Speaker 1:
From the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, welcome Inside the ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange is your go-to for the latest on markets, leadership, vision, and business. For over 230 years, the NYSE has been the beating heart of global growth.
Speaker 1:
Each week we bring you inspiring stories of innovators, job creators, and the movers and shakers of capitalism here at the NYSE and ICE's exchanges around the world. Now let's go Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Lance Glinn.
Lance Glinn:
Skilled trades are gaining steam and students are taking notice. More young people are ditching the four-year wait and jumping into high-demand careers through fast, hands-on technical training programs.
Lance Glinn:
Trade schools are leading the way helping students turn passion into paycheck with real-world experience and paths to good-paying jobs. We're seeing a shift to purpose-driven essential work that keeps the world and the economy moving.
Lance Glinn:
Universal Technical Institute, that's NYSE ticker symbol UTI, is fueling the future by helping students turn their passion into high-impact careers. With state-of-the-art training, industry-expert instructors and strong ties to top employers, UTI gives students the skills and confidence to thrive in fields they love.
Lance Glinn:
Joining me today Inside the ICE House is UTI CEO Jerome Grant. Since taking the helm, Jerome has led a bold transformation of the company, building on what was then an over 50-year legacy. Now as UTI celebrates its 60th anniversary, he's expanding its reach and evolving its offerings to meet the needs of tomorrow's workforce. Jerome, thanks so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.
Jerome Grant:
Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Lance Glinn:
So 2025 marks 60 years of UTI's evolution from a trade school to a leader in workforce solutions. When you reflect just on six decades of what UTI has become of preparing students for successful careers, what stands out most to you? What comes to mind?
Jerome Grant:
Oh, that's a great question. And the institute did start with one campus in Phoenix 60 years ago, five kids, and they were under a mission of, "Listen, there's a lot of cars in this country that need to be fixed. Let's fix cars."
Jerome Grant:
And I think the piece that really followed through all 60 years was dedication to quality, dedication to having a student that graduates work-ready right out of the gates. Things evolved over time with industry alliances and things along those lines, but at the very beginning they said, "We're going to have a very high-quality product. Our students are going to be sought after." And that's something that they've been able to do all the way through these decades.
Lance Glinn:
So, Jerome, you became CEO in 2019 after serving as COO for a few years before that, so you really got a whole picture on the UTI brand. But when you took over this leadership position overseeing the company, how have you focused on balancing what UTI was, that five-person classroom focused on automotive, with the need to modernize, innovate, and adapt to everything that these trades and that the healthcare industry brings today?
Jerome Grant:
That's unyielding focus on quality permeates everything that we've done. And so even if we think about our growth, our diversification, our optimization strategies, we do it all in the light of staying focused on outcomes. If students don't get great jobs, we don't succeed. They succeed, we succeed.
Jerome Grant:
And so once you dedicate yourself to that underlying notion that we're never going to yield on quality, we're never going to yield on marketability, we're not going to yield, that stands by you in anything you do. It actually dictates how fast we move.
Jerome Grant:
We could build many more than two campuses a year. The supply and demand curve is so far out of whack that we could build twice as many campuses and still not fill the demand for skilled workers in America. But we don't. And we don't, because we don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves in terms of quality. Hiring, training, making sure that the curriculum's right, making sure that the technology's right, all of that guides what we do as we've been growing over these past five years.
Lance Glinn:
And so as we look back to those initial days of your time as a CEO, what were just your, when you're sitting in your office, first few months, first few weeks, your initial impressions of the challenges that were facing UTI, and at the same time, what were your impressions on the opportunities for growth and just how successful the company overall could be?
Jerome Grant:
Yeah, so I'll answer in reverse, opportunities is actually what brought me to UTI, is that if you have over 6,000 employer partners, these are people who have registered to get access to your end product, which is a qualified student, you've got 35 OEM partners, Mercedes, Ford, GM, Harley-Davidson, Peterbilt, all the greatest brands in the world, and you've got a reputation for this high-quality output.
Jerome Grant:
Those three things together are really the fuel that I was using at that time to be able to say, "Listen, we need to unlock the fullest potential of this school." The school was really a neutral at the time, wasn't trying to grow, wasn't really addressing the skills gap that's out there, wasn't really addressing this notion of the supply and demand curve issue where there's four jobs for every graduate.
Jerome Grant:
And so at that time, what we're really thinking was let's put a plan together that can unlock the fullest potential given that we have these assets that we can build upon.
Lance Glinn:
So earlier this year I spoke with Donald Allan, the CEO of Stanley Black & Decker, and we talked a lot about the urgent need for skilled workers, which you've obviously mentioned during our conversation. And these workers are needed in obviously many of the same fields that UTI trains their students in.
