SkillsUSA, Preparing the Future Workforce, With Joe Marco
Episode Description
Students from Motlow State Community College’s SkillsUSA chapter have won both national and state competitions in several categories, including telecommunications-related fields. Joe Marco, instructor at Motlow, discusses the benefits of SkillsUSA and how local broadband providers can prepare the future technical workforce of America.
Joe Marco is also a cybersecurity research engineer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Transcript
Transcripts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Intro: The following program is brought to you by the Tennessee Broadband Association. Lead Tennessee Radio, conversations with the leaders moving our state forward. We look at the issues shaping Tennessee’s future: rural development, public policy, broadband, healthcare and other topics impacting our communities.
Carrie Huckeby: SkillsUSA was founded in 1965, and it is a partnership of students, teachers and industry working together to ensure there is a skilled workforce. The mission of the organization is to empower its members to become world class workers, leaders and citizens. And one of those instructors, teachers is my guest on this episode of Lead Tennessee Radio. Joe Marco. He is a cyber engineer at the University of Alabama, and he’s also an adjunct technology instructor for Motlow State Community College. He’s also a US Army retired. Thank you for your service, Joe. And he is here to tell us more about SkillsUSA. Welcome, thanks for joining me.
Joe Marco: Thanks for the opportunity to come and talk about SkillsUSA.
Carrie Huckeby: Well, to kick us off to start us, tell me and our listeners just a little bit more about SkillsUSA and what inspired you, or drew you, to get involved.
Joe Marco: SkillsUSA is a partnership between students, teachers and industry. We work together to ensure America has a stronger skilled workforce. It’s a nonprofit educational association that serves middle schools, high schools and post-secondary to prepare students for careers in the trade. What drew me to SkillsUSA is when I was in high school, my junior and senior year in 1992 and 199 – I’m sorry, ’93 and ’94, I competed in what was called VICA – Vocational Industrial Clubs of America. So SkillsUSA is what VICA was. So any of the older crowd that remembers what VICA was back in the day, VICA is SkillsUSA. So we just added more to it, made it a little bigger. Before it was the skill trades of, you know, when it was vocational, heating and cooling, plumbing. It was a more narrowed skill set. Now, it’s culinary. It’s baking. It’s construction. It’s masonry. It’s technology. There’s drones. There’s everything. So it’s just morphed into a much bigger, larger competition than it was when it was VICA. But that’s what brought me into it. My my teacher, Mr. Blatter, back when I was a junior in high school, he got me involved, and I thought it was the coolest thing. When I became a teacher, I started at Stewarts Creek in 2016. I showed up there, and they had a SkillsUSA chapter, but the technology department, we didn’t compete in it. So I got with my partner instructor and said, “You know this, we’re doing it.” And he didn’t really know much about it. He knew about it a little bit, but he had never competed. So my first year, we decided to go and that started my track down the SkillsUSA path at the high school level.
Carrie Huckeby: Got it. Well, you mentioned some of those technical skills, and it is a wide variety and a good range. So, you know, as the students explore those options and maybe they excel in those through SkillsUSA, how do you think those skills contribute to maybe, you know, a two year and four year formal education makes them a more rounded, I mean, a very desirable employee and very skilled. How does that work together?
Joe Marco: Well, it’s kind of – SkillsUSA is unique in the way it’s developed over time. So not only are they competing, before they even start the competition, just to start, you have to submit a resume. And the resume is not for them to compare certifications or jobs or it really has nothing to do with the contents of the resume. It has to do with their ability to construct the resume and tell their story on a one page document. And take enough pride in it to not have grammatical errors, to have somebody check behind him and proof it to make sure it tells the story it needs to be told. That’s what they’re looking for in the resume. It’s not truly the what the resume contains. So that’s just step one of the process. Step two, you have to have a uniform. So there’s actual uniform judges. They are third party. They’re not associated with your competition. All those judges come in, they judge your uniform. If it says black socks, you don’t have black socks. Guess what? You lost points. If it says black shoes and you have a gray stripe on those black shoes, you lost points. So that’s step two. And then step three, they conduct a job interview. So once they conduct this job interview, they put them in a hot seat. They’ll ask them some serious questions. Again, they’re not grading them on the knowledge of the questions they’re asking. [It’s] how they compose themselves and how they present themselves.
