Trey Michael has a philosophy that he takes with him wherever he goes – to help the people around him grow.
As the new State CTE Director for North Carolina, Michael is charged with leading the state’s Career Technical Education (CTE) system, and he plans to use that philosophy to help grow the state’s future workforce.
“I want every student to be as prepared as possible to make intelligent and guided decisions about a career path for their life as soon as possible, and then support them with tools and resources to help them begin to go down that path,” Michael said.
The philosophy is one that he stumbled upon early in his career while in the financial services industry in the mid-90s, where there was no structured training program for new staff. He began informally trying to help build the knowledge and skills of the new associates, and unknowingly, set himself on a path that would soon lead him to return to graduate school and pursue a degree in marketing education at North Carolina State University.
After graduating, he took a job teaching middle school business and marketing classes and soon took on additional responsibilities coaching soccer and track. For Michael, coaching was also another opportunity to recruit students into his CTE classes. As he says, once a marketer, always a marketer.
Michael’s energy and passion helped him then move on to help open a new high school outside of Raleigh, and then to the state Department of Public Instruction in 2001 to help strengthen curriculum, instruction and standards for marketing education across the state. Over the 15 years that followed, Michael managed myriad responsibilities within the department, serving most recently as a section chief.
In his new role, Michael said he is looking forward to strengthening middle and high school CTE programming with a focus on key industries in the state including computer science, health care, construction trades, and information technology.
“We have a skills gap and have fallen behind as a country competitively, and the only way we fix that is by thinking really hard about how we prepare elementary, middle and high school students to be more competitive in the workforce,” Michael said.
Andrea Zimmermann, Senior Associate, Member Engagement and Leadership Development