By JUNO OGLE
Daily Press Staff
This week, 18 students gathered at the Grant County Veterans Memorial Business and Conference Center for an intense training session that could help lead them to better jobs.
The five-day fiber optic boot camp was offered free of charge through Santa Fe Community College, thanks to a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration that Grant County received in 2020. Throughout the week, they learned through hands-on work and lectures, and tested for three certifications from the Fiber Optic Association.
Instructor Mike Rauch teaches the boot camps all over the country through BDI DataLynk, a national training company. He said the typical cost of training for the certifications would amount to about $3,100.
While the certificates aren’t necessarily required to get jobs in the fiber optics field, he said, they can give a job candidate an advantage.
“When you’re looking for work and you’re brand-new to this, this is a good baseline of how fiber works and gives you a leg up when you’re applying for jobs than if you don’t have them,” Rauch said. “These are a good starting point if you want to jump into the field.”
Kris Swedin, dean of continuing education and contract training at Santa Fe Community College, said now is a good time to get into the fiber optic industry, with $675 million in federal funding coming to New Mexico to expand broadband access in the state.
“A lot of these awards are coming to some of the local telecommunications companies,” she said. “Many of the tribal governments around the state have secured some of this funding already. So particularly over the next two to four years, there’s a demand for about 1,400 people to have this kind of a job.”
That funding is part of the $42 million Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program in the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which means fiber optic workers will be in demand nationally.
“So every state in the country also has big amounts of money to increase their internet capabilities,” Swedin said. “These workers are going to be very scarce, because they need a lot of people in Texas and in Colorado and around the country simultaneously.”
That demand for workers has already started, Rauch said.
“They have just started implementation. They just started running cable and doing a bunch of stuff,” he said. “Right now is a great time for these guys to take this course, because there are a lot of companies that don’t really even need you to have a lot of experience. They just need people to pull cable and test and terminate, just get the equipment into place.”
Swedin said her community college began the boot camps about two years ago, and has trained about 250 people so far. While the college doesn’t track students after they get their certifications, she said many have gotten back in touch with the college on their own.
“A lot of them reach back out to us because they have jobs, either working for companies or they’ve started contracting businesses, and they’re looking to get additional training for themselves or for their new colleagues that want to go through the training,” Swedin said.
While the job possibilities are nationwide, several of the boot camp’s students said they took the training to help them with local opportunities.
Shallon Donaldson of Cliff has worked for TWN Communications for about four years. The company encouraged him to take the training and paid his regular wage for the week.
“Our company started doing fiber optics, so I might as well get certified — that way I can try and do it. It’s booming right now,” he said.
The biggest thing he’s learned, he said, was working with the equipment.
“This is just so small and hard for me,” Donaldson said. “I have shaking hands. It’s getting the hands-on and getting to mess with it, getting to learn. It’s the terminology, too, learning the different terms.”
Branson Coltrane owns an IT business and said he’d been looking to get into fiber optics.
“I just wanted to get the experience and do it,” he said. “I’ve learned a lot. I think it will help me.”
Samuel Hernandez said he hoped it would open up job-seeking options in the future.
“It’s a good course. They call it a boot camp, so it moves pretty fast, but it does give you a good look at everything that’s involved in it,” he said.
Enrique Maldonado already had some experience from the U.S. Navy, where he was a sonar technician.
“I saw this course was being offered, and I figured it was one of those things to boost my résumé, get those kinds of skills that everyone is looking for nowadays,” he said.
Maldonado’s studying for an associate degree at Western New Mexico University to get his general education credits, but said he eventually wants to go to a four-year school to study cybersecurity.
“I have experience in fiber optics, and now I have the certification to work on it. So hopefully that goes somewhere,” he said.
Daniel Ynchard traveled from Pueblo to take the course this week, sponsored by his employer, Bechtel, an engineering and construction firm.
“It’s a good class. I think people should jump at the opportunity for stuff like this, especially if it’s free,” he said.
This was the second fiber optics boot camp Grant County and Santa Fe Community College have offered this year. Through the federal grant, the county also offered leadership skills training and hospitality industry training, said Andrea Montoya, deputy county manager. The grant period is coming to a close next week, however, so no further trainings are scheduled.
Juno Ogle may be reached at juno@scdaily press.com.