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Help wanted: Master builder for the NY Legoland resort
By
Ryan Kailath
Published Aug 7, 2024
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By
Ryan Kailath
Published Aug 7, 2024
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If you’ve always thought your Lego skills went above and beyond those of the average builder, now you can survey the brick-stacking competition.
The Legoland resort in the Hudson Valley, which opened in 2021, is hiring a model builder to create and maintain more than 15,000 installations across its 150 acres. These enormous structures are designed to resemble dinosaurs, castles and city skyscrapers – and they're all made entirely from Lego pieces.
Instead of a traditional job application, the resort is hosting a two-round competition in front of a live audience of public visitors, on Aug. 7 and Aug. 14, to find the next builder. These contests take place at two different Legoland locations: at the American Dream mall in New Jersey and in Goshen, New York.
Legoland New York is hiring their next master builder, with a posted salary of $19 an hour, plus benefits.
Courtesy of LEGOLAND.
Thirteen finalists have been selected for the competition, in keeping with how Lego has hired its master builders for years. This is its first in-person competition at the New York resort, where the winner will work full time.
The winner, who will be crowned after the Aug. 14 competition, will get to keep building and maintaining some 30 million Lego bricks across the resort’s various models. The position has a starting salary of $19 an hour plus benefits, said Ryan Wood, a Lego model shop manager who is involved in the recruitment process.
The job posting doesn’t just draw entry-level applicants, Wood said.
“I’ve hired retired schoolteachers, mailmen, policemen – people who in some cases this is their second or third career after they did the adult thing for a lifetime,” he said.
Wood was hired through such a competition in 2009, when he won a model builder search and was hired to work with Legoland in California.
He said the New York job comes with a new twist. Most model builders previously worked in private workshops set apart from the park's public-facing areas, but visitors and Lego fans always clamored to see the process in action, Wood said. So now, builders at Legoland New York will work in the open, among the visiting crowds.
“A lot of the job is going to be interacting with kids 2 to 12 and their family members,” Wood said.
That’s one reason the competition is held in public at the company’s two locations in New Jersey and New York this month, Wood said. They want the audience to interact with the finalists while they’re working, so they can see how the builders handle that challenge.
“When they’re in Legoland New York doing this with kids on a daily basis, it’s going to be this job tryout, but amplified,” Wood said. “We want to see how our contestants interact with our target audience.”
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