Encouraging Women To Consider Careers In Traditionally Male-Dominated Fields With Ken Midgett

In this episode, Lindsey talks with Ken Midgett, a seasoned plumbing instructor, about the importance of getting more females involved in Career Tech Education (CTE) programs. They share their personal experiences of encouraging women to consider careers in traditionally male-dominated fields like plumbing and diesel technology. Ken emphasizes the need for a supportive and inclusive environment that fosters confidence in female students, while also highlighting the role of work-based learning, job shadowing, and co-op programs in preparing students for future careers. They explore strategies for recruiting more females into CTE programs and promoting diversity within industries. Ken Midgett, the plumbing market director at Interplay Learning, brings over four decades of experience in the plumbing and heating industry, having worked in every facet of the field. He has owned two successful PHC businesses, is a licensed master plumber, and is a two-time national award-winning educator in plumbing and heating CTE classrooms. Ken continues to mentor both men and women apprentices in the HVAC and plumbing industries, further contributing to the push for greater gender diversity in these essential trades.

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Transcript

Hey, this is Lindsey Trent with NGT talks. And I am happy to have Ken Midgett on the call today. I actually met Ken through his wife and through one of his former students. Thank you for being on the show. 

Thank you for having me, Lindsey. I'm very honored. 

And today we're going to talk about how we can get more females in CTE programs and how to make the environment better so more females will want to be a part of CTE programs. But I just want to kind of share with you how Ken and I got acquainted. I was at the ACTE vision conference and we had a speaker, Plumber Paige and Plumber Paige. She's young.  She's, I believe, 21, 22.  She was a CTE plumbing student. She graduated, she worked in plumbing for a while, but then she decided she wanted to be an influencer. And so she's written several children's books called Plumber Paige.  And she is encouraging young girls to consider a career in plumbing. And so we got to talking about how we can get more females in career tech ed programs.  Because I walk into classes, diesel classes, it's all male and we want to see more females. We should have almost half females, right? And so I met his wife, Cindy, who was winning an award. What award did she win? At the ACTE vision conference, it was. 

The Carl E. Schaefer award presented by NOCTI. 

Wow. So that's a big award nationwide. So congratulations to her. And if I'm not mistaken, she's also a CTE teacher. 

Correct. She teaches dental technology. Her name is Cindy. 

Oh, very good. So, Ken, tell us a little bit about your background and what you taught and how many years you taught. 

Cool. Yeah, I started out as an apprentice, then became journeyman, then became master. I had two successful businesses over 23 years on the residential side, plumbing, heating and air conditioning. And then the opportunity came up for me to apply to teach CTE at the secondary level. And the local plumbers in the area who were also on the advisory board there, they wanted me to apply. And I had said to them all along,  you know, if this ever get in touch with me, I'm definitely interested. So I applied, thinking I would never get the job because I never had a day of a college in my life. Turns out Pennsylvania has a program just designed for that to take somebody from industry and bring them into education and teach them how to be a teacher. It's a nine year program. It's called vital.  So that's kind of how it went. I applied for the job thinking I wasn't going to get it. I also thought, kind of funny that this is going to be the greatest job in the world. I'm just going to sit back and tell these kids stories. I quickly realized that is not what we're going to do. That was okay once in a while, but didn't work. Found it quickly didn't work, so got the job, got stuck into it and really started to do the things I needed to do. And one of the things that the former director now, but he was the director that hired both Cindy and I. And he was actually spoke at the award ceremony, came into my classroom one time and he said, Ken, run your classroom like a business.  And I just kind of started to think about that and know, how can I make this work and all these things. So I started to do that. And within about. By the third year of business, significant changes, cooperative education started to happen. The advisory council started to grow. Seniors were getting placed. Completion scores for NOCTI were in the top 3% of the country. We were really rocking and rolling. There was a waiting list to get in. So I just turned it around and got the ship going in the right direction. And then from there, it just got better and better in that the advisory council grew to be the largest in Pennsylvania, probably largest couple of states. I had like 60 some people in my advisory council, just in the plumbing advisory. 

