Skills That Pay The Bills - SkillsUSA Regional Championship

A competition of opportunity. Students from across the Four Corners came together to compete and to test their automotive and diesel expertise. On November 21st, San Juan College became home to the SkillsUSA Regional Championship, a competition that brings together hopeful students and seasoned industry professionals. You're watching the Local News Network brought to you by Graff Orthodontics and San Juan Regional Medical Center.

The main purpose of this competition is we have a real need for technicians, and so a lot of these young students coming in, they need a place to showcase their skills, they need to identify maybe areas where they're a little bit lacking in skill, and so this is sort of the step up before a state competition, and then of course, a national competition above that, so this is the first place to get to come feel out who they are. We have approximately 10 schools competing. Those are college and high school, and from across the region, some coming from Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. San Juan College has been hosting this regional event since approximately 1991. We do it every single year and we have a great turnout. This year, probably about a 10% increase in contestants as opposed to last year.

All right, guys, find your tables. 30 seconds. 30 seconds. Find your tables.

Sure, so they're going to come into the competition today. Basically, it's broken up into the eight ASE areas of automobile certification, and so each student's going to spend about seven minutes at a hands-on station doing some precision measuring, or identifying maybe a failed component, something that fits in that short timeframe, but then they're also going to have a seven minute written test associated with that area. A big part of this competition is funded, even worked by our advisory committees, and our advisory committees are made up of local dealers and businesses that need technicians and so you'll see most of our judges here today being those people from industry, so we're really a tie to industry and we're getting these students in front of those people that our industry may be future employers for them, right? And so they get to identify what we're doing here, how the students are learning this, and what they're leaving these programs with.

So the students are going to be going through, rotating from station to station, so our written is actually incorporated into our contest itself, so every 10 minutes, they're going to rotate to a different station and it's system-based, so each of the skilled stations covers a system on either a highway truck or a piece of construction equipment. So each station, they're going to be asked to do something, find information, take measurements based on what that system is.

Anybody that wanted to come and help out with the competition, all they need to do is get ahold of San Juan College, get ahold of Automotive Department, and we would happily advise them on how to jump in.

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