This week is the ninth annual “Week of Excitement” when staff gets together for strategic planning. The staff completed an online questionnaire that gave us a good jump-start on the very important SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. While we’ve gone through the SWOT process in the past, this is the first time we’ve done it online; and that’s one reason we held only a single-day meeting as a full staff. In addition to staff input, we received data from students, teachers, B&I partners and state association directors. The opinions of all our stakeholder groups will be considered in our FY10-11 strategic plan. The balance of this week was spent in department and special committee meetings. Almost immediately following, we take the draft of the plan to the State Association Director Executive Committee for meetings beginning January 21.

The next step is Vision 2020 following the state association director meeting in Ft. Lauderdale on January 24. Stakeholders will include an instructor, two students, a school administrator, an alumni member, a Job Corps educator and several members of the SkillsUSA Board of Directors. Steve Pierz, strategic program manager, common components, Caterpillar, will be facilitating the process. He knows his stuff, and it has been great working with him. He’s helped us devise the questionnaires for the field and staff and, I firmly believe that high-level vision SkillsUSA will have for 2020 and the sub-goals to get us there are going to be very useful to the organization. As you might be able to tell, I’m looking forward to the meeting.