LINN — Matt Baker graduated from Cabool High School and decided to get his post-high school education at State Technical College of Missouri.
“There were a couple of guys who were a year older than (me) in high school, and they came here for the heavy equipment and lineman programs,” Baker said. “I decided I’d give it a try for the HVAC (heating, ventilating and air conditioning) program.”
Baker expects to graduate this year.
“Currently, I’ve got two companies I’m looking at in Springfield,” he said. “It’s just a matter of picking which one.”
State Tech student Caleb Darnel, of Brazito, added: “I know, with HVAC, I can go to anywhere in the U.S. and I can find a job without a problem. There’s always going to be a demand.”
And, Darnel said, there are many different options for a student to pursue.
“You can do service work,” he said. “I like the sheet metal and installing, more — so that’s what I’m going towards.”
For both students, studying at Missouri’s only state-owned technical college gives them an experience not found while learning on the job.
“Here, you get the understanding,” Darnel said, “then you go out in the shop and you actually get the hands-on experience.”
Ben Berhorst has taught at State Tech for the last eight years after graduating from the school in 1999.
“I saw all the amazing opportunities that were out there for us,” he said. “And I had a successful career in industry (and) started a business with my brother.”
When a teaching opportunity came along, he recalled, Berhorst said he wanted to give back to the program that had helped him succeed.
He now is State Tech’s department chairman for the HVAC and Industrial Electricity programs.
His programs are just two of 40 different training programs State Tech offers to help students learn jobs needed by industry and commercial businesses throughout the state and nation.
Workforce development push
State Tech for years has been doing what Gov. Mike Parson says the state now needs to be focused on: developing the workforce of the future.
“Cultivating and training our workforce for high-demand jobs and investing in critical infrastructure are the priorities we must address this session,” Parson told lawmakers during his Jan. 16 State of the State address.
“We must consider making necessary changes to our education programs and update the training pipelines to ensure economic growth in Missouri.”
Shawn Strong, State Tech’s president, started his career as an HVAC technician before going back to school to get academic degrees to teach, then be an administrator.
State Tech, he said, “is day-and-night better” than the training he received, including having “more advanced” and “more intensive” training than he received two decades ago.
“Finding good jobs for our graduates is not a problem,” Strong said. “That’s all we do is workforce development. That is our value proposition.”
When Strong came to State Tech three years ago, he envisioned making a number of additions and program changes, including more short-term training, online and night classes.
But, he said, those haven’t happened.
“We do one thing, and we do it well,” Strong said, “and that is specialized technical programs.”
Even with the school’s long-time success, Strong added, Parson’s push for workforce development has helped.
“When I go talk to any group and ask them, ‘What are the governor’s priorities?’” he said, “everybody knows it’s ‘workforce and infrastructure.’
“I can’t say he’s responsible for it, but I can tell you our (enrollment) numbers are looking really, really good this year — and our numbers are looking just as good, if not better, for next year.
“And that should not be the case in a good economy.”
State Tech has been experiencing good growth in its student enrollment over the past few years, at least partly from an official plan to expand those numbers.
“At some point, we’ll figure out what our ceiling is,” Strong said. “Right now, our issue is finding places for students, more so than trying to recruit students — which is day-and-night different from two years ago.”
Creating more training programs
Some of the expansion comes with the creation of new programs, as industry signals its needs for future jobs.
Cole Schaefer came to Linn last fall to chair State Tech’s new utilities systems technician program.
“I graduated here in 2004,” he said, and started a career with Sprint (now CenturyLink) until hired to head the new program.
“We are trying to address the utility industries that don’t have” their own on-the-job training programs, Schaefer said.
The training includes traditional lineman-type work of climbing poles and stringing cables — but also includes learning skills needed to install wires underground, as well learning to work with water, sewer, natural gas and oil systems that generally also go underground.
“Probably three or four years ago, several industry leaders here in Missouri approached State Tech,” Schaefer said, “and said, ‘We would love to see a program supplying a workforce for us.’”
Students graduating from State Tech go to an employer with basic training, safety training and certifications that other potential employees don’t have, Schaefer said.
“A lot of our emphasis is going to be on the buried utilities,” he added, “but we (also) have an overhead construction class. … This program is providing a utilities workforce,” including training in all kinds of weather conditions.
“All of our labs for the most part are outside — because we try our best to simulate a working environments,” Schaefer said.
But expansion comes with a bigger price tag than normal, because start-ups cost more than ongoing programs.
“Everything we do is expensive,” Strong said. “That is the only down-side. … We are the very best at what we do, but specialized technical programs are awfully expensive to deliver — and that’s all we do.”
Hands-on training
Strong said there’s no substitute for the hands-on training State Tech offers, especially to the traditional, new high school graduate who comes to Linn for more education.
Berhorst added: “It seems to me like, over time, trades that use their hands have gotten kind of a bad rap.”
In many cases in today’s working world, his program’s graduates are finding that they’re more in demand than their friends who’ve earned a four-year bachelor’s degree.
“So people come here and learn with their hands, and they get to use their hands,” Berhorst said. “By the time they graduate, they have multiple job offers — and there’s not a lot of fields that are like that. It’s basically pick-and-choose for them when they leave here, where do they want to go?”
Students Darnel and Baker both talked about the importance of hands-on work — and making mistakes.
“I look at it like this is the place for those mistakes to happen,” Berhorst said. “So we dive in and do major repairs to our equipment out there. The other side is, we have to replace equipment fairly often.”
But, he said, it’s better for students to make mistakes they can learn from while at school than to make that mistake while installing an expensive piece of equipment a customer bought.
And, Berhorst said, even technical college students learn they must keep learning throughout their lives.
“Technology is changing so quickly that everybody in this industry is learning something every single day,” he said. “We build a strong, solid foundation, (but) there’s no such thing as a good service tech out there who is not constantly doing industry-specific training by the manufacturer.
“Technology is advancing so quickly that that is the new norm.”