Incredible. 

Yeah, they would take up. 

How did you build that? How did you build your advisory board? 

Well, a couple of ways. One, I was in the industry for a long time, and I also was in the local plumbing association. At the time it was called the Allentown Master Plumbers Association. I have been a president in that, been a vice president, been just a plain old member. Now it's called PHCC of Lehigh Valley. So there was that group of people, and the real thing happened is that the word got out when I started to get students placed, that this was a place to come to get students. That's how the word got out. And everything I did, I just maximized it.  When that cooperative edge of thing, cooperative education thing, workforce development, if you will, started to get traction, it dynamically changed the classroom and the culture of the classroom management in that people that were there wanted to be there and wanted to learn. I can remember days probably in years like six, seven and eight of teaching and saying to my boss, when are we going to have coffee this morning? Because I knew I never did this, but I could walk out of my class, go down to his office on the entire opposite end of the school for 20 minutes, have coffee, come back, and everybody would be working as if I just walked out the door. 

Really?  

It was just that kind of environment. Highly disciplined. You never walked into my lab and saw students without their shirts tucked in, a belt on, pants pulled up, no pants tucked inside the work boots. Never saw that scene. Everybody was working. 

How did you build that? 

Well, that was the machine. It came kind of from that co op machine, right? That cooperative education thing. When students would come back into the classroom, they came in on the first and third Mondays of the month of each month. They would have new watches, they would have phones, they would have new trucks. And I always kept telling the students that were in the class, I said, this is the best game in town for you to be involved in. You get the hours count towards your apprenticeship, towards your on job training hours. You're not working for McDonald's in know job. You're starting your career potentially as a sophomore or even a freshman in high school, and getting your hours accumulated on summer internships. And the other students would see this and they would say, man, he's not lying. He's telling us the real deal.  And I said, the only thing that's stopping you from being where those people are, your behavior and your willingness to learn. And a driver's license and a vehicle. And even the driver's license and vehicle. We found workarounds for that. 

So how old did they have to be able to be in the co op program? 

Any student could technically be in it. Now, there were some things with specific employers that the 18 year old age category had to come into play, but not every employer had that. It seemed to happen a lot more in the commercial sector than in the residential. Mean, once in a while, the age thing would become a know. And I just go to the next OEC member and say, hey, do you want this kid? Because they didn't take him. 

Gotcha. 

And how we would do that, how we would groom them to go into this position, is once the behavior started to get right and their interests were aligned with learning, they had job shadows, where they would go to a job shadow with a contractor all day long. Think of it as like a one day interview. 

Got it.

Right.  This, by the way, is also what worked great for the females. Took a little bit of extra work on my part when I would send one to a contractor, because I would call them personally two days before and say, look, I'm sending a female to you. You need to make sure that the tech that's going to go with her is going to act professional and make her feel welcomed and comfortable and talk to her just like she's anybody else. Right. Don't do anything special, but don't do anything that's clichic or historic with that person. Right. Because I don't want you to do anything that's going to discourage these people, the women, from coming into the program. 

Absolutely. 

So that little bit of extra touches there with the employer, that helped a lot. And certain employers just knew that's the way it was going to be. And they knew that if there was a problem, they just wouldn't see any more students, men or women, right? 

Yeah. 

So that kind of helped with that. And we would do these job shadow things. And it wasn't uncommon in like a six week period to have maybe seven to twelve students and be pushing out 150 job shadows in that window of time with different employers. Right. So it would just be very sequential. Just build a little file in Excel, spit all the kids names in it, spit all the employers names in it, spit all the available dates, and boom, it just populated the dates. I just dragged them right into Google calendar. Boom, boom. And then automatically I had another extension in Google calendar that automatically would bring up the form and email the form to the student. The student would get the form first, start filling it out. It was a fillable PDF form.  And then I worked out the thing with my school, that I would sign all those forms with an actual digital Adobe signature. And when they got that, they knew that it was right. I would never handwrite my signature. It was always done that way. So they knew when that came through that all the other signatures were organized because I would check all that before we get to them because mom and dad or guardian had to sign it, home school guidance counselors had to sign it. And that was the other part of this. That was the lure, if you will, is that their grades had to be on the up and up at their home school. There's no failing grades at the home school, no behavior problems at their home. Right. There's very high standards to do this. So no one excused absences either, which got little challenging because some parents didn't think it was a problem to take their kids out of school and go to Disneyland for two weeks. Well, in Lehigh you only got ten per year absences. Anything after ten, you had to get a doctor's note. So it got a little tough to work around that problem. But basically I was just in touch with the parents in that situation. 

