When more than 650 Iowa high school students recently convened in Des Moines for the annual SkillsUSA Iowa State Leadership and Skills Conference, a handful were there to test their skills in commercial roofing, a relatively new competition to the SkillsUSA lineup.
SkillsUSA is one of nine Career and Technical Student Organizations (CTSO) in Iowa that engages students in career and technical education activities and provides opportunities to develop and refine the skills students need in their chosen occupational area. Through its instruction and curriculum, SkillsUSA empowers students to become skilled professionals, career-ready leaders and responsible community members.
As part of its annual State Leadership and Skills Conference, students could participate in nearly 70 competitions evaluating their aptitude and proficiency in their chosen discipline, including almost every skilled trade imaginable.
View photos from the 2025 SkillsUSA State Leadership Conference and Skills Conference
"They are coming to compete with the skills that they have developed over the last 1-4 years of high school or community college courses and are competing to be the best," said Iowa Department of Education program consultant Cale Hutchings.
The addition of commercial roofing to the competition lineup and curriculum was a direct result of industry demand and the need to create a talent pipeline to fuel a strong and skilled workforce.
"The National Commercial Roofing Association reached out and said, 'We have a pipeline issue, how can we partner with SkillsUSA?" said SkillsUSA Iowa State Director Kent Storm. "We partnered with the Iowa Commercial Roofing Association and Dryspace, Inc. out of Cedar Rapids, who said, 'We want to do this not only for our company but the entire industry,' and they launched the commercial roofing program."
In just two years, Dryspace and other industry partners donated the supplies to more than a half dozen high schools in Iowa while providing industry teaching standards and their employees' time and expertise to help expose and train students in commercial roofing proficiency.
"We've launched an entirely new program because of industry demand," Storm said. "We were able to meet industry demands through subtle changes that did not require legislation and had a true impact on the ground and in the industry."
For Dryspace, that demand was critical to maintaining a strong workforce while providing opportunities to students in their community.
"A large part of our workforce is starting to phase out as they get older, and we're looking for that next group to bring in and bring up into the trades," said Dryspace owner Lynn Price. "SkillsUSA has provided that opportunity to get in front of more of these high school students and talk to them about how there are opportunities out there that are not traditional four-year colleges."
Opportunities in commercial roofing are plentiful across the nation. With roofs that cover facilities that are acres in size and often protect production lines and equipment worth millions of dollars, the need to construct, maintain and repair commercial roofs is ever-present. Especially in Iowa, the industry has been challenged by the demand created by the 2020 derecho and subsequent severe weather that Price estimates has caused significant damage to 80 percent of roofs in Cedar Rapids.
"The need for what we're doing doesn't ever slow down," Price said. "We're always replacing roofs. Finding people who want to enter the trades and work with their hands has been challenging. If we can get out there and meet and talk to 15-20 students in a year, maybe one or two of them will be interested. That's awesome."
Korey Moser, a senior at West Lyon High School, is one of the students Price was able to reach through SkillsUSA and encouraged to explore commercial roofing.
"One of our shop teachers got in contact with him [Price], and he came in and showed us how to do roofing welds," Moser said. "I was looking for a new competition for SkillsUSA that year because I did masonry the year before and didn't really love it. I did some good welds and passed."
From that visit, Moser was spurred to continue working on his roofing skills, as staff from Dryspace regularly visited to provide continued instruction. This experience brought Moser to the SkillsUSA Iowa State Leadership and Skills Conference to test his roofing proficiency against other students. The SkillsUSA commercial roofing competition requires participants to successfully install a functional thermoplastic single-ply membrane roofing system on an 8-foot by 8-foot mockup in four hours that complies with nationally accepted standards and benchmarks.
"This is the context to the content of what they've been taught," Storm said. "Teachers have been telling them this is what they'll face in the real world. Now, industry partners are showing them that."