• We held our second-to-last National Leadership and Skills Conference staff meeting on May 11. Registration is up over last year in many of the states. We have 16 new exhibitors and the outdoor booth space for TECHSPO is sold out. SkillsUSA University boasts 74 sessions, and the alumni association is counting on 41 volunteers and 21 alumni attending conference for training. All in all, it appears this is shaping up to be a great national conference.
• The meeting with the NCCER Board of Trustees mentioned in a prior post went very well. I was pleased to meet with many of the nation’s largest contractors. NCCER will be chairing our Carpentry contest.
• On May 13 and 14, we had representatives from the U.S. Department of Agriculture here. They were conducting an assessment of the USDA grant SkillsUSA received from the Rural Development Office to provide PDP Online to select rural communities. The program is complete and the USDA representatives said they liked what we’d done.
• The Skill Connect Assessments continue to generate interest in industry and elsewhere. They were the subject of a conference call with Job Corps representatives yesterday. Also, during the week of May 10th, we had a visit with NIMS (National Institute of Metalworking Skills) which has an interest in co-branding, and the chairman of Adayana visited on May 13 to express his interest in using the assessments abroad.
• We’re getting ready for a large number of VIP visits to national conference by both public- and private sector guests. We’ve been preparing itineraries to make sure our guests see and hear everything possible during their times with us.

Tags: NLSC, Partner News, PDP Online, Skill Connect Assessments, SkillsUSA Championships, SkillsUSA University, TECHSPO, U.S. Department of Agriculture

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