He greeted me with a smile and a handshake.
When I first arrived for my appointment to interview Michael LeBlanc, he already had a question on his mind.
“So, why me? What made you guys choose me for an article?”
He explained that he’d read up on the Beyond the Classroom articles and understood that they highlighted an instructor. After a brief explanation about his name coming up in a Commuter meeting due to some of the great things he has been a part of at the Automotive Technology program, he offered me a tour of the facility.
I’m so glad he did – it’s a must see!
With spaces for classrooms and labs, a student lounge, an expansive area with bays for cars and lifts running the entire length of the building, a tool room, and an office area, there is much more than meets the eye. I have driven by the Advanced Transportation Technology Center (ATTC) building countless times in Lebanon, but never had the occasion to stop. It is located near the end of Oak Street before Denny School Road.
Mike seemed incredibly proud of his students and the programs that they are running at the ATTC. He shared his hopes and goals for the program and a little bit about himself, too.
Mike: My name probably came up because I am doing a lot of things. I’m trying to be involved in as much as I can, with the hours that are available in a 24-hour day. Most recently we’re really doing some things with the women in our program, auto and diesel.
Last year, or two years ago, we worked on a grant through the National Science Foundation, and I wrote and submitted a grant to really accelerate an electric vehicle training program. We do automotive, we do heavy equipment diesel, we offer two-year degrees, we offer one-year certifications, but we don’t do anything with high voltage or electric vehicles. Since the industry was trending that way, it was like, “Alright, let’s try to get a little bit of money to kickstart a program.”
The National Science Foundation also wants you to have a component of your project that focuses on underserved populations. So, one thing that we’ve always found is that our industry is like 3% female. Well, our program is like 3% female, so if we’re not training women to be technicians, they’re not going to become technicians. So, we wrote about some activities that promote female-focused recruitment, retention, and marketing over the terms of the grant.
We just had a female-focused photoshoot last week and we had our six automotive females and six heavy equipment diesel female students, and they all got to do photoshoots and group shots. That was a cool activity and we’re going to utilize those images for outreach and marketing. So, I showed you the picture of our ladies with Erin (Jacobson) because she is in the American Association for Women Community Colleges. When they had a tea luncheon, they had a guest speaker maybe a month ago, we paid out of the grant for them to all get registered and go over there and represent the program and say, “Hey, we’re women, we’re in this program, and we rock!”
So that was kind of a cool activity we’re doing, and really just trying to get anything that is female-focused – I want to send our gals over there and do it. Because we’re out here on a satellite campus. Not a lot of people come out here. Not a lot of people know we’re here. That’s been another big push of mine: to try to get more of the Albany college stuff out here. Whether it’s support from counselors, or Roadrunner Resources, or we’re trying to get student leadership out here. Again, just kind of awareness. Getting our students more involved.
What was your journey to automotive? Where did you start – did you have goals and aspirations in that direction?
I was always exposed to mechanics. My father and grandfather were both kind of mechanics. So, growing up, I was around it. But I lived with my mom when my parents split early on, so I didn’t have a lot of it, but in high school, I took some auto shop [classes]. It was like junior or senior year and all my credits were done. All I had was sports and auto shop my senior year. I knew I didn’t really want to do a four-year path, but was just going to take the year off and see what happened. I worked at a restaurant, went to some community colleges in Southern California, and was actually on a waiting list for a nursing program. My mother was a nurse. It was a three-year waiting list for the nursing program.
I ended up getting a job at a Jeep dealership and it just kind of went from there. I was good at it. It made me happy and made some money. So yeah, I worked in the automotive industry as a technician, worked my way up, and became certified as a master technician. And then most recently, I was the shop foreman at Mercedes-Benz of Salem before taking this position in 2019, right before COVID. My introduction to teaching was a term and a half of regular teaching and then a year of COVID! But yeah, I could have been a nurse in another life, I guess!
You switched from being a mechanic and working with customers and working on vehicles to teaching. What is the best part of teaching for you, and what was that switch like?
So for me, as you progress as a technician, you get to a point where you start training younger technician apprentices. That was always rewarding in industry. We weren’t really compensated to train people, but you did like to see people grow. Watching a young technician blossom into a technician and go work on their own and be productive and efficient. That was always really satisfying. And I want to say that’s very similar to what we get teaching, where we’re taking larger groups of students and watching them grow. There is always talk about the “aha” moment, obviously having that as an instructor, watching somebody get something, like really understanding it. That’s really, really what drives it.
Can you tell me a little bit about the program in general? It’s for automotive technology – what does that really entail?
So, we are a CTE, or career technical education program. We really focus on, at the end of your education, what career path you will be on. And the career path we focus on is that of the mechanic or the technician. So, an individual working in a shop fixing a vehicle for compensation. The majority of our students enter the program, they don’t really necessarily see themselves becoming a technician. They didn’t decide, “that’s my career.” They just know they want to work with their hands. They like cars. They don’t want to sit at a desk. We have a lot of students that come here with very little technical knowledge, mechanical knowledge, or automotive knowledge. And then we have a few that grew up on a farm and have been driving tractors since they were six and have been welding fences their whole lives. We have a pretty big variation in the students coming in.
