SkillsUSA

Over the past week, I have been in Kansas City, Missouri, competing at the National SkillsUSA competition. SkillsUSA is a worldwide organization that both high school students and post-secondary students compete in at their particular trade. Skills is a very large organization with around 350,000 members in the United States alone.

At the national level, I was in the mix of 6,000 members competing in just over one hundred different competitions. My involvement with Skills started last year in my Cisco Networking Academy class in high school. My teacher really wanted to get involved with this program, so he offered it to the class and had many of us interested.

At the state level, my school took part in four of the computer-related competitions including Telecommunications, Computer Maintenance, Internetworking, and Advanced Computer Applications. The group that competed went in with the mind set that it would be a great experience if nothing else because the classes we had taken were not specifically geared toward the competition (like other competitors had had). Even with that disadvantage, we took gold in all four of our competitions!

The four gold medalists (including myself) flew out to Missouri to take part in the week-long national competition. It was a very busy week, but it all payed off in the end. My particular competition, Telecommunications, is the practice of installing and maintaining data communications cabling. That involves anything from copper networking cable to high speed fiber optic backbones. It’s nothing that I ever studied specifically, but something that I have picked up over the years.

With my hard work at the competition, I was able to take sixth place at nationals. Overall, my whole experience with SkillsUSA has been extraordinary! I would highly suggest anyone to look into Skills and get involved if you can.

More information can be found at: SkillsUSA.org.