Their Time Is Now: A SkillsUSA Champions Scorecard
Their Time Is Now: A SkillsUSA
Champions Scorecard
The SkillsUSA National Leadership & Skills Conference
brought around 15,000 career and technical education
students, teachers, education leaders and
representatives to Atlanta in June.
All photos courtesy of SkillsUSA
Looking for a metric by which to calibrate a workforce’s
technical skills? The SkillsUSA Championships could be
meaningful to any company’s site selection matrix.
Based in Leesburg, Virginia, SkillsUSA is a student-led
partnership of education and industry representing nearly
380,000 career and technical education (CTE) students and
teachers from middle schools, high schools and
college/postsecondary institutions. Nearly 298,000 members
are from the high school level.
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An estimated 15,000 students, teachers, education leaders and
representatives from 650 national corporations, trade
associations, businesses and labor unions were expected to
participate in the organization’s National Leadership & Skills
Conference (NLSC) in Atlanta in June. A highlight of
the week is the SkillsUSA Championships, career competition
events showcasing the best career and technical education
students in the nation. In 2022, there were nearly 5,200
contestants in 108 separate events. This year featured 6,094
contestants in 110 categories, competing for more than 1,250
gold, silver and bronze medals in such disciplines as
welding fabrication, diesel equipment technology, CNC 2-, 3-
and 5-axis milling programming, digital cinema production,
medical terminology and automated manufacturing technology.
A team competes in the SkillsUSA
Championships welding fabrication catetory,
where the college/postsecondary competition
was won by Dallin Cardon, Noah Vergara and
Kenneth Bell of Utah State University
Eastern.
Over $36 million from industry and education is invested in
the SkillsUSA Championships, where the equipment and
materials include 2,000 computers, 12,500 bricks and 1,500
blocks, 60+ stoves and ovens, 25+ refrigerators, 100+
welders, 50+ manufacturing machines and complete
laboratories for machining, welding, auto repair and
painting. The competition area covered the equivalent of 31
football fields or 41 acres. And the event itself was
estimated to have a $20 million impact on Atlanta.
So who won? We downloaded all the medalists from the NLSC’s
results page and sorted by state:
Top 10
States by Medalists at 2023 SkillsUSA National
Leadership and Skills Conference
State
Medalists
Texas
59
North
Carolina
46
Georgia
44
Tennessee
42
Oklahoma
37
Massachusetts
32
California
31
Utah
27
Florida
23
Pennsylvania
22
A demonstration competition in CNC 5-axis
milling programming featured these high
school medalists: Silver-Xavian Gilbert,
Pickens County Career and Technology Center
(South Carolina); Gold-Thomas Blake, Diman
RVTHS (Massachusetts); and Bronze-Noe Diaz,
Streamwood High School (Illinois). Back row,
l. to r.: College/Postsecondary
medalists—Silver-Cody Russell, York
Technical College (South Carolina);
Gold-Arik Edstrom, Manatee Technical College
(Florida); and Bronze-Jacob Golden, Thaddeus
Stevens College of Technology
(Pennsylvania).
The list of top-performing states hews closely to some recent
Site Selection state rankings, with the top five states all
in the South and the top three of Texas, North Carolina and
Georgia accounting for a number of Governors Cup, Prosperity
Cup and Business Climate Rankings victories in the past
several years.
CTE leadership in Texas can be traced in part to the work of the
Texas Workforce Commission. Among other programs,
the TWC has awarded around 335 Jobs and Education for Texas
(JET) grants averaging $280,000 apiece. “We have traveled
the state doing check signing presentations,” confirmed
Aaron Demerson, the TWC commissioner representing employers,
in an interview earlier this year for the Texas Economic
Development Guide. “In rural communities we’re seeing
students and employers come together, involved in the
curriculum, so when those students graduate, if they’re not
going into a 2-year or 4-year college, they’re walking right
into a job or career. And they can continue getting an
education too.”
SkillsUSA exists to further such programs and with them, the
individual careers of CTE students. No less a skills
champion than Mike Rowe explains in a backgrounder from the
organization:
“The thing about SkillsUSA that’s so cool, and the reason
that my foundation has supported it
for years, is that it is deliberately focused on celebrating
a skill,” Rowe has said. “Three million jobs right now exist
in the trades and transportation and commerce. The skills
gap is real. Training kids and getting them excited to do
the jobs that exist ought to be job one.” — Adam
Bruns
One region taking CTE skills leadership
seriously is Pickens County in rural Upstate
South Carolina, where the notion of the
Scholar-Technician has been trademarked, and
where the Pickens County Career and
Technology Center boasts 1,800 students, a
waiting list of several hundred, and a bevy
of awards.
When it comes to physically demarcated free trade zones, look to Singapore or Hong Kong as shining examples. Or look to eastern China, where boundaried zones have proliferated. The Republic of Korea’s internal competition among zones has led to several excellent models such as the Incheon Free Economic Zone and the Gwangyang Free Economic Zone. Vietnam’s burgeoning roster of zones is also engaged in healthy competition. The argument for special economic zones (or SEZs) is hard to refute.