Joe Marco: So we’ve gone through three phases of competition, and we haven’t even touched what they’re there for yet. And then we get into the actual competition where it is raw, what you know, how much better you are than the person next to you. And they take all that together, and that’s what determines your score. So if you get a top three finisher from state level SkillsUSA applying to your industry, whatever industry it is, you know that they’ve accomplished those tasks, and they have that ability. I think that’s huge for industry because every time I go to the Murfreesboro Technology Council, the Rutherford County Technology Council, the National Tech Council, Cyber Huntsville, any of these places I go to and talk to industry professionals, the one thing they’re missing is those skills right there. They just want somebody that can get to work on time in the right uniform and be willing to learn. And if you have a top three finisher from a state level SkillsUSA, I guarantee you you’re getting that. And that’s why it’s important. We talked about the partnership between us and industry. We’re going to get into that here later on in the discussion, I think, about the importance of the partnership between the industry and SkillsUSA and how it benefits them.
Carrie Huckeby: Well, that’s great to know. It’s very foundational or layered with learning the resume and everything that comes with it before you actually apply whatever skill they have. So that’s great to know. And talking about the competition, we recently highlighted two of the success stories of SkillsUSA on the TNBA website, and we also talked about it in our newsletter. You had two Motlow young ladies that placed first in the state competition at the SkillsUSA State Leadership and Skills Conference in June. Mariam Tanas in Cisco internetworking, and Gabby Miller in telecommunication cabling. They were the only females in a very male dominated technology event, I think. And then they later competed in Atlanta, and Gabby bringing home the bronze. Mariam placing in the top ten. First of all, it’s great to see these young women compete in technical fields, but tell us what the competition actually means to them and others in their future success in their career. I mean, what does it provide them?
Joe Marco: First, I’m going to take you back in time a little bit, because that only tells half the story. And it’s a bit of a testament to what SkillsUSA does. So let’s go back two years. Like I said, I’ve been in SkillsUSA. This is my sixth year in SkillsUSA. So my fourth year, Mariam, she decided she was going to compete in telecommunications cabling. Now, she was a junior in high school. She was a dual enrollment student. Now she was graduating as a junior, so she was ahead of her peer group. So she was one of the advanced students. So we decided – or I decided – that she would compete at the collegiate level. She’d compete post-secondary as a junior in high school. Well, that immediately kind of set off her panic buttons of – or her panic alarms – of I’m high school. I’m not college. Well, she had that ability. So we competed at the college level. She went to state. She took gold in the state in 2022 for telecommunications cabling. Fast forward, we go to nationals, bigger group. There are a few girls or females in this one. Bigger group, much harder competition, and she took first in the nation in telecommunications cabling in 2022 as a junior in high school. So we leave. Everything kind of dies down a little bit. She decides she’s going to run. Now she’s a freshman in college. She should be a senior. She decides she’s going to run to become the president of the Motlow’s SkillsUSA chapter, which presides over six separate geographically dispersed locations across Middle Tennessee. So she ended up getting elected to president. So as a what should have been a senior in high school, she’s now running the SkillsUSA chapter for Motlow, and she went on to run for a state officer position.
