On most hands-on instruction days, David Hope, who leads career-technical instruction at South Tech High School’s fire and emergency medical technician academy, can be found helping his St. Louis students understand how to assess injuries at a crash site or evaluate how shifting winds affect firefighting logistics.
But this year, the 18-year veteran firefighting and EMT instructor is also learning with his students. He’s attending online classes for Federal Aviation Administration certification and directing remote and virtually controlled drones in the field behind the school’s shop building, to earn his pilot and instructor’s license to establish in-person drone classes.
“We’re all going through it together,” Hope said.
South Tech High, which serves juniors and seniors from 27 districts across St. Louis County in part-day career education pathways, has been updating buildings and expanding courses in line with joining a federal registered apprenticeship program for students. Similar expansion across the St. Louis County special school district has driven a 10% increase in CTE enrollment over the past five years, said Kevin Andert, operations and CTE chief for the for the St. Louis County special school district.
But that also means a massive struggle to recruit more specialized educators, or tap existing teachers to earn new certifications, particularly in the fastest-growing areas of healthcare, advanced manufacturing and information technology (including artificial intelligence). “It’s really hard because it’s evolving constantly,” Andert said. “A lot of it is, ‘I need you to get certified so that we can then certify students.’”
St. Louis is far from alone. Changing technology and workforce needs have driven a wave of new initiatives and investments overhauling career and technical education in nearly every state and the federal government since 2024. These initiatives depend on building a pool of teachers like Hope for highly sought-after and rapidly changing fields like advanced manufacturing, computer science, and medicine.
But school-based teacher professional development often skews toward core instructional areas like reading and math or classroom management, leaving teachers like Hope to spend their own time—and their own dime—to keep abreast of new trends and skills in their industries.
State initiatives have had federal support. In the last year, the U.S. Education Department prioritized CTE and workforce development programs in its grantmaking, and President Donald Trump signed an executive order to expand federal registered apprenticeship programs, which combine classroom instruction with mentor-guided paid work.
In part based on the expansion of these programs, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers this year launched a $7 million CTE initiative focused on artificial intelligence and manufacturing careers. The 18,000-student Kenosha district is one of the districts rapidly building out its industry pathways, but it has required a heavy lift to build teacher capacity, according to Aaron Williams, the district coordinator for the district’s 3,500-student, 33-teacher CTE programs.
“Technology and engineering just move a lot faster than we do in education,” Williams said. “When we look at career and technical programming, we’re slow at moving big systems. We have to focus on teaching the essence of [industries] and then just sprinkle in the things that are moving forward as we can.”
Districts are recruiting CTE teachers—but what about building their knowledge?
Career education initiatives in rapidly changing industries have tended to focus on recruiting, said David Sherer, the head of a CTE research network on the issue including Washington state and five other states, led by the Carnegie Center for the Advancement of Teaching and the College Board.
Nineteen states and the District of Columbia reported statewide shortages in career education teachers in 2024-25 (the most recent data available), according to federal teacher shortage data analyzed by the National Conference of State Legislatures.
“I think we’re all struggling with wanting to be sure that we’re not just exchanging quantity and fast growth,” said Holli Ryan-Kalaleh, the supervisor for Washington state’s business and marketing career and technical education program.
The state has one of the most concentrated technology areas in the country, home to Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google. And it has a chronic shortage of teachers to prepare students for the companies that want to hire them, she said. “In some of the higher-demand fields—healthcare, cybersecurity, even for a long time in basic computer science—it’s challenging to get and keep people in.”
Ironically, states’ efforts to expand the hiring pool of teachers in high-demand career fields sometimes have had the effect of lessening the content knowledge that’s most critical for them to learn.
Illinois and Maryland now recognize aspiring educators’ business, marketing, and technology education credentials to tap them to teach some cybersecurity courses. But that can give teachers a less consistent foundation for the specialized technical knowledge needed to teach the courses, said to Melissa Dark, executive director of the nonprofit National Cybersecurity Teaching Academy. As of 2025, the NCTA found 11 states include some kind of certification for high school cybersecurity education, either in computer science or career-technical education, but the specific standards vary widely.
States set teacher-licensing requirements in CTE fields—which may or may not track with individual industry credentials—and there is no centralized database for these. (This summer, the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers’ union, voted to study career-education teacher licensing and professional development programs nationwide, but there is no timeline for the data.)
The teacher pipeline for career education has become a “big system-level problem,” and needs a more holistic approach, Sherer said.
“We want a better, stronger, more resilient CTE teacher workforce,” Sherer said. “That’s not just about getting people in the door; it’s getting people to stay … really supporting them well and making sure they feel successful in their day-to-day.”
Teachers ‘on their own’ for industry PD
Once they’re licensed, keeping up with their fields can pose an additional challenge for CTE teachers. With fewer courses and students per subject, and expensive, specialized equipment and training required, such high school teachers often don’t get subject-specific professional development as often as teachers in core subjects.
