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Inside the Canyons Innovation Center, a solution to America’s broken school-to-work pipeline

Walk into a traditional classroom almost anywhere in America and you will see a familiar scene: desks in rows and students sitting face-forward, learning largely the way their grandparents did. Outside those classroom walls, however, the world those students are preparing to enter has fundamentally changed.

America is re-onshoring industries and rediscovering the dignity of what it means to make things again. Artificial intelligence and automation are reshaping how work gets done. At the same time, the industries defining the next century of American competitiveness — advanced manufacturing, aerospace, defense, robotics, energy, cybersecurity, and engineering — face a talent pipeline crisis.

The country is at a reckoning point, one that requires public education to evolve to start preparing students as early as high school for immediate entry into these high-wage, high-demand careers, said Canyons District Superintendent Dr. Rick Robins. “Academic achievement is always going to be at the heart of what we do. But we really do need to lean into this philosophy of workforce readiness.”

That is the premise behind the Canyons Innovation Center, a high-tech, profession-based learning center coming in August 2027 to the former regional headquarters of eBay in Draper. The facility is not a school in the traditional sense. It is an R&D-inspired environment where students work with professionals to solve real-world business problems while earning college credit and industry certifications, and developing the work habits and skills that employers say they so desperately need.