Lance Glinn:
A McKinsey study mentioned 584,000 jobs. That's how big the workforce deficit is in the trades, at least it was in 2024, and you can only imagine that it's continuing to grow. So how do you interpret the scale of this challenge, and what are the ramifications if that number is not decreased, if that gap continues to grow and instead is not minimized? What could be the potential consequences for everyone else if the workforce isn't there to fill these trades and healthcare positions?
Jerome Grant:
Yeah. I think it's also important, because UTI is actually both in transportation skill trades and energy and healthcare. The healthcare field is larger and the demand is even greater, right? We talk about four jobs for every graduate in the transportation trades and energy. It's five to 10 jobs for every graduate on the healthcare side. And so the ramifications are different on either side.
Jerome Grant:
The ramifications on the UTI side of the equation are, just think of it practically. How long do you have to wait to get your car fixed? Right? How long are you waiting in line? An open bay at a car dealership costs them a lot of money, but costs you the inconvenience of waiting days, if not weeks, to get your car fixed.
Jerome Grant:
We're talking about onshoring going on in the US. We're not going to build ships in China anymore, we're not going to build fighter jets overseas. Who's going to build those? We train welders, electricians, HVAC techs, all of those people who would be part of that growth. Without that, frankly, we don't have an opportunity to build, right?
Jerome Grant:
And then there's some of the critical pieces of it, like during COVID, right? The car dealerships shut down their retail for a while, and that's one of the things that moved car dealerships online at that point of view. They didn't close their service areas because cars had to stay on the road, groceries had to be delivered and diesel trucks and things along those lines. And it plays a critical role in the infrastructure.
Jerome Grant:
On the healthcare side, the need is dire, and more people will get sick, more people will die if there's not the right people that are there to help them. And we take that very seriously. And I said the skills gap is there and growing, to your point with the CEO of Black & Decker is absolutely right and growing, especially with the aging demographic of people retiring out.
Jerome Grant:
With everything we are going to do over the next five years, and we've laid out our next five-year North Star plan, we're still not going to make a scratch in the problem. And so we need more participation. We need the government to participate with community colleges and high schools and middle schools and things along those lines. That's the stuff that's going to start attacking that gap.
Lance Glinn:
And why do you think that gap exists? Is it a retirement issue, as you just mentioned, right? Aging out of whether it be healthcare or even the skills trade? Is it a perception issue? Right? Why do you think that we have these really substantial and potentially devastating gaps in the workforce both in obviously the skilled trade and healthcare?
Jerome Grant:
Well, focusing on the skilled trade, I think it's very much cultural issue, right? I think that there are 25,000 high schools, 25 million high school students in the United States. We've got about 153 recruiters that are in the high schools talking to people. There are high schools that won't let us in.
Lance Glinn:
Yeah.
Jerome Grant:
Right? Why? Because they define themselves about what four-year schools that their students, their graduates will go to.
Lance Glinn:
Mm-hmm.
Jerome Grant:
Right? And I think culturally over the '70s and '80s, there was this redefinition of both high schools and junior colleges or community colleges as feeders for a four-year education and that everybody needed a four-year education. I have a four-year education, I assume you have a four-year education.
Lance Glinn:
I have a four-year education as well. Yep.
Jerome Grant:
That's fantastic. But not everybody does. What, some 40-some percent of the students that graduate from high school don't go on.
Lance Glinn:
Mm-hmm.
Jerome Grant:
Going right out into the workforce we don't believe is in their best interest.
Lance Glinn:
Yeah.
Jerome Grant:
Right? And so, one of the things people ask us about is who's your biggest competitors? Right? Is it the community colleges? Is it the other trade schools in the country or the other? No. Our biggest competitor is a parent, what they want their child to do after high school, right?
Jerome Grant:
Frankly, not a lot of parents want to be at a cocktail party saying their kid's a welder, right? And we need to break down those stereotypes, understand that these are great jobs with great pay and great stability, and there need to be more schools like ours out there that offer the opportunity for people to do this.
Lance Glinn:
So Jerome, is that half the battle, not only convincing students to come to UTI to pursue careers in the trades and healthcare, but also convincing their parents too?
Jerome Grant:
Yeah, it's the biggest battle by far. Obviously money is a big deal here, right? People are making a sizable investment in their future here in order to pursue this. Usually these families are people who their parents didn't go to college and this child probably was not the best student. Right? And so making the investment in doing this is a big deal to them.
Jerome Grant:
But I think more importantly is that that sort of parental cultural barrier about, "I want my kid to go to a four-year school," is by and large the largest piece of the conversation.
