New 'Ignite' course at UTI aimed at high school juniors builds interest in skilled trades
It didn't take long for Giovanni Lopez to realize he fit in perfectly around Universal Technical Institute's Lisle campus.
Lopez isn't a student at the vocational school. He hasn't even finished high school yet. But he spent three weeks of his summer waking up at 4 a.m. to make the drive from Midlothian to Lisle for a new course exposing teens to increasingly complex technology in cars.
In the first lab at UTI, Lopez and his classmates had to take apart GM's 4.3 liter, V6 engine. It was hardly an intimidating exercise for Lopez, who tinkers with a similar engine at home. But the engine teardown - three days into the course - was still a thrilling moment that seemed to solidify his decision to pursue a career as a diesel technician.
“With a 100 percent attendance rate, I really feel comfortable that somebody is going to hire me,” said Lopez, a rising senior who's headed to UTI after he graduates from Bremen High School. “I am committed and also serious about what I want to do.”
His job prospects are indeed promising: The launch of the UTI “Ignite” class comes as the industry struggles to meet demand for skilled technicians. Employers regularly turn to the campus and suburban high school auto shops with lucrative incentives to encourage students to work for them.
At a recent career fair at UTI with more than 60 companies, one truck dealership was offering a $10,000 signing bonus. Others pledged to reimburse student tuition.
“The hiring opportunities right now are better than they've ever been,” UTI Operations Director Brian Gallagher said.
'Best technicians'
The demand stems from fast-paced advancements by car manufacturers. An aging workforce also plays into it.
“As cars and trucks are becoming more and more sophisticated - computerized - you're no longer the stereotype of a grease monkey where you're just replacing a part,” Gallagher said.
“You really have to be a computer technician to understand what's happening with the multiple computers that are in that car that are running everything. There's not much in the vehicle these days that's not run by a computer, tied to a computer.”
The average car operates with some 50 computers, says Keith Santini, Addison Trail High School's career and technical education teacher.
“We really need to strive to get some of these students to be the best technicians there can be because vehicles are getting more and more complicated every day, and they need to understand the interaction between all the different systems on the cars,” said Santini, who runs the school's automotive program and has built a close relationship with peers at UTI.
He gives an example of the skills needed to diagnose and make repairs: Say a technician needs to replace a side mirror for a Ford F-150 pickup truck with a 360-degree camera in the dashboard to help drivers parallel park.
“You now need to calibrate that mirror and the computer. So you have to roll out these mats that are about 200 feet long on the sides of the vehicle in a perfectly flat location and roll the vehicle back and forth to calibrate the mirrors,” Santini said.
“And these are the type of things that have to be done or the vehicle won't work correctly. And now we're adding auto-braking functions and speed-sensitive cruise control. Everything is going to require calibration.”
A new approach
The labor demand also has to do with a mentality that steers students away from vocational training to four-year colleges to earn their bachelor's degrees, educators say.
They confront that perception by focusing on the job outlook for their graduates. Auto and diesel employers have been so interested in recruiting UTI students the school had to separate them into their own career fairs because there wasn't “enough room for them all,” said Julie Mueller, the Lisle campus president.
Santini counts BMW, Audi, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche dealerships among the employers that have hired former students from Addison Trail's automotive program.
The high school is one of only a handful across the country to receive master-level certification from the National Automotive Technicians Education Foundation, a group that merged with another to become the ASE Education Foundation earlier this year.
“In the last three, four years, the number of businesses coming directly to the high school to recruit students offering to pay for their college if they come work for them has grown exponentially,” Santini said.
“Our machine shop students a few years ago, a bunch of them went out and got summer jobs, and when they came back in the fall to school, the employers had bought them a toolbox with tools just kind of as a motivation to come back.”
With the evolutions in the industry, UTI has retooled some of its messaging to prospective students to connect STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) with the skilled trades.
STEM-themed banners hang in prominent places on campus. More notably, Gov. Bruce Rauner's office nominated Mueller to give her input on the development of a five-year blueprint for STEM education during a White House summit in June.
UTI now tries to cast a wider net by reaching out to high schoolers who aren't in auto shop and excel in math and science.
“We've kind of had to change our approach on how we go into schools and how we talk to students and how we approach students about coming here, as those auto shop programs closed at a lot of different high schools,” Gallagher said.
Igniting careers
The inaugural Ignite class at UTI enrolled 26 students - all incoming seniors who have been accepted to attend the vocational school and can receive credit toward their certificates by completing the program. Next year, UTI hopes to double the number of students participating in the free, three-week course.
Ignite students must adhere to the dress code at the school, where enrollment ranges between 600 to 1,000 students depending on the time of year. Mirrors around the campus remind students to maintain a professional appearance.
“They have a drive to get the information, the training and take it in an area that they are interested in, and hopefully they'll take it out in the field and be our next generation technicians,” Ignite instructor Cory Mathis said.
It's a fast-paced course, and by the end of it in June, Mathis will test students on the names and operations of engine parts and have them use precision measuring tools that some of the high schoolers “have never touched before.”
One class demonstration uses the school's Dynojet to conduct a performance run measuring horsepower on a Ford Mustang's four-cylinder engine.
“You're not just going to throw parts on it and hope that you can get the results that you want because, unfortunately, parts are very expensive,” Mathis said. “It takes research.”
Class beings at 6:30 a.m. for students who come from Naperville to Willowbrook to Cicero. But the students feel camaraderie and a sense of belonging because of mutual interests and dedication to their career paths.
So when you ask Jake Talerico, a Plainfield South High School student who likes performance cars, about the proudest accomplishment he's logged during Ignite, he echoes Lopez:
“Committing,” he said.