Fast 5: Creating A High School To MRO Industry Career Pathway

As the executive director of Mentoring Mission and Project AMPLiFI, Carol Valentino-Barry is working with high school students across the U.S. to prepare them for careers in the MRO industry. She launched Project AMPLiFI in Southern Illinois to provide better resources for the region’s young people and its growing aviation sector. Valentino-Barry spoke with Aviation Week about the lessons she’s learned so far and how industry professionals can help drive progress on workforce pipeline and mentorship.

Southern Illinois might not traditionally be seen as an aviation or MRO hub. What has driven demand for aviation maintenance workforce development there, and what are its unique regional challenges?

Southern Illinois isn’t a traditional center for aviation maintenance, but there’s real momentum building. The Southern Illinois Airport, Veterans Airport of Southern Illinois and nearby businesses like Crucial MRO, Arch Medical Aviation and Midwest Aviation are generating steady demand for skilled labor. But that workforce can’t grow without exposure, and that’s the challenge. The region is remote, and students often have no way to access aviation careers. Transportation barriers, limited school resources and a lack of visible role models make it difficult for young people to see these jobs as realistic options.

That’s exactly why we launched Project AMPLiFI: to bring high-quality, FAA-aligned aviation maintenance training directly to high school students. We hold classes after school, at the airport, with real tools and working professionals. It’s not about turning Southern Illinois into a national hub. It’s about giving overlooked students in underserved places a real pathway into an industry that needs them.

Could you tell me about Mentoring Mission and Project AMPLiFI? When and how were both launched, and what’s the goal with each?

Our goal is simple: good jobs for those who might otherwise fall through the cracks. That’s why I founded Mentoring Mission—to connect high school students with real-world skills, mentors, and pathways into technical careers. In the past year alone, we’ve mentored over 500 students, from Chicago to the Carolinas to the Bay Area to, believe it or not, Istanbul. We do this through a two-track approach: one vocational, one problem-solving.

• Project AMPLiFI is our aviation pipeline initiative, launched in 2023 through a federal workforce grant. We provide FAA-aligned aviation maintenance training to high school students after school, on site at Veterans Airport in Marion. Students train with certified aviation maintenance technicians (AMT), learn technical skills like torqueing and safety wiring, and visit working MROs to see the profession in action.
• On the other track, we use Harvard Business School case studies to teach leadership, analysis and critical thinking. Volunteer MBAs guide students through real-world business dilemmas, helping them explore tough problems and start imagining how they might solve their own.

By combining hands-on technical training with elite-level problem solving, we’re giving students not just career options, but confidence, networks and a sense that they belong in rooms they didn’t know existed.

How many students have participated in Project AMPLiFI so far and what does the program include?

We launched Project AMPLiFI in fall 2024. Since then, over 30 high school students from across Southern Illinois have taken part in field trips, virtual sessions with professional mechanics and exploratory hands-on training at Veterans Airport in Marion.

Classes meet after school and focus on building core technical skills aligned with the 12 modules in the FAA’s general curriculum, covering everything from maintenance forms and regulations to physics, math, basic electricity, aircraft drawings and materials. Students engage in tool labs, safety wiring and precision measurement exercises that build confidence and technical fluency.

Choose Aerospace has supported us with access to curriculum and pre-assessments modeled after FAA standards. And industry professionals—from American Airlines, FedEx, United, Zipline, Alaska Airlines and Women in Aviation International—have mentored students in person and virtually.

One student recently said, “I thought this career was out of reach—but now I can picture myself doing it.” That’s the starting line.

Some of the students from this program competed in the Aerospace Maintenance Competition at Verticon in Dallas earlier this year and got to tour some of Southwest Airlines’ MRO facilities. What was that experience like?

It was a game changer. In March, a group of four AMPLiFI students traveled to Dallas to represent Southern Illinois at the Aerospace Maintenance Competition at Verticon—becoming the only high school team in the country to compete alongside professionals, trade school students and military technicians. They took on 27 timed challenges, including safety wiring, torqueing and virtual painting.

They also toured Southwest Airlines’ MRO operation, saw live maintenance in progress and got firsthand exposure to what a career in this field actually looks like. Southwest Airlines, which sponsored the students, helped make that possible.

For students from a rural, underserved area to compete—and hold their own—on a national stage sent a message: They belong here. Experiences like Verticon don’t just inspire. They help a student see aviation maintenance technician not as a fantasy, but as a future.

You’ve also worked with students in other areas of the U.S. to introduce aviation maintenance curriculum. Based on your experiences thus far, why would you say efforts to target high school-aged students like this are important for the MRO workforce pipeline, and what do you think industry can be doing to help?

The aviation maintenance workforce shortage isn’t coming—it’s here. That’s why I’ve centered my doctoral research—“Establishing Effective Industry-Education Partnerships: A Focus on High School Pathways for Aviation Mechanics”—on one big question: How can early exposure, mentorship and hands-on training accelerate readiness and improve outcomes for the next generation of aviation maintenance technicians?

What we’re seeing is that mentorship matters most. It’s not enough to show students a video or give a one-day tour. What makes the difference is connection. Students need to stand beside someone who looks like them, talks like them and turns a wrench for a living. And the most effective mentors are the ones who already do the job: working AMTs.

But those mechanics are stretched thin. They can’t be expected to take on mentorship as an unpaid side project. That’s why industry support is so critical. We need to stop viewing mentorship as extra and start treating it as infrastructure. That means offering paid release time for certified mechanics to mentor students, lead labs or support pre-apprenticeship efforts. It doesn’t just build the pipeline—it stabilizes it.

We’ve already seen the impact firsthand. Several of our students are applying to Boeing’s assembly mechanic apprenticeship in St. Louis—a paid, earn-and-learn pathway that leads into union-represented roles. And along the way, they’ve been mentored by professionals from across the country.

AMPLiFI is collecting anonymous responses from certified AMTs nationwide to better understand what is driving and draining job satisfaction in the field. Valentino-Barry says this research is a key part of her doctoral study on industry-education partnership for AMTs. If your organization would like to participate or help spread the word, please contact: [email protected].