Jerome Grant:
And I'll give you an example of how this works, is we build a new campus in a city, say Austin, there's usually other trade schools there. Say they've been there 30, 40 years. When we come in, now we're close to 1,000 students in our Austin building, they're all doing many more students than they were doing before. Why is that? You would think if a competitor came in, that guy would be losing students. No. You got 150 more than when we got there. Why? Because we brought the awareness to the market that this all exists.
Jerome Grant:
So many people just say to themselves, "I didn't know you could do this." We take our kids to, we have industry nights for high school students, and we'll take a busload of them to a Porsche dealership with their parents. And they can talk to Porsche technicians who came through our Porsche program or something along those lines, and you've got a 22-year-old who thought he was going to be driving Uber, thought that his life was maybe working in a warehouse, wasn't going to go to college, is now a Porsche tech that's 22 years old making upwards of $100,000 a year when he never thought anything like that would happen. That's how mindshare starts to change with parents.
Lance Glinn:
It really is opening up the eyes of both the parent as well as their child, and of course in your case, the student. So you mentioned earlier in our conversation the North Star strategy, and this is something that was implemented not long after you became CEO. Can you just first, before we get into it, define the North Star internally and how are you putting its core principles into action to reach the desired goals?
Jerome Grant:
Yeah. Well, there are three core principles to the North Star strategy. We put it into place, devised it in 2019 when I took over, put it into place in 2020 after we went out into the market and raised $50 million to launch the strategy. And there were three basic principles, growth, diversification, and optimization. Right?
Jerome Grant:
And it's very simple strategy at the core, not necessarily simple to execute on. When we talk about growth, we talk about more campuses, more geography, getting to more students, right? When we talk about diversification, we talk about more skills.
Jerome Grant:
UTI for many years was really just auto diesel. And now UTI is auto, diesel, motorcycle, marine, aviation, welding, electrician training, as well as renewable energy and HVAC. So what we really now have, have diversified into a tech center.
Jerome Grant:
We talk to about a half a million 18 to 24 year olds a year. Some of them just don't want to fix cars. They want to go out and they want to fix something, or they want to operate something, they want to weld, they want to do that, and so we diversified the population. And that optimization really has to do with both the way we teach and the way we think about our locations, right? For many, many years we didn't think about are we optimizing our location so we could get the maximum number of programs on it? Which that stuff's spread around and on it.
Jerome Grant:
Are we teaching using the latest technologies? Right now 50% of our curriculum is online. And you may scratch your head and say, "Well, wait, how do you become an auto technician online?" Well, remember, inside of that car is a server, inside of that car is electronics, inside of that car is a computer. And so there's a number of courses, about half the courses are non-hands-on courses. They're computer science, they're strength and materials, there's basic engineering courses, et cetera, where you need to understand all of that stuff before we let you put your fingers in there.
Jerome Grant:
And so 50% of the curriculum is now online, which liberated us to have more room on our campus and more time to teach other things. And so that's the example of optimization. So growth, diversification, and optimization.
Jerome Grant:
The first five years were really about getting ourselves set up and getting a diversified portfolio. We acquired MIT College of Technology. They brought us aviation, they brought us HVAC, renewable energy, a number of things that we can now proliferate onto the UTI campuses. And then the second move was buying Concorde Career Colleges, which took us into healthcare.
Lance Glinn:
Yeah.
Jerome Grant:
And so a company that was 10 campuses and about 8,000 students is now 32 campuses, approaching 30,000 students, and servicing a much broader audience in these areas. And so that was the first five years of the strategy.
Jerome Grant:
The next five years of a strategy is really a continuation and with an accelerated view on getting to more locations and getting more programs out in front of people, right? We've set it up, set the base, got the assets in place, and now what we're doing is really moving to accelerate that growth.
Lance Glinn:
And you mentioned the acquisition of Concorde Career Colleges that happened in about December of 2022 or closed in December of 2022. Just what was the strategic rationale? Because that is a stark sort of shift from what UTI was originally known for, going from, again, originally the automotive industry 60 years ago to, again, staying relatively within the skilled trades arena, but then shifting to healthcare or at least adding healthcare to your portfolio. What was the rationale behind that move?
Jerome Grant:
So the thing that binds these two businesses is the fundamental notion of the supply and demand curve. As I said, there's four or five jobs for every graduate from everything we teach at UTI. And frankly, we won't enter areas where there isn't a supply and demand curve issue. But on the healthcare side, it's five to 10 jobs for every graduate.
Jerome Grant:
And so the rationale is one, both of them are alternatives to a four-year education. And two, the supply and demand curve is as acute, if not more acute on the healthcare side.
Jerome Grant:
It also sort of diversifies our student set. And the UTI side is really an 18 to 24-year-old. It had been primarily males, although we're working very, very hard to bring more women into the trades. Concorde is 25 to 35-year-old, primarily women. And so we also wanted to diversify our student body so that we had a broader audience for which to talk to. But what really unifies them is this need to close the gap.