Joe Marco: So not only was she the Motlow President, she was the SkillsUSA Tennessee Treasurer for SkillsUSA. So after this is all done, we decide we’re going into 2023. What are our competitions going to be? Well, she doesn’t want to do the same one twice because she already won gold. She wants to try something else. So her plan was to take the most difficult competition in technology for SkillUSA, which is Cisco Internetworking. I would train her for that. She would take what she learned, and she was going to train somebody for telecom cabling. So Gabriel’s third place win at nationals and first place win at state was not because of me. It was because Mariam took her. She took that leadership role and mentored another student to go on and be successful. And that’s kind of the story of SkillsUSA. That’s kind of like the epitome of the story of SkillsUSA is we you know, we’re training our future generations. Well, it doesn’t get any more to the ground than that. I trained Miriam. She trained her. They both won. So the two of them became very close friends to this day. They’re best friends now. And I don’t think before that they had even talked to each other. So it was a pretty big deal how this whole thing unfolded with the two of them. Again, females in a male dominated competition. It was the best part of my teaching career was because Mariam was a state officer, so when the medals got presented at state, when Mariam put the gold medal on the person she trained, that kind of capped off my teaching career right there.
Carrie Huckeby: Oh, I can’t imagine how wonderful that felt to see that. I mean, it certainly, as you said, a testament to her and to the program and all that. So she sounds like an impressive young lady. I would love to meet her, and maybe I’ll get an opportunity to do that sometime. Now, do I remember correctly that was she hired by the University of Alabama?
Joe Marco: Yes. So she graduates Motlow in December with her associates, again, six months ahead. So now she graduated high school 12 months ahead of her peer group. She’s graduating college six more. So she’s 18 months ahead of her freshman peer group in high school. And she will be attending University of Alabama at Huntsville. She hasn’t decided whether she’s doing cybersecurity technology or mechanical engineering yet, but we did hire her at the Cybersecurity Center for Research and Engineering. She is an associate researcher there. So yeah, we think – it was important to get her into our circle. That way it helps her make that transition to the university and finish her four year degree.
Carrie Huckeby: Yeah. Congratulations to her, and congratulations to the University of Alabama at Huntsville for grabbing her up.
Joe Marco: Gabriel is also thinking about moving to UAH. She’s got a little bit longer at Motlow left, but she’s looking at going that direction, too. And I’m very interested in seeing what Gabby – I saw what Mariam’s second year at SkillsUSA and Motlow was. I’m interested. I’m very anxious to see what Gabriel’s second year is going to bring here come the end of August when we start kicking off our SkillsUSA season.
Carrie Huckeby: Yeah, I’ll look forward to keeping up with those two and see what they accomplish. So we’ve talked about a little bit about the job market, and it is changing. Big demand for the trades. Our industry, the broadband industry, is just one example. Recently a report came out that our industry would need over 200,000 employees to finish out building broadband across the nation. You know, there’s a lot of funding coming down for that, that’s there, but finding the employees and those skilled workers. So as the market changes, as technology changes, how does SkillsUSA align the students with those demands and, you know, and those industries? I’m sure it has to do with the industry partners. But how do you understand where all those possibilities are and just keep up with what’s happening?
Joe Marco: The first thing I tell all the instructors to do is join their local technology, like we have the Murfreesboro Tech Council, Russell County Tech. They need to find their technology council, their construction, baking, whatever industry they’re in. They need to find that. And the first place to start is the Chamber of Commerce. Go to the Chamber of Commerce. I tell them to start there. Let them point you into a direction. Because I think a misnomer everybody has is that when I’m looking for an industry partner, I’m looking for money. That’s completely false. Of course, I am looking for money sometimes. But if it’s a three man shop, I don’t need the money. I might just need them to come help train my student on something that I’m not that sharp on. For example, we were connected with Ben Lomand through Larry Flatt at Motlow. He connected us. And Ben Lomand was able to lend me some fiber optic tools, which allowed me to train these girls before going to Skills in an area that we don’t have tools in. A lot of schools don’t have fiber tools because they’re expensive. So what happens is they get to nationals, they give them a two hour block of instruction, and that’s all they have to dive into this competition with. Well, through industry partner, I was able to get our girls prepared before we got there. And I didn’t need money from Ben Lomand. I didn’t need, I didn’t even need time. I just needed a loaner, a loaner of some tools. So the industry partnership, and I don’t want industry partners to be afraid to engage us because they think all we’re going to ask for is money. Because like I said, the small shops with only a few people in it, we don’t need their money; we just need their experience.
