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Gib and Michelle Mouser are proud of their son’s career – just not in the way they once imagined.
Only 23 years old, Cale Mouser already earns well over six figures, and he’ll end up making substantially more. He is an acknowledged expert in a highly specialized field who spends hours in deep thought solving hard problems. He uses a computer, but he’s not stuck behind it.
Cale Mouser repairs diesel engines.
The Minnesota native began working with medium- and heavy-duty trucks just five years ago. His aptitude quickly led to a diesel technology degree at North Dakota State College of Science – and then a faculty position there.
His family background offered no obvious path into the field – his mother is a nurse and his father a veterinarian – but he now teaches the next generation, which is still his own, how to diagnose and repair heavy equipment, from tractors to 53ft semis.
“It’s very exciting. I get to go do some sleuthing, like Sherlock and Watson,” he chuckles. “There’s a lot of awe and wonder involved.”
“Awe and wonder” is an unusual way to describe a hands-on job – the kind many Americans still see as a fallback at best, with only a tough daily grind to look forward to. What used to be called vocational education once carried a punch-the-clock stigma.
But for many young people on the verge of entering the workforce, that stigma is fading. And for some, the appeal is competitive: these trades now come with contests, rankings and national titles. That’s how Mouser became a national champion.
Mouser’s path began with a competition he didn’t even enter. One morning, a teacher told him to show up at a cavernous industrial hall in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where the non-profit SkillsUSA had filled the floor with parked diesel trucks.
Students had 25 minutes to rotate through 14 truck stations, diagnosing built-in faults and fixing what they could on the fly. It was a long and challenging 10-hour day, with the added stress of the judges recording every small error.
Somehow, with no prior competition experience, Mouser won. “I had an absolute blast, just working my way through the stations and enjoying my time. I loved the challenge and the thought process behind it,” he recalls.
Suddenly, he had his first state gold medal, hundreds of dollars’ worth of sponsored tools and a ticket to compete in the SkillsUSA Championships, which are held each year in Atlanta. Soon he would add another gold medal to his collection – this time as a national champion.
From welders to skilled robotics technicians, auto repair experts to EMTs, numerous US industries are struggling to find and hire people with Mouser’s level of complex cognitive skills, speed and determination – all things he learned in competitions, at school and on the job.
Fix a broken tractor or combine fast enough in the real world, you help save a farmer’s crops or get medicine to where it needs to go. And competitions are often their first access point, says Chelle Travis, executive director of SkillsUSA, the largest nationwide workforce development organization for students. “ Everyone is after skilled talent,” she says. “We see employers asking to increase competitions.”
To witness a skills competition is to be struck by the curiosity and drive that these students bring to a category of work that does not receive its share of headlines: “middle-skill” jobs – the kind that require training and credentials beyond high school, but not a four-year bachelor’s degree to enter.
While wildly different, these fields have two important things in common, according to Prof David Autor, associate department head of the MIT Department of Economics.
One, they all over-index on what he calls human expertise, which he defines as applying learned proficiency to problem solving and making one-off, high-stakes decisions. And two, they are all poised to benefit in the best possible version of a robotics- and AI-entwined economy – where humans are called on to collaborate with technologies that help them form new expertise on brand-new work processes which are likely to emerge.
These hands-on jobs “are an area where there’s tremendous specialized knowledge. It’s often acquired in the field. And it’s not easily automateable because it requires lots and lots of judgment, combined with a level of dexterity and adaptability in an ever-changing environment. That’s very, very challenging for robotics,” he says.
AI is skilled at knowledge tasks performed on computers, leaving the so-called “knowledge workers” who do them, especially entry-level graduates, among the most exposed. Yet Autor believes predictions of an impending “AI robocalypse” – his term – lack nuance.
In his analysis, general purpose AI models could change certain middle-skills fields like cybersecurity or IT by making them higher paid but potentially less numerous. Those who remain in those roles will be more specialized and their human oversight and judgment will be essential.
As for skilled trades, Travis says that in her 20 years with SkillsUSA, she has never before seen such concentrated interest from policymakers and CEOs in developing work-based learning programs for students, sometimes starting in elementary school. SkillsUSA’s membership now stands at more than 440,000 students nationwide, and its annual championships draw thousands of competitors.
Eva Carroll discovered the trades almost by accident.
Her high school offered electives in construction, electrical work and building technology. No one in her family worked with their hands. But during her first electrical project, a teacher showed the class how to generate a charge using nothing more than a potato sliced in half and a pair of wires. She was hooked.