So what year are the students that do the job shadowing is it juniors or is it all of them? 

Anywhere from freshmen to seniors. 

Okay. 

Depends who's ready to go, who I feel is ready, who I have vetted strong enough, and that they are going to do the right thing. Because I would say to them, whether you go out there on a job shadow or you go out on an internship or you go out on co op, it's not your name on your back. It's my name. 

Right. 

So that's why you will behave and act like a professional, or you won't be able to stay out there, or you won't go. And part of being a professional is doing all the work that I assigned to you and being assertive and disciplined. When you're on a job site with somebody, you're not playing with your phones. I mean, there was a whole procedure of things that they had to know and no meaning. Different mindset when they would go on a job compared to when they were in the classroom or just in the school environment. 

Absolutely. So your co op program is that for a certain age group or anybody, just as long as they were ready, they could do the co op. And how many days a week was it? 

Well, it was typically the juniors and seniors, but it wasn't unlikely to have a sophomore and freshman sprinkled in there, especially for the summers. Lots of 9th graders worked and sophomores worked in the summers, and they worked over winter break, too, some of them. To answer the question about when they go, that's a really good question. It would be only usually in the afternoon. So you had to be a PM student too, by the way, to do it. That was one of the things that was very rare that we would have an AM student on co op because there was two sessions in the school and they had to have their license. They had all those things. And they had already been on several job shows and got the nod from the employer that the employer wanted them.  So I would get a phone call at the end of the day or the following morning or an email or a text and would say, we want this person, we want this young woman, we want this young man, we want to put them on co op. 

Want to bring them in, get paid, right? 

Oh, yeah. Everything's on the up and up. Typically no less than $15 an hour. No less than that. All of them, some made more. So instead of coming to school, they would go to the employer. If they were a PM student, they had to be at the employer shop the same time they would be at LCTI and they would do whatever's necessary. They would get in a truck and go do a service call. Sometimes they would drive to a job site if it was new construction. And we worked that part out too because of the gasoline would got expensive for somebody to drive further to, maybe to a job site. We worked that part out too. They got comped a couple extra bucks to help pay for their gas. And the amount of they could go as many as five days a week. Right.  And there was the first and third Monday of every month they would come to LCTI and meet me. I would go through their paperwork, the employer had the rubric and I would go over all that with the student and say, it's your job to explain how to fill this out with the employer. But whatever that employer, he or she puts on here, that's what I'm putting in the grade book for you because I'm not going to grade you for only two days in my classroom. 
Right.  So this is your grade. Right. It all worked out because the employer would just, if there was ever a problem that I just said it's an open policy, just send them back. And the student knew if it didn't work out for them, for whatever reason they didn't feel comfortable or whatever the case was, they could pull out, they didn't have to stay. Right. And that was very rare. I mean, out of almost twelve years of keep doing this, I'd say maybe three kids changed and went to a different employer. 

Interesting. They're in this class from start to finish and it's a job interview really. And they're on their best behavior because they're wanting to get these good jobs. 