Joe Marco: Now, the bigger shops. Yeah, you know, I’m going to Ben Lomand, I’m going to these bigger companies. I might ask them for some kind of donations. But that’s where teachers got to kind of – or instructors – kind of got to be a little cognizant of what they’re asking for and know their audience. Because in the end, if Ben Lomand gives me a little bit of time, I’m going to be able to give them some people that are quality employees. And that’s what the industry understands that. And a lot of these instructors don’t understand that the industry does get it. If they dump time and effort into us, we’re going to provide what they need down the road. The soft skills are one of the biggest things we’re having troubles with in industry, right? All of the industries. It doesn’t matter what. You name the industry, soft skills is an issue. People can’t talk to people. People can’t show up on time. They don’t understand how to dress appropriately and SkillsUSA really leverages that. So the tighter our partnership is with industry, the more they are going to benefit from those results. SkillsUSA has a huge reach. We currently have over 300,000 students in SkillsUSA. Just because they’re not winning state championships, doesn’t mean they’re not learning these lessons. Every student in my classroom, every Wednesday, had a dress for success day. They got bonus points for coming in dressed like they would go to a job interview. So they still leave my classroom with some knowledge, even though they didn’t compete at a state or national level. If you have somebody with SkillsUSA attached to their resume, you might want to give them a close look.
Carrie Huckeby: Yeah, such good points. I didn’t realize that SkillsUSA did concentrate so much on the soft skills as well, which are so important because they don’t have the opportunity to show what they know in the trades unless they get that job interview, and they can communicate and do the resume and all of that.
Joe Marco: And that’s another great point. You know, the first thing you see on a job application or a job posting is experience. One year experience. Well, how do you get that? SkillsUSA is that hands on experience. So if a student is graduating high school complaining that every job wants experience, how are they supposed to get it? Well, that was their opportunity. So when they do go to the community college, they got a second opportunity because a lot of community colleges, the TCATs, they’re all participating in Skills. So there’s their second opportunity once they realize that, Wow, I did need SkillsUSA because it gave me that experience that the industry is looking for.
Carrie Huckeby: Yeah, great point. And as you mentioned, going to the Chamber of Commerce, most communities have industrial and industry committees that work on looking, you know, what industry has to offer in each of your communities. So great point that you’re not always looking for monetary donation. You’re looking for experience and skill. So good point.
Joe Marco: Just because I’m an instructor doesn’t mean I know everything. There’s somebody stronger in certain areas than I am. And I leverage that every chance I get, which is why we have eight state championships and one national championship because I know what I don’t know, and I’m willing to accept that and go find somebody that can help us.
Carrie Huckeby: Great point. So you mentioned the competition, and there are 300,000 students in the program, which is awesome. And not everybody gets to go to competition. But how important is the competition to the ones that compete? Mariam and Gabriela, you know, it’s on their resume, of course, but what kind of time commitment are these students putting in to get to the competition?
Joe Marco: Honestly, it’s less than you would think.
Carrie Huckeby: Really? Good.
Joe Marco: We cover a majority of the stuff in class, so they have a base foundation. Now, they will never go and win with the base foundation. So we would meet starting two months prior to the competition. I believe April was our competition for state. So starting in about February-ish, we start meeting twice a week, and we really start hitting focused heavy on the standards that they’re going to be tested on. The telecom cabling one is a little bit easier to prep for because there’s only so many ways you can do this and so many ways to troubleshoot it. Cisco internetworking, that took a lot more man hours – or woman hours in their case – to get this pieced together and and cover all the possibilities she could have. And we still didn’t cover the possibilities. She showed up there. There was stuff they threw at her that she was like, I had no idea. And I’d tell her, like, I had no idea either. So there’s always going to be stuff that we don’t know. But I’d say twice a week, two months out is when we started our serious preparation. And that’s because they had a good foundation.
