business, the more useful move is to volunteer a table — the research says a stranger with a job is exactly what most kids are missing.