Yeah. And each year the level of student just got better and better and better because of this, because the other ones, they don't do it anymore. But they did a thing called rotations where you would see in the beginning of the year you'd have three batches of these students that you saw for 13 days and then you would go after and try to recruit the better ones. Right. Talk to the parents, talk to the kids. I got to the point where I didn't have to do that anymore because the kids loved the environment when they were in those 13 days. They didn't want to leave. They wanted to stay for the whole another 13 days. Right. They didn't want to leave. And I would tell all of them, look, it's competing.  If you don't have at least a 95 average when you're in my class, you won't make it in because that's what went by, grades and disciplines. If there were any disciplines, you weren't in, if there were any grade, and that's all of it. Now, the disciplines means the other two labs that those students would go to, if there was discipline problems in any of those labs, you weren't getting in. So it migrated into, if they were in the first rotation, when they went to two and three, they were angels because they wanted to get back there. 

Wow. Well, I just want to take a moment to thank our sponsors for helping us put on this podcast. So thank you to our sponsors. And one of the things that we had talked about is how did you get females into your program? So were you recruiting starting in eigth grade? When did they know that they could take a plumbing course while they're in high school? 

I think the number one thing, while I did a lot of public speaking at some of the middle schools, I went to the middle schools in an auditorium environment, brought students with me, right. Brought females who worked in the industry, but they weren't necessarily turning wrenches, but they were part of a plumbing company, so they were able to talk about it and talk about the wages. And then during those rotations, that was a heavy recruiting element, but you had to get them into your rotations. Right. So the way that worked is we would always have tours from January to almost the first week of March, and every middle school would send their kids up, and then the kids got to pick what labs they would go in. Well, the first couple of years, that wasn't popular to come there.  Then the word got out, right?  Then there was siblings coming in, and there was friends of siblings. So that's how things started to churn with getting more people in. And the tours, I made them very interactive, so were using machines. Students ran the tours. All I did was supervise. Right, because they're still learning. They're just teaching somebody else something, right? It's still all part of it. They're learning how to teach another person. Just like a journeyman would teach an apprentice, right? So it's the same cultivating culture that's going to happen in the real world again. Run your class like a business, right? It was ran exactly like a plumbing business. So many times when the girls would come in, I would ID them and say, hey, come on over here, I want you to solder with me.  And some would be very shy, and I don't want you to do this. I don't want to do it. I don't want to get near it. And they would jump when you would ignite the torch and this and that. And some of them would just come over, and I would just come behind them and grab their arms and robot them, shadow them. And they were soldering, and somebody would be on the other side filming. And their faces, every single girl was smiling, like they couldn't believe that they were doing this. And we had other things they were doing where we had machines that would thread pipe. They were working on them. We had a camera inserted into a sewer line where they were videoing a camera and using a location device to find the camera.  So we tried to use technology as much as we could. And that interactivity for boys and girls, for eigth grade environments, it escalated it to that. They wanted to come in there. They at least came into rotations. Then once I got into rotations, I just recruited them. I just worked with them. I said, you can make a lot of money at this. 

Yeah. You had eigth grade tours at your career tech center, and they could go look at all of the different career tech classes you had. And you provided an environment that was hands on learning. And your other students were the ones that actually taught the younger students and showed them what to do, right? And so that piqued the interest of the young people, knowing that they could come in as a freshman to take your class.

Right, and in other classes, when those tourists, if you want to use that word, would go into other classes, it would either be the teacher speaking or the students would just talk. That's not going to tell them what this is about, right? So we would maybe do 30 to 90 seconds. We would have one student that would say, welcome to plumbing. It's more than toilets and poop. Let me show you. And we just wound, there was somebody designed to hand out safety glasses, somebody to hand out rubber gloves. And it was like a machine. It just kept going and going. The PM class, every day, they would clean all the safety glasses. We had a dishwasher up in our loft where we had working plumbing systems. We had a dishwasher up there.  We just threw all the glasses in the dishwasher, washed them the next morning, pulled them all out, dried them, so everything was sanitized. There was nonsense. They didn't get dirty. And if somebody had long sleeves, my students would instruct them that they had to roll their sleeves up. They can't work around equipment like that, and they couldn't have any loose sleeves. Girls or guys that had long hair had to get it tied back. We had barrettes there. We had what do you call them? Spongies or squishies or whatever they call them. We had all that stuff there. 

Yeah. So scrunchies. 

Scrunchies. That's it. 