Joe Marco: I want to hit one more point. I’m talking about competitions that are directly related to industry like culinary, construction, telecom cabling. But we have competitions that aren’t directly related. They’re kind of around the side related. There’s a competition for job interview. There’s a competition for public speaking. There’s a competition for debate. One of my students was going to compete in cybersecurity, lost his partner. And you have to do two. So he was like, I just want to compete in something. So we put him in extemporaneous speaking. He took third place in the state for extemporaneous speaking in 2023. First and second place decided they didn’t want to go to nationals, so we took him to nationals because the third place gets the opportunity. He took first in the nation in extemporaneous speaking. And his whole point, he was going to compete in cybersecurity. So there’s over 180 competitions. If you have students that want to compete, find their strengths and put them in it. It doesn’t matter if it’s public speaking, if it’s a job interview, there’s something for everybody that’s great.
Carrie Huckeby: And you have a video on the SkillsUSA website that I watched from the competition. I was amazed, as you said, the segments, masonry, the culinary. I mean, it showed. It gave a really quick overview of the competition. So if anyone wants to see what you’re talking about, they can go and kind of get a snippet of that from that video. It was very well done.
Joe Marco: And at nationals, state level. These are all hosted or sponsored by, usually local companies or colleges. At the national level, it’s Harley-Davidson. It’s Ford. It’s Nissan. You know, their motorcycle repair is hosted by Harley-Davidson. Cisco does Cisco internetworking. Bosch, Milwaukee. The major brands are hosting all of these competitions. Like, and generally when they come, they’re bringing their HR reps with them. They’re scouting you out. And when you’re at nationals, your students are being looked at for jobs. We had the head of talent acquisitions for Cisco at our at Mariam’s competition this year. It’s a big deal for these students. So a couple of days a week, a little extra work is not a lot to ask for when it could yield opportunities that it does.
Carrie Huckeby: Yeah, those kind of gains. Yeah. So let’s touch on industry partners. You mentioned a lot of them there; the brands at the national competition. But talk about your industry partners just a little bit. And you talked about it earlier where you’re looking for expertise and skills sometimes, not always money. But how do the partnerships benefit the students, and how do you establish maintain those strong relationships with those partners and keep those students connected with those employers? Potential employers, I should say.
Joe Marco: It’s an interesting dynamic we have between them all. Because at the high school level, it’s a little harder to bring people into the schools, especially with Covid. It kind of hurt a lot of our industry partnerships. Not because nobody wanted to, but because it was just too hard. One of the biggest things I love to do is get our students out in the field. You know, I understand they can’t have access to certain data, and they can’t do certain things. But just to see what they’re doing, what the bigger picture is. Because everybody works in a confined classroom in close. I use construction as an example. Nobody builds a house at school, really. They build little tiny ones. But if they can take them to the construction site, and it gives us the opportunities for field trips. Again, another thing a business partner can do for us that doesn’t require anything except for time is let us just come and see. Let the students see because that will build their interest, and it also remove that interest. In technology, there are so many facets of technology, whether it’s medical, whether it’s banking, whether it’s payment card industry. There’s so many different facets people can look at. I got a student that was a numbers genius. Well, you can go into the financial industry and audit their cyber mechanisms in the financial industry. So and getting out there into the field and on these field trips allows these students to see the different aspects of what can be done.
Joe Marco: And that benefits the students tremendously because it helps them find their path. The more exposure we can get through industry partners. I can sit up there and play videos and talk all day long about the opportunities, but that don’t mean anything compared to them going out on a field trip and seeing those opportunities and saying, Wow, that looks pretty cool. And it could completely change their trajectory. Mariam had absolutely no desire to do cybersecurity. She took my class as a 14 year old freshman in high school, just because. And once she got involved and saw some of the opportunities in the, – you know, I can work here for five years, get a little bored, and I can stay in my industry and just go to a different aspect. I might be repairing things this month, and then I might decide to go and do networking the next month. So the opportunities to shift around within your industry. Because in this later generation, I think it’s my generation, there’s a lot of moving, completely shifting from one career to a new career. Because they just either get stagnant. There’s 100 reasons why my generation is shifting careers. But in technology, if you get these people out there, and they can see the options, they may not shift careers. They may shift within their career now.
