Before the first wave of seniors even walked through the gym doors Friday morning, Culver’s had already hired several Fort Walton Beach High School students.

• That’s the kind of thing that happens at the Viking Voyage Career Fair, and it’s exactly the kind of outcome the school has been building toward since the event launched three years ago.

The third annual career fair brought 108 businesses, colleges, military branches and organizations onto campus Friday, filling rows of tables where employers and students spent the morning in face-to-face conversations about jobs, scholarships and career paths. Students filtered through by grade level, beginning with seniors, as vendors from across the region — from Defuniak Springs to Pensacola — set up shop alongside local employers.

But the most striking story in the gym wasn’t at a corporate table. It was at a booth run by three FWBHS seniors and soccer players — Aidan Pajor, Dillon Young and Isaiah Esparza — who operate Triple Threat Detailing, their own auto detailing business.

The three started the company about two years ago, working out of the back of Pajor’s Durango. They’ve since upgraded to a trailer, invested in ceramic coating equipment and hose reels, and grown their customer base through door-to-door outreach and AI-generated ads on Facebook and Instagram.

• “We started this business really hungry,” Esparza said. “We wanted to work.”

What made their presence at the fair especially meaningful is that all three have attended the Viking Voyage as students since it began. This year, they were on the other side.

“We have been coming to Viking Voyage for three years now,” Pajor said. “I think it means a lot that we were able to get invited and come work it. There’s not a lot of seniors that have their own business.”

Balancing a growing business with the demands of being a high school student hasn’t always been easy. Pajor said their junior year was the toughest, with a school day that ran until 1:49 p.m. leaving limited time for jobs. Now, as seniors with an earlier release, they can fit in two to three cars a day.

• “The clients are really understanding that we are still in high school,” Young said. “But I’m glad that we can do it together. We’ve gone through ups and downs, but our relationships have never been altered. Still best friends.”

Dr. Linda Dugan, Professional School Counselor at FWBHS and one of the organizers behind the fair, said 108 businesses participated this year, with two additional vendors joining Friday morning.

Dugan said the week leading up to the fair included career-themed dress-up days and classroom visits where counselors walked students through Xello, an online career exploration platform, to help them research companies and careers before arriving at the gym. A raffle encouraged engagement, with students completing questions after speaking with vendors and dropping entries into a box for prizes to be awarded Monday.

Even the student tour guides — members of the ROTC program and other selected helpers — researched the participating businesses ahead of time so they could have informed conversations while walking vendors to their tables.

• “They’re familiar with the business before they even get to the table,” Dugan said. “It gives them a sense of accountability and lets them know about a company before they get to know the people behind it.”

The first rows of the gym were filled entirely with colleges from across the region, offering students not just information about their programs but the career paths those programs lead to. Several colleges were also extending scholarship opportunities to students during the fair.

Dugan said the event also produced immediate job offers Friday morning, with some students being hired as they helped businesses set up their equipment.

“It’s a win-win situation,” Dugan said. “The employers get to see the different businesses that have come from all over, not just Okaloosa County, but Escambia, Milton and so forth, but they also get to collaborate with each other and with our students and with our staff.”

• She said one teacher walked out of the gym and told her the event was “phenomenal” — because it had connected the teacher with a guest speaker who could come into the classroom.

For Dugan, seeing Pajor, Young and Esparza with their own booth was a moment that captured what the fair is about.

“It is inspirational to the other peers,” Dugan said. “You can start your business too. This is how they began. They started it from this program, and now they’ve built upon the program.”

Okaloosa County School Board Member Parker Destin, a 2003 Fort Walton Beach High School graduate, said the career fair reflects the district’s broader mission of preparing students for life after graduation — whether that means college, the military or the workforce.

• “There’s nothing better than to be able to connect our community, our employers, our universities and everybody within our local area to our students as they’re on the precipice of going out into the world as adults,” Destin said. “That’s the main goal of the school district.”

Destin said the fair didn’t exist when he was a student at FWBHS, and watching it grow has been encouraging.

“To see it be implemented, and now watching it flourish, I couldn’t be more proud and excited for our students,” he said.

He pointed to the collaboration between staff and students as a driving force behind the event’s continued success.

• “It is a tremendous amount of synergy between the hard work it takes to organize and execute an event like this, but also the collaboration of the students being energized about stepping into the world and being able to see our staff match the enthusiasm and encouraging them into the next part of their lives,” Destin said.

Principal Lindsey Smith said the fair continues to fulfill the school’s mission of connecting students with opportunities in their own community.

“We are incredibly proud of the amazing turnout for the 3rd Annual Viking Voyage Career Fair at Fort Walton Beach High School,” Smith said. “This event provided our students with valuable, real-world insight into careers they can pursue right here in our community. At Fort Walton Beach High School, our goal is to build strong community connections while developing leadership capacity from within, and today was a powerful example of that mission in action.”

Dugan said the school distributes surveys to vendors after every fair, collecting both positive feedback and constructive criticism to improve the event each year.

“We take it to heart and we’re very passionate about it,” she said. “We hope it will continue to grow every year.”