When I met plumber page and she did a panel and I asked this question to her, I said, I was really disheartened because I was at the Skills USA national competition and there were 74 diesel tech finalists. And this past year, all 74 were male. How do we get more females attracted to skilled trades, to couratech ed programs? And she mentioned you and the environment that you made it to feel comfortable to be in the program. But how would you answer that question? How? I'm a teacher. I want more females in my class. How do I get more females in my class? 

Well, that's what you just said right there is the first step. Having the mindset that it's the right thing to do. Right. Because it's going to take work. If you're one of these seven to three teachers, I call them seven to three teachers. And you've got a calendar under your desk that you're checking off the amount of days till you retire. That's not the right person, but somebody who's aggressive and wants to take over a program and really cares about their industry. It wasn't just about women. It was about me. Identifying people that could work in the plumbing industry and fix the skills gap. Doing my part of it right. So I recognized that women could do it. So that's the first thing a diesel technology teacher or a diesel engine teacher would have to say.  They have to come with the mindset that women can do the work just like the guys. Right. That's the first step. And once that step is made with very little accommodations, by the way, the girls in my class got very little accommodations. I would teach them a couple tricks with using cheap pieces of pipe on wrenches and cheating that way. But I would teach them how to put it four x ten on their shoulder and walk around with it. A piece of cast iron, a 90 pound piece of pipe. I would teach them how to handle those fittings. And it's not about strength, it's about agility. Right. And it's about leverage and physics and how you do that. So they learned those things, and I knew that I could get them to learn it right. With a lot of confidence.  That's the second thing the teacher has to do. It's not like a male where they have testosterone. You have to give them confidence. You have to tell them they're doing good. When they do something right, you have to really praise them. And the first couple of months that you get in there, you're going to have to work a little harder as an instructor to groom them to be whatever you're teaching them to do. Right. But I'm sure even in diesel technology, just like any skilled trade from 30 years ago, the technology alone has changed the trade. 

Incredible. 

Right. 

Yes. 

I mean, years ago they probably had situations where people were pushing and pulling on engines to get them into place. Now there's probably a hoist holding them and maybe there's, I don't know what kind of technology there is to make that job easier. But just for the principles of people getting injured alone, they've made the job so much safer, which in turn attritionally makes them things lighter to work with and different techniques to put things together so that teacher has to absorb all this and want to do that. And then once it's there, you need to put your recruiting hat on and go get them. Right. Start talking to your existing students. You got a sister, right? You got a sister, you have a cousin, right? Get them in here, tell them to come up for the day. Bring them. 
I used to do that too. We called it sibling day. We had one sibling day a month where they were allowed to bring any sibling they wanted, their signatures and all with this, with public education, but we would have a sibling day and they could bring, I mean, they couldn't bring like a fifth grader up, but they could bring anybody from 6th grade up. And they were briefed that student. And so did all the rest of the students know, you got to keep your eye on this person. They're not innate with our environment. They have to understand safety and da da. And they were limited to what they could do. But it was almost like a job shadow for a sibling, right. To come in and see what it was like to be in the lab. So that worked well.  I got a couple females that way. Paige has two younger sisters and I had the luxury of having them all staggered throughout my time in education. So they were all heavily recruiting. When there would be a female that would come in a rotation, they were all over them. 

So once the females got into your class, how did you make them feel comfortable and accepted? 

Great question. Even before they chose the class, when they were there with the guys, I would say there's no inappropriate behavior from either gender here. Right. We're not going to do that because you're not going to do that in the workforce and in the workplace and get away with it because you're probably going to eat one side of the other is going to get slapped with sexual harassment. And when it happens and it goes on your record, it never comes off. So good luck getting a job once you have that mess on your record. Right? That's step one. Step two, sooner or later you're going to realize that women are going to work right alongside you and you're going to need to learn to adapt and work with them. It's not weird, it's not awkward. It's only that way.  If you make it that way.  As to the males, I would say, and I would say to the females, the males are going to have the same expectations for you to do this as they do of themselves. So you have to step up to the plate. When there's something that you don't understand, you come to me or go to a higher level student, because it was a multilevel lab and ask them, what am I doing wrong here? How can I get this together? And in the beginning, they would come to me a lot because they were girls and they didn't know all the guys and they didn't know what. They just were weird. They had to get out of their comfort zone. 