Carrie Huckeby: Yeah, good point. So how does a industry partner, or how does an industry get more information, Joe? Where do they go? Where do they say, hey, I’d like for you to bring your class here. I’d like to be, you know, a partner, sponsor or whatever. How do they get involved?
Joe Marco: I would again, I’d tell them the same thing I tell the teachers. Let’s start with the councils. Start with the Chamber of Commerce. Chamber of Commerce is wheeled in with the schools. Invite schools. Like I said, I used Murfreesboro Technology Council a lot because it’s right here. Send them an invite. Send the schools. Get with the CTE advisor for your district. I live in Rutherford County. We have a CT head advisor, Tyra Pilgrim. If anybody in the industry contact Tyra, she would make it her priority to get them in touch with the instructors that they want. Because every school district, their CT director will make it a priority to link up industry reps that want to be partnered with schools. Because it eases the burden on the district a lot too if they can create those partnerships. And it does generate some kind of funding or anything like that. Half of the devices I had in my lab were donated from another company, whether it’s quantum computing or or Ben Lomand. Those donations take a financial burden off the county because now they don’t have to buy that stuff for me. So, yes, I encourage industry partners to reach out to the CT directors of their county or their districts and start there. And send a direct invite. You can get on the school website, look in the staff directory and see who teaches technology or construction or culinary. Send them an email. Hey, this is who I am. I’m looking to partner. And any instructor will jump on that.
Carrie Huckeby: Great advice for sure. As we wrap up, Joe, anything, one final point that you want to make about the program or instruction?
Joe Marco: Yeah, I think SkillsUSA and again, I sat in a classroom with high school students. There was two of us. We had a 300 fill. Each of us had 150 students from freshman at 14, all the way to senior at 18. So I’ve seen the entire range of demographic, and I think I have a pretty good grasp on what’s going on out there. SkillsUSA cannot get large enough to impact the students it needs to. We need to impact, you know, Rutherford County schools alone. I think we have over 2,000 students in every one of our high schools. Those students need to understand the importance of getting to work on time, being in the right uniform and just be willing to learn. And SkillsUSA is probably the greatest tool we have right now to make that happen. So if schools don’t have a SkillsUSA chapter, they need to get one. Now, there’s DECA. There’s a couple other chapters out there that do the same thing Skills does. I’m only familiar with skills, which is why I’m so SkillsUSA biased. Colleges, you guys are this – I’m talking about like Motlows, TCATs, post-secondary education, you’re the second line when it comes to this. Because if they go through high school and they don’t get this, hopefully by the time they get you, they realize they needed it, and you need to have it there for them.
Joe Marco: This is how we get our – I don’t want to call it blue collar industry – but our industry, our vocational or our career technical education industries on track. Our construction, our plumbing. I mean, I tell my kids this all the time. I got a 13 year old and 10 year old. A plumber that does good work, will make more money than any master’s degree I know. But you got to do the good work. A plumber that does bad work is going to have no work. So pride in what they do. And I do believe when you pair up our industry with the competitive nature and the camaraderie that SkillsUSA builds, I do believe they develop a pride in their work. Because they’re working in that. You know, we have 27 students we took to SkillsUSA this year. Those 27 people still talk to each other this day because of the camaraderie they built, and it reinforced the pride in what they did. And I think SkillsUSA will have a huge hand in bringing pride back into our industries, whatever industry it is.
Carrie Huckeby: Such good points. So enjoyed this conversation with you this morning, Joe, and learning more about SkillsUSA and wish you every success with the program. And I’ll certainly do what I can to get the word out there, for sure. My guest has been Joe Marco, cyber research engineer at the University of Alabama and adjunct cybersecurity technology instructor for Motlow State Community College. You’ve been listening to Lead Tennessee Radio, produced by the Tennessee Broadband Association, cooperative and independent companies connecting our state’s rural communities and beyond with world class broadband.