4.19 - Liaison: SkillsUSA National Architectural Drafting Competition

I am currently in Nashville, TN, attending the 2024 SkillsUSA National Competition planning meeting. (Tuesday and Wednesday of this week - February 6 & 7).

Next week, there will be emails looking for sponsors, industry partners, and volunteers.

Mark Tidwell, Professional Member in AL, is planning to continue to serve as Co-Chair.

There are not any significant changes in the competition format being proposed by SkillsUSA. Although the AIBD competition floor plan has changed for third time in the past three years.

Below is the power point presentation being used at the planning meeting, if you're interested in learning more about the back-end legistics of the program.

UPDATE (12:06 pm CT):
During our discussions about improving the student experience at the competitions, two interesting ideas came up that AIBD could particiapte in.
1. There is a writen portion of the competition. In our case it's a one-hour multiple choice test. What if we used our (mothballed) Design Technician Level 1 certificate test and each passing student would go home with a physical certificate? If that sounds feasible, we would need to continue the program and write our Level 2 test for the college students.
2. What if we created a digital badge for the winners? This would be a cost of $6/year and the cost would increase by $6 each year as we issue six more badges to the medalists. Is it a crazy idea to think we could enlist a digital badge sponsor and offer the badge to all the competitors each year? That would be a cost of around $60 annually with the cost growing with each year that we add new badge holders.