Last year, Carroll proudly stood out as the only national female medalist in her division on the podium when she and her team took silver at SkillsUSA. She had traveled to Atlanta from Columbia, North Carolina, to compete in the TeamWorks competition, one of the most high-pressure skills contests known for attracting only the most tough-as-nails construction fanatics.
Students must frame out and build an eight-foot by 10-foot mini home in 16 hours flat, complete with roof, working electrical and plumbing, making it one of the most arduous challenges on the convention floor.
In Atlanta, judges provided just enough wood, masonry materials, electrical wire and other items for the build, which Caroll, 20, undertook with her team of three male students from Midlands Technical College in South Carolina. Going in, they knew they’d have no margin for error. One stud out of place would lose them points. Make the wrong cut, a board would be short and they’d lose 10 points or more.
Carroll’s main passion is for electrical installation, but she does it all. Even in the whirl of panic and accidentally hammering a finger, she enjoyed herself immensely. “I’d look around and everyone’s freaking out. And I’m just doing my own thing, singing to myself,” she says. “I’m in my own world when I’m out there.”
Carroll initially got some alarmed pushback from her parents when she came home in high school talking excitedly about the electives she’d signed up for. “Me being a girl in this, they were kind of scared that I might get hurt,” she says. They do support her, but they first wanted their daughter to understand she was choosing a field that would likely entail a lot of hard labor.
Carroll isn’t sure yet what elements of the trade she’ll pursue. She likes construction math and teamwork, so she could become a construction manager or estimator and earn well above $90,000 per year to start.
Carroll knows that being a woman on a construction site can come with its challenges, but she believes that competing and training has given her all the self-confidence she’ll ever need. “Plus, it’s cool that I get to beat a bunch of dudes that do this all the time,” she laughs.
It took a stray conversation with a friend about a criminal justice class to pique Aydrie Ruff’s interest enough that she enrolled at Meridian Technology Center, a trade school in Stillwater, Oklahoma, at 16.
By far the most interesting part of the class, for her, focused on crime scene investigation and forensics. So when her teacher asked her whether she would like to compete as part of a crime scene team through SkillsUSA, her heart leapt. “That sounds like the most interesting thing ever,” she remembers thinking.
In a competition, students are presented with the staged aftermath of a violent crime. They have to think quickly to decide what to do. “We photograph the evidence, we draw the scene. One person will swab for blood. One person will lift a fingerprint and another will package evidence and find fibers and stuff,” she explains.
Ruff’s team – three girls from her school – made it to nationals on their first try. It was extremely nerve-wracking, she recalls. In Atlanta, her CSI team had 15 minutes to process a simulated hotel robbery scene – overturned furniture, broken glass, synthetic blood, a gun underneath the mattress with prints on it. They had to capture everything without contaminating the scene. And every move they made was judged by real-life forensics experts.
Back home in Oklahoma, Ruff’s classroom work ranges from the detailed to the grisly. She’s practiced redirecting traffic away from a crime scene, and spent time at the local jail with her class. She can calculate, using a special math equation, where a suspect or victim was standing at the crime scene, based on the pattern of the blood spatter (“it’s very, very cool.”)
And she has learned a lot about bugs. Specifically, the kinds of bugs that grow inside corpses. In fact, listening to visiting entomologists lecture her class about the life cycles of maggots and flies was one of the highlights of her school year.
Ruff keeps her medals tacked up on her bedroom wall. The soft-spoken 17-year-old was raised by her grandparents. Her upbringing had no connection to the criminal justice field, other than the enjoyable hours she spent cozying up next to her grandfather as a child to watch Forensic Files, a documentary TV show that highlighted real-life cases solved by forensic scientists.
Once she completes her final year at Meridian Tech, Ruff will be off to the University of Central Oklahoma to major in forensics. “You can be a forensic scientist or a pathologist, or a toxicologist,” she says, happily. “There’s work you can do with just bones or just fingerprints or bugs. There are hundreds of jobs out there.”
Cale Mouser’s passion for diesel technology took him all the way to WorldSkills in 2024 in Lyon, France, where the then- 21-year-old earned a fifth-place medallion of excellence for the high score he obtained.
“ They always told us we were the best of the best, and I always doubted ‘em until I got there and realized how big of a deal it really was,” he says.
And crucially, AI won’t be stealing his Sherlock Holmes hat anytime soon.
“I just diagnosed a transmission the other night, where the computer didn’t even know anything was wrong,” says Mouser. “AI will not replace the skilled trades.”