Right Right. Yeah. And I would think that it could be a hard step to take to walk into that classroom. So did you do anything to prepare them before they walked in on day one? Anything special? 

Well, I made sure I spoke to all their parents. 

Okay. 

And I told mom, dad or guardian, look, your daughter is going to be safe in here because I'm going to treat her like she's my daughter. Right. So there's never going to be a problem with something inappropriate happening with your daughter. I can't speak for the whole school, but when she's in my class, none of that stuff's going to happen. Right? Because my boys know that if that happens, you're never going to go on co op. As a matter of fact, I'm going to go over to you with a pass and say, go down the guidance always to pick a new lab. You don't belong here. 

Wow. 

Right? So they knew that was where I stood with this. And there's two sides to the pancake. If there was an issue, you have to do the investigation and find out. But for the few. Couple of things that cropped up and they were stupid things, not anything sexual or intimidating, just stupid stuff that would happen 90% of the time it was the boys starting nonsense, just being stupid. The other side that going back to the instructor question and just the industry question, I can attest to it from a lot of different facets that I was involved with encouraging women and being involved with women and young women. Women are smarter than men, period, for starters. Right. And they're much more articulate. They're good communicators and their attention to detail.  I don't know very many men who can match most women when we talk about attention to detail. So if you migrate that over in the big picture, when an automobile mechanic has to talk to somebody who's female on the other side of it, whether they're buying a truck, the owner of a company, that person is going to communicate much better than the male guy is. Right. Because all the friction is broken down then in those environments. Consequently, when the female has to talk to a male superior, sometimes that's challenging for them. So I would coach them on that part, too. I would say, you're going to talk to them just like you talk to anybody else. Just professional courtesy. Right. And you don't take any nonsense. If there's something they do that's inappropriate or they talk to you inappropriately.  When they were in my program, I said, you come to me when you're in the real world. You go to your employer, and if you have to jump heads to get answers, you jump heads. 

It's good advice. Well, in driving, professional driving, women are safer. And so companies want to hire more women because they have a safer track record. They're more cautious. So there is a lot of advantages to getting more females in the program. It sounds like we have to seek it out as a teacher, we have to recruit and spread it to all of our students to recruit. Right. Anything else that you can think of? 

Definitely. There's lots more. From an industry perspective, if I had a diesel engine shop and I wanted to acquire more females, the first thing I need to do is look at my website, and if it's all male driven or masculine pictures, then you got to get some females in there. Even if they're not your employees, you got to get them on that website. That's one thing from an industry perspective. On the instructor perspective, each classroom typically has their own site. I made sure that there were videos of women, girls doing work, just like there would be videos of boys running machines and pictures of women standing on the ladder soldering a joint.  Or when somebody came and looked in the LCTI's website and they looked at plumbing and heating, they knew there were going to be women in there, so they had that feeling you know, it's a little more accepted. They're already in the. I don't have to be the trailblazer.  Right?

Right. Absolutely. That it's. 

That's. That's definitely important. And that mindset is so teach, the instructor has to believe that they belong here and that they can learn and do the work just like a guy. That's the very first step they have to make. And once they're there, you just keep doing it. The sibling thing was great. It's a great recruiting thing. Great way to get them in there. We would poach them from other labs. The painting lab was always predominantly female, so we would be poaching them and say, look, if you come over here and learn plumbing, you are going to be able to buy a painting business. And I used to do the same thing with the Cosmo girls, the girls that were in cosmetology. I would say, yeah, you know what?  You can get your nails done, all that stuff, and you can own the whole cosmetology business while you're running the plumbing business. 

