Meet Josh Cecil, who’s throwing a music festival to celebrate the trades

Josh Cecil spins a lot of plates. He’s a business owner, musician, marketer, and former teacher. 

Yet somehow, each one of those skills has helped him organize TradeUp Fest, a first-of-its-kind country music festival celebrating the skilled trades.

What’s happening: TradeUp Fest will take place on September 19 in Noblesville, Indiana, just outside of Indianapolis, and is open to anyone across the country. Think state fair, but with a taste of the trades.

• The one-day event will feature a roster of musical acts performing all day outdoors — and indoors when the sun goes down. 
• Front and center will be Trades Village, Cecil’s spin on a job fair, but one that’s actually exciting. Attendees can participate in hands-on “try-a-trade” experiences, live demos, and explore apprenticeship opportunities. 

Why it matters: Cecil aims to give the trades additional street cred, showing students — and his seven high school-aged kids — the possibilities at their fingertips. 

• “I think the skilled trades need to really talk about wages and how much opportunity is out there,” he said in an interview with Homepros. “I want them to be informed of all the options.”

The backstory: When he worked as a high school teacher, Cecil felt that schools over-emphasized college degrees. But when he ran into a former student who became a welder, everything clicked. The young man casually mentioned that he recently made over $100,000.

• “I’m sitting there as a high school teacher, making $54,000 a year and paying off student loans, thinking, ‘I think I was sold a lie,’” Cecil said. 
• “There was a time when going to college meant almost a guaranteed higher-paying career. But that’s really reversing,” he added. “Holding a screwdriver isn’t going to disappear.”

The big picture: Roughly 165,000 collective annual job openings for HVAC technicians and installers, plumbers and pipefitters, and electricians are projected from 2024 to 2034, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 

Please don’t stop the music: As his day job, Cecil runs HamCo Live, an online platform for discovering live music in his home base of Hamilton County, Indiana. He wanted TradeUp Fest to have a headliner who would draw the community in. 

• “It doesn’t matter what side of the political spectrum you’re on. It doesn’t matter who you pray to, who you love, who you’re married to, what socioeconomic status [you are] — we’re all singing the same song. To me, that’s the power of music,” he said.

Of note: Larry Fleet, the rising country star headlining TradeUp Fest, is a former construction worker himself. 

Looking ahead: Cecil dreams of taking TradeUp Fest across the country, eventually creating a non-profit to advocate for policy changes that affect the trades. 

• “It’s funny, I looked at my life, and all these things converged at the right moment to make this happen,” he said. 

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