There’s a chance the 2012 Career Fair may not take place at all this year unless more sponsors step forward to provide financial backing.The Career Fair, is scheduled to take place on the Bermuda College campus on October 18 and 19, but the event’s organising chairman, Ralph Richardson said that may not be possible unless they can raise more funds in the next month.“We do have a few sponsors right now, but I think if a lead sponsor came in and announced that they were taking it over, the organising committee would be quite happy to work with them and make sure it happens and we can certainly do that from now until October.”The Career Fair, now in its eight year, is geared at getting middle school and high school aged students thinking about what they want to do in the future and what they’ll need to study to make that happen.“We commissioned a study on careers and found an underlying trend — that when young students connect learning and the workplace, learning takes on a whole different meaning to them,” Mr Richardson said. “This is not a career fair. There’s no expectation that students are going to walk away with a job.“At some point a student says, ‘if I want to do this career, I’m going to have to do x, y, z’ and when they make that connection, all of a sudden, learning becomes important to them. The whole purpose of the career fair is to expose young people to their options.”But Mr Richardson says without the financial backing, Bermuda’s students may not have the opportunity to explore their options. He said many of the event’s past sponsors have had to back out.“We don’t want to mention the ones that have pulled out this year because we don’t want to embarrass anybody and they’ve been really great sponsors, but some have had to pull out because of their own challenges,” he said.The Career Fair typically features 75 booths and gets anywhere from 2,000 to 2,500 students attending the two-day event. Mr Richardson says he and the organising committee have cut the event’s budget by more than $100,000.“It’s costing about $120,000 to put it on this year — and that’s scaled down compared to the cost of it in the past when we spent around $230,000. But there’s no way we can do it any cheaper than that — we’ve got tents, trucks, set-up, staffing, security — that’s what it takes for it to happen, but unless there’s sponsorship, it can’t happen.“A title sponsor can give cash or an in-kind gift. In the past, sponsors have provided places for meetings to be held or supplied expertise from their staff. If I were to put an amount out there, we’d be looking at $30,000 to $40,000 as a title lead sponsor branded with that company’s name,” he said. “I think that would be the main advantage — to show that they’ve taken a keen interest in our young people.”Mr Richardson says the event’s organising committee is grateful for the support to date from Belco, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Trade and Industry and other companies who have already committed.Companies interested in sponsoring the event may contact Career Fair organisers at careerfair@selectsitesgroup.com