Students gather in Atlanta to participate in trade skills competition

While many students are in summer programs or camps, several thousand young people participated in a unique activity — honing their trade skills, professions that industry leaders say need new blood.

As a part of SkillsUSA, a workforce development organization, students across the country participated in a recent three-day competition at the Georgia World Congress Center, working on their trade skills, possibly creating a path to scholarships or job offers. Nearly 7,000 students competed in areas including welding, carpentry, masonry and 3D printing. Some competitions also included a liberal arts focus, concentrating on photography, advertising and cosmetology.

Credit: Ben Gray

Ty Pennington, known for his popular shows, “Trading Spaces” and “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” attended the event and told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the competition comes at the perfect time. Many trade professionals are retiring, leaving a shortage in those professions, he said.

“There’s one person going in for every five that’s leaving the industry, because they’re aging out,” Pennington said. “So that is a window of opportunity that people are missing out on.”

Pennington added that he started his trade career as a landscaper, and then soon learned other skills and became a carpenter. That’s one of the benefits, he said.

Credit: Picasa

“The thing about being in the trades is you may specialize in carpentry, but you’re going to learn plumbing, you’re going to learn drywall,” he said. You learn all of it, he said.

State leaders have talked about the importance of getting more young people in such careers, raising similar concerns about the number of projected job vacancies in fields such as welding while noting the high salaries they can command. Georgia’s HOPE Career Grant offers no-cost tuition for programs that provide training for jobs in high-demand fields such as welding, automotive and construction technologies; practical nursing; and early childhood care.

Emily Pinto competed in advertising and photography, ultimately winning two state gold medals in 2022 and 2023. When she first competed as a student at Augusta Technical College, she had already had a handful of jobs.

“I had already been through five jobs,” Pinto said. “I knew I wanted to do something big, but I had no direction.”

Through it, she said, she and other students got to experience hands-on learning. “There’s a whole new level of learning that comes with actually doing it,” Pinto said. While Pinto did not compete this year, she is now serving as an officer with the organization as college postsecondary vice president.

Wyatt Wilson and Travis Cain, both 18, competed together in an additive manufacturing competition, using 3D printing technology to create a flashlight. The two used computer software to create a model of the flashlight, then sent the model information to a 3D printing software. The judges hadn’t decided if Cain and Wilson won before they left.

It’s a process that is having an increasing role in manufacturing, Rob Luce, the vice president of the SME Education Foundation, said.

“Manufacturing is still seen somewhat as a dying, dirty, dead industry,” Luce said. “Manufacturing is extremely high tech. It’s extremely clean.”

Students like Wilson and Cain could eventually have careers as design or manufacturing engineers, Jesse Roitenberg, the National Education sales manager of Stratasys, an additive manufacturing company, said.

They could also have careers as a biomedical engineer, helping design new products in the health care industry, he said.

“There’s so much more engineering because they’re actually inventing all these new things to help with a surgery, to help with that next-generation pacemaker,” Roitenberg said. “We’re kind of intertwined into everywhere.”

Wilson and Cain are both planning to attend Arizona State University, but John Montgomery, the co-executive director of the Skilled Careers Coalition, said college may not always be a top choice for some.

Montgomery, who helps lead the collaborative organization with SkillsUSA, said there’s an increase in students looking to trade careers as options after high school.

“We built a lot of stigmas around the skilled trades and what we called blue-collar work for decades and decades,” Montgomery said. “I think we convinced ourselves the only path to success into the American dream was through college.”

Now, he said, students may be rethinking that due to the rise of college debt.

“This next generation is saying, ‘Wait, no, this is great. I don’t want to stay hunched over my computer all day long. I want to work with my hands,’” Montgomery said.

He added that students who participated in the competition will be driving the trade industry for the next 50 years.

“These are our future leaders here, and this is the fabric of America,” he said.

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