Right Right. And that's the thing. I mean, these jobs are great jobs. There are so many of them available. It's just a matter of getting more young people to consider getting a skill and going straight into the workforce. And I think there's so many opportunities in your industry in plumbing and trucking. We just need to be able to recruit more, and we want to recruit diversity. We want to recruit women. 

Absolutely. 

We have intentional about it. Right. 

You have to be deliberate with your actions. When I would take my students once in a while, a wholesaler or somebody who sold plumbing materials would invite us in for the day, and they would take us through the entire process of how a fitting gets from a manufacturer to there to a plumber's truck to in a house. So it was very interesting. And this exposed all of them, not just the women, it exposed the men to what else is available? You could be part of an industry and not have to turn wrenches. You could be the parts person bringing parts to a diesel shop, and you're still part of the industry. Right? 

Absolutely.

Right? Just because you're not turning wrenches doesn't mean you're not part of that industry. 

Yeah. So just showcasing all types of jobs that are available. There's so many. There's so many for us supporting the supply chain. We're the ones delivering those pipes to. 

That's right. That's exactly right. That wholesaler had drivers. 

Yep. That's so. Well, Ken, thank you so much for being on the show today, and I really hope that more women will do these CTE programs. And I love the job shadowing and the co oping. I think this work based learning is a great way. 

Oh, it's the best way for them to. Those kids are so know one thing that actually Covid became a positive factor for workforce development because students that were in our program, in our school all day, so we had an actual academic center. I went to the principal there and said, hey, what's the chances of getting my students on cyberschool to do their academic work? So they're still going to work with your teachers, but they're not going to be in their classes. And my students are going to go to work all day, an eight hour day, four days a week. Four days a week. And they'll come in on Friday and meet with your teachers. They still got to do their work at night. Right. They got to do the work at night that they do during the day, but it's asynchronously with the computer, and my finger was on the pulse all the time with them. They knew if one academic teacher called me and know, Sue or John's not doing their work out of the not. You're not doing that. 

Go back to school online. 

Right. And the positive thing was that those students, when there's an apprenticeship in plumbing and it goes by on job training hours, well, they were graduating high school and having the equivalent between all the other years and their senior year, they had year one done. 

Wow, that's incredible. 

So what we found out was some of those students, when they went to go get their journeymans, they weren't 21 yet, so they had to wait another year to get their journeymans. 

No. 

Yeah. 

Why do you have to be 21 to get your journeyman? 

It's just state and township and government rules. 

Okay. 

Yeah. 

Just like, for driving, you have to be 21 to cross state lines right now. 

Yes. Silly stuff, but, yeah, that's another thing that happened, was a positive thing outcome for my students with COVID and the employers just ate it up. They loved it. A student, be there 07:00 in the morning and go to work. That was great for them. 

One last question, because I know sometimes employers feel like they don't have time to train, and so they're like, well, I don't have time to have this 17 year old student because I don't have time to train them. I've got all this stuff to do. How do you negate that? 

We had procedures in place to prep them for whatever the job was. So if they were going to work in service work, they had an idea of what was going to happen and knew the questions to ask, so they were more efficient. We also had, ironically, interplay learning and they could do that work asynchronously too. So if they knew the next day that we're going to do drain cleaning, they could look up drain cleaning sims and do that work at night. 

Okay. 

That was very beneficial for them to get out there during COVID and have that as a tool, a learning tool for their own self, but that fosters their own self discipline. Right. You want to make it's got to be the student's responsibility, not the teacher. 

Yeah, that's a great point is like, hey, tomorrow we're going to do A, B, and C. Why don't you look at a YouTube video and see if you can find some? 

Just read. Learn to read. It can't all just be by video, right? Learn to read. You're going to have to read a manual to take that engine apart and what the specifications are. It's not going to always be in a video. 

Yeah, that's a great point. I love it. I think that's awesome. Don't forget to follow us on YouTube. Follow us on all the major podcast platforms and like. And subscribe. Thanks for listening. Well, thank you, Ken. I appreciate you. 

Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's great to share the information. 

It's awesome what you've done over the years in your career. So thanks for all you've done to invest in these students. 

No problem. My pleasure. Loved it. 

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