Home Meeting Planner Resources 5 Add-on Activities to Engage Gen Z

5 Add-on Activities to Engage Gen Z

August 28, 2025

Five add-on events that will entice Gen Z to consider joining your profession as they enter the work force.

Gen Z is just starting to enter the work force, and most meeting and event organizers are joining forces with the professions they support to entice the newest generation to consider their profession as they embark on their careers — and come to their meetings and events.

Here are five activities that event organizers can provide that will help educate Gen Z about all the opportunities available related to their professions, and perhaps swell the future ranks of attendees.

Organize a job fair. To further intrigue those who are on the cusp of making career decisions, hold a job fair in conjunction with your event. Invite attending companies, sponsor and exhibitors to showcase career opportunities available to graduating students and those who are early in their careers. It also can be a good idea to open the job fair up to students who are still in middle or high school who may not be familiar with your profession.
Plan a career day at a local school. It’s never too soon to educate youth about career opportunities — while you have top experts in town for your event, why not ask them to join in a partnership with a local school to hold a session at the school to teach about the different career paths available in your specific field? It’s also a good way to expose the teachers to your profession so they can answer questions and provide guidance, especially for students who will soon be joining the professional work force.
Host a tour of a member company or organization in your meeting’s destination. Chances are good that many of your attendees come from the local area, and they might be willing and able to help organize a tour of their facility and perhaps a meet, greet and educate session on site with the execs. If you are unsure where to start or don’t know of any locally based attendees to tap, ask your host destination marketing organization (DMO) to help. Many have deep ties in the local business community and would be more than glad to help. Be sure to let participants know ahead of time if there are any safety or security protocols needed to take part in the tour, such as clean-room procedures they may have to complete to tour parts of a scientific or medical facility. Logo’d swag can be a great giveaway to help keep the facility, or your organization, top of mind, as well as make for a good photo opportunity to participants to post to their social media channels, further spreading the word.
Plan an alumni day. Tap into your local attendees and/or the DMO to find people from the local community who once attended that high school or local college before beginning a career in your profession. Just having that local connection can help break the ice and make it more comfortable for Gen Z and millennials to approach, ask questions and see for themselves what a career in that profession is all about — and potentially even find a local mentor to help them get there.
Create a professionally focused app or game. Young people do tend to be gamers, so what better way to get them to learn about a career — perhaps event excited about it — than engaging them in a fun app or digital game about it? For example, the manufacturing industry has long had a difficult time getting the next generation interested in considering a career in that industry due to lingering perceptions about what opportunities exist in that field. In 2018, Rockwell Automation and PTC created a free smart manufacturing comic book app that uses augmented reality to showcase the reality of modern manufacturing to the next generation. The game features a kid-friendly comic-book design and augmented reality to help users experience what it’s like to solve real problems — in this case, role-playing a superhero trying to build a drone — from creating the initial design through assembly and quality testing, along with troubleshooting challenges along the way.