NBAA Collegiate Connect Program to Offer Students Business Aviation Career Exposure at NBAA-BACE on Oct. 22
Why It MattersStructured student-to-professional pipelines like this reflect how business aviation is leaning on early career exposure across flight, maintenance and business functions to address workforce pipeline needs.
What happened
The National Business Aviation Association will hold its 2026 Collegiate Connect program on Thursday, Oct. 22, the final day of NBAA-BACE in Las Vegas, giving college students direct exposure to careers across the business aviation industry. NBAA-BACE 2026 runs Oct. 20–22 in Las Vegas.
The session opens with a welcome from NBAA leadership followed by a keynote from Xyla Foxlin, a mechatronics engineer, pilot and content creator who founded Beauty and the Bolt, a nonprofit now operated by Reinvented Inc that has taught thousands of children to use power tools. Foxlin has served as an IF/THEN ambassador with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and is a spokesperson for the Pilot Mental Health Campaign. The program continues with a panel of recent graduates describing how they entered the industry through coursework, clubs, internships and extracurricular activities, followed by a second panel, "Career Possibilities in Business Aviation: Beyond the Obvious," featuring professionals from flight operations, maintenance and business functions.
Attendees then choose from nine networking tour categories — airport business, business management, broker/sales, flight/cabin attendant, innovation and technology, maintenance, marketing, pilot, and scheduler/dispatcher — to meet young professionals working in each field. The day ends at the NBAA-BACE Career Zone, where students can meet recruiters, have a headshot taken and enter to win a $200 Amazon gift card. Admission is free for college students, faculty and chaperones presenting a school or university ID. NBAA, founded in 1947 and headquartered in Washington, DC, represents 10,000 company and professional members in the business aviation community.
Industry impact & what to watch
Programs like Collegiate Connect belong to a broader effort within business aviation to build talent pipelines by pairing students directly with working professionals rather than relying solely on classroom recruiting. Structuring the day around nine distinct functional tracks — from maintenance to broker/sales to scheduling — signals that the segment sees its labor needs spread across operational, technical and commercial roles, not concentrated in piloting alone.
The format also depends on volunteer participation from young professionals already in the field, since the networking tours and graduate panel rely on recent entrants sharing how they got there. Whether this translates into hires will depend on what happens after Oct. 22, at the Career Zone and beyond, where recruiters and students meet directly.