To answer your question about, like, where do we start? Our first couple of classes are very much a base level knowledge. This is a tire. This is a wheel. These are brakes. It’s a lot of introductions and component identification. And then throughout the entire process, we talk about, okay, what does it mean to transition into a career? How do you make this your job and then make it your career? How do you make money to support a family as a technician? And there’s a lot of nuances about our industry that nobody realizes about technicians. As technicians, you are paid by the job. It’s kind of piecework, and a lot of people don’t understand that. How productive you are impacts how much money you make. So, we’re also training them in how you move through the shop. Moving with purpose, being efficient. So, that’s a lot of the things that go into that first year.
When they come back for their second year, typically, they are employed in the industry by then. In the first year, we are trying to get them ready to go and get a job over the summer. What’s interesting about our program is that we have what is called a tool program. Because we work with Snap-on [tools], we built the tool set costs into the first-year course. It’s a starter set of tools and storage. As a technician, if you want to go get a job at a shop, the first question they ask you is, “do you own your own tools,” right? So, we were finding that many of our students weren’t employable, or they weren’t being hired, because they didn’t have tools. So, by putting that cost into the program, it makes our degree expensive, but it makes students more employable.
Actually, (June 5) will be our tool ceremony. And we do a mini graduation. We’ll have 31 students standing behind 31 tool sets, friends and family will come, and we’ll announce their names. And then, immediately afterwards, we’re going to unbox their tools, load them up in their car, and then grab their student portfolios and go interview for a job. I’m hoping to have 10 or 15 of our industry partners lined up in our classrooms, ready to do almost speed dating-like interviews.
So, that’s the plan. Then we kick them out over summer. We say, “Go work.” Some of them get really good jobs and they don’t come back, which I would consider an okay form of attrition. We’ve actually structured the program in a way where the ones that don’t come back, they’ve automatically completed a one-year certificate and it’s ASE [Automotive Service Excellence] certified. ASE is the national accreditor for mechanics and technicians. We train to their standards.
If you go out and you find an awesome job, you start your career and you don’t come back, all you have to do is change your major to Automotive Maintenance and Light Repair, and you get your one-year certification. For those that come back, we go deeper into engines and transmissions, taking things apart and understanding the more complex things that are going on inside a vehicle. At the end of the year, they have an associate degree in applied science in Automotive Technology, and they have trained to go out in the industry and get their ASE certifications and credentials, which makes them more employable. And it just gets them on a really good career trajectory.
That’s awesome!
Yeah, the new electric vehicle program adds another one-year option. It’s a one-year certificate in Electric Vehicle Technician. You could make the choice as a new student and say, “Hey, I’m gonna start with Maintenance and Light Repair,” and at the end of that year, you could transfer over to EV. A lot of our students finish the second year and then they go through a year of Heavy Equipment Diesel, and they get two associate degrees in three years. So, that’s another option we can do. You could do two years of auto and then a year of EV. Again, a stackable credential that gives our students options.
I assume that in something hands-on like this, you guys are really ingraining safety, and that’s a big part of the culture.
Yeah, in all of the first classes. If a student comes in the program – a lot of our students start in fall, we are kind of a cool, cohort-based model but we do have some off-sequence starts – but the majority of students come in, and in the first two weeks of every class is basic safety stuff. We’re getting certified with some lifts, like vehicle lifts. Lift It Right is a national certification for lift safety training. All the students get lift certified on all of our vehicle lifts products. And then we also have pollution prevention and chemical safety, and then mechanical safety. So, there’s the “Don’t smash your finger with a hammer,” but also, “Don’t spray yourself in the face with the brake cleaner.” But we do certify them in that very early on.
[Brief interruption by someone with a question for Mike.]
There’s a lot of that in my daily life.
I bet! Alright, switching to just about you. What do you like to do when you’re not here? What are your hobbies?
Well, I have a wife and two kids and they’re teenagers, so they don’t want a whole lot to do with me anymore. But I do like going home and just being with my family. We would be homebodies, I would say. We do Friday Night Magic. We play Magic the Gathering, Kitchen Table Commander. So, that’s kind of our big thing. We watch a lot of stuff, streaming stuff. But as far as activities go, I do enjoy exercising as much as I can. And golfing. Actually, my wife and I golf up in Salem at these little, tiny municipalities whenever we can, so those would be my hobbies. But most of the time I’m thinking about working, answering emails and doing that kind of stuff.
Have you ever had a mentor who helped you in some way? Do you see value in mentorship?
Yeah, actually. I think one of the things that’s driven me to help, or actually focus, on the female technician aspect of our grant was that I worked at an independent shop in California that was a European car specialty shop. And early on in my career, I worked with a lady named Martha Flohr. And she was a Mercedes-Benz master technician in the Bay Area in the 80s and 90s.
I worked pretty closely with her, and she was a really good resource. That was kind of awesome, I mean, she was a rock star in the shop. She was the only female I’ve ever worked with in the industry, and that really had that impression on me of just like, “Man, she knows her stuff.” She was a good resource to go to, so yeah, definitely – mentorship is huge in our industry. We learn a lot going into programs like this, but we learn so much more out in the industry working with other technicians who have done it.
If you could impart one thing to the readers, what would it be? In whatever topic.
Be the best human you can be and do the best you can do in whatever it is. Just want to do your best, and that comes through. If you are genuine and try hard – they say hard work pays off, and I’m a really big believer in that. But, I think also, being just a genuine, positive person that wants to be successful is a huge one for me.