Technology has intensified change and fueled the need for teacher training not just in computer science or cybersecurity, but in traditional fields too. Automotive programs that taught students to check ignition timing and reset spark plugs a decade ago now focus on computer-based electronic ignition and other systems. Data analysis and technology have changed approaches to fighting large fires, said Hope, the fire and EMT teacher.
“The job is always changing, and if I’m not keeping up on different trends, my kids walk out the door behind the eight ball,” Hope said.
In lieu of systemic state training support, Hope and his fellow Missouri instructors pay about $500 out-of-pocket and work 20-40 hours outside of school each year to stay up to date. They have to prepare for recertification in firefighting every three years and EMT every five years, not counting certifications for new courses like Hope’s drone piloting.
In manufacturing, computer numerical control—or the use of coding and software to produce complex prototypes and manufacturing processes—has been a huge driver of new “makerspace” CTE programs in schools, according to Nichols, the Kentucky CTE teacher.
But it can be expensive and time-consuming for teachers to keep up with changing equipment. “The turnaround time is so fast; the 3-D printer that is all the rage today, in six months, is falling behind,” Nichols said. “And for the most part, teachers are left to figure that all out for themselves.”
Andert said St. Louis County schools try to help its teachers “keep a toe in their industry” by coordinating with students’ work-study employers. For example, a Registered Nurse teacher might have opportunities to log required clinical hours alongside their students working at a local hospital.
CTE teachers cobble resources together to stay current in their fields
For the most part, teachers rely on small-scale state or industry boot camps, externships, or grants from individual employers to stay up to date.
Many teachers solicit grants and training directly from individual manufacturers, experts said, though this can mean the skills aren’t as generalizable. For example, to teach students how to use a precision manufacturing tool like a Haas CNC machine, manufacturing teachers need to convey physical safety procedures and tool offsets, as well as the proprietary software used to program advanced printing and milling—which may not apply to other machines or procedures.
Getting approval to count industry PD towards teachers’ continuing education requirements every 5-7 years is also daunting, said Hope, in part because in Kentucky it must be completed by an administrator, not the teacher who actually benefits from the training.
“I would have to recruit an administrator to do all the legwork; then wait for approval that [the district] considers it worthwhile; then roll it out and have individual teachers give feedback to show how it benefits their instruction and their students in the future,” Hope said. “The process is so overwhelming, for such little credit, that most people just forego it.”
Williams, the CTE coordinator for the Kenosha district, said he hires teachers from industry using the state’s experience-based CTE license, but has partnered with Deanna Schultz at the University of Wisconsin-Stout to develop boot camps to help those who started in the classroom or who have been out of the industry for awhile to brush up on skills rapidly changing fields.
Kenosha teachers go through three years of training. In the first year, mentors spend 75 minutes a month helping new CTE teachers improve classroom management and building the instructional environment. In the second year, they focus on developing industry-based lessons and adapting them to needs of general and special education students. In the third year, teachers improve connections between their classroom experiences and students’ work-based learning.
“We always talk about personalized learning for students, but it really is the same need for personalized learning for our teachers,” Williams said. “We might have someone teaching construction for a period of the day, and then they shift gears and do a manufacturing or engineering course, so we have to do a lot of professional development.”
Another idea: Outsourcing career education to employers
David Miyashiro, the superintendent of the Cajon Valley Union schools in San Diego, Calif., takes a different approach.
The district has reorganized its schools around a “World of Work” model to help students begin exploring different careers from kindergarten on. Its classroom teachers are trained to integrate so-called “durable skills”—like critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and digital literacy—transferable across many different careers.
But Cajon Valley’s career-tech high school, launched in 2020, does not have on-campus career-tech pathways. Instead, participating students can spend up to 40% of their class time at work-based mentorships and apprenticeships off-campus, with local employers in biotech, aerospace, medical research, and artificial intelligence, among others.
“The biggest challenge [in career education] is always that people with the most relevant experience and skills in an industry can make more money outside of teaching,” Miyashiro said. “It doesn’t make sense to ask most people who are successful in industry to give up what they’re doing to make a percentage of their private industry salary to be in public education. So we rely on industry and business to do the teaching.
“And so whether that’s automotive or construction or healthcare or professional white-collar work,” he continued, “students’ career experience is coming from industry professionals, not teachers.”
Teachers have opportunities to work with those partners, too, around the dispositions employers want students to have.
The approach has eased staff hiring and retention stress, and allows the school to adapt more quickly to changing industry needs, Miyashiro said. “Our industry leaders say, ‘We have a workforce shortage. We need the kids to be interested and aspire to work here. Don’t waste the money building and doing [CTE] yourselves. We’ll train them here.’”
