Volunteering for SKILLS USA

Our third and final volunteering experience came on Saturday, April 29, through a connection with Dan.  His wife works at Germanna CC and knew of this event and the need for volunteers and asked if we would be interested.  The task was to serve as judges for various categories of competitions that high school students would be presenting skills to us.

I was a little unclear of what the actual event was, even after visiting the website for the group, but was looking forward to helping however best I could.  On the day of the event we all met early at the college to help with setup and get our assigned rooms.  Ray and I were together with some other volunteer judges in an open skills demonstration.  After discussing the objectives with the 'chair' who was the more experienced person and turned out to be someone else who worked for the college, we were ready to go.

It was fascinating to me the types of skills the kids were coming to show, from criminal justice, to computer tech, to electrician and even a budding vet tech with her dog.  We were to evaluate them on presentation, platform skills, organization, and if we understood the skill and felt they did a good job presenting an entry level description of it.

I could tell these kids were nervous, but they all did a great job of presenting to a room of 6 adults and practicing some basic hands-on and interviewing type skills.  Because we were judging them, we were not able to provide any feedback to the kids, and I found that to be the hardest part.  For some of them, I just wanted to write a comment or feedback on the scoring sheet just to tell them one or two small things they could do to improve performance.  I saw a lot of potential in many of them and hope they will succeed in their chosen field.

After we were done with judging, we helped with clean up and getting the judging boxes organized and arranged for returned to the main organization.

I truly enjoyed this volunteer experience as it was the only one we did that we got to interact with the end user we were there to help.  It was a different view for me of the next generation, past all the bad stereotypes that you usually hear.  I look forward to what this group can do, and am happy to know there is an organization like SkillsUSA that is promoting technical skills to the next generation.