Lance Glinn:
So Jerome, with multiple subsidiaries, campuses across the country, students pursuing diverse career paths, how do you ensure alignment with the North Star strategy and measure whether it's driving those desired meaningful outcomes for all stakeholders?
Jerome Grant:
We're at the New York Stock Exchange, you can talk about numbers like stock prices and revenue and EBITDA and all of the numbers that drive the financial community, and the way I look at that is those numbers sustain us, they don't define us.
Jerome Grant:
The definition of what we do is really about student success, right? Over 70% of the students graduate in their allotted time. If you look at community colleges, that number's more in the 30% range, right? So having a high-quality educational process that matriculates that many students is something that we're very proud of. 85% or more of our students get job in market within one year, right?
Jerome Grant:
And then the final statistic is really our employer satisfaction. Our employer satisfaction numbers are between 95 and 100%. Those barometers we want to keep up there no matter what we do in terms of it. And why? Because we were just celebrating our 60th today, ringing the bell, had a lot of our partners there, and I would ask some of our employment partners, "So why do you hire our people?" And they say, "You have the highest-quality graduate by far. They're the most industry-ready. They're the most industry-aligned." So that's really what defines us both on the Concorde side and on the UTI side.
Lance Glinn:
And so we've talked a lot about growth, the different acquisitions that UTI has made, obviously growth being one of the pillars of the North Star strategy. What does growth look like for UTI when we're looking over the next decade, over the next 15 years? You said before that, "We could open up 12 new campuses, but we'd rather open up two new campuses each year to maintain that high standard of quality." So what does that growth look like in the years moving forward?
Jerome Grant:
Well, we did say we're going to open a minimum of two new campuses a year, and part of it is sort of conditioning both divisions to get the bandwidth and the focus to do it. We know we can open two new UTI campuses a year. We've done it successfully in the past, we'll do it in the future. We know we can launch somewhere around between a half a dozen and 10 new programs across the UTI and do it at that successful rate and have the high outcomes.
Jerome Grant:
Concorde is new to us, right? They haven't opened many campuses over the last five years, and so we are just getting to know each other in terms of bandwidth and capabilities. That may give us some upside to the plan. But what we've said is we'll open two new campuses a year minimum. We're doing three next year. We'll open six new programs a year minimum. We're doing nine this year. And that will happen for the next five years, which gets us to the target we set, which is a company that's somewhere about 1.1, $1.2 billion and approaching 20% EBITDA.
Lance Glinn:
So earlier we obviously touched on 2025 being a milestone year as UTI celebrates 60 years since its founding. And while the company has evolved far beyond its original automated focus with, as you said at the beginning, five students in one classroom, I feel like its core mission to put students on a path to success has remained throughout those six decades.
Lance Glinn:
So as you reflect on them and the impact that UTI has had, what message would you want to share with young people and their families really about the values and the opportunities that careers in skilled trades and healthcare could provide today?
Jerome Grant:
Yeah. What I'd say is this is not only a job, it's actually a mission, right? Is that keeping trucks on the road so that people get food, keeping ambulances on the road so people can get to the hospital, having the staff waiting for them there at the hospital, that they're not waiting in line in a waiting room to be able to get their blood taken or get their X-rays taken or an MRI, or surgical techs and nurses and the things that we do. When you go to a dentist, you need your teeth examined and you need your X-rays, et cetera. Having that there is not just a job, it's not just a way to make money, you're really contributing. Right?
Lance Glinn:
As we now begin to wrap up our conversation, you've obviously led significant transformation at UTI since becoming CEO in 2019.
Lance Glinn:
Now looking ahead, and we obviously, I asked before how or what growth looks like in the next five to 10 years, but just how are you and your leadership team planning to build on the progress that you've already made over the last five years, last six years now, and shape the company's future moving forward so that when we get to 120 years and then 180 years, UTI is still strong and thriving?
Jerome Grant:
Well, we're working very hard not just to build the front end, meaning new campuses, new programs, and more students, et cetera, but we're also working to fortify the platform.
Jerome Grant:
And we've made some additions to our leadership team. Adrienne DeTray just joined us as CIO. Her job is to help us create a platform on which we can grow at a faster pace. Whether it's our ERP system, our learning management, our student information, or our CRM, those platforms across the division will fuel us going forward.
Jerome Grant:
We've been doing these acquisitions, but not really talking about how they work together. Are there functions that can work together to create a more durable platform for us to move forward?
Jerome Grant:
So yes, we've got our eyes set on being able to open at least two new campuses, 6, 8, 9, 10 new programs a year, but we're also doing the hard work underneath it to make sure that the company and the platform and the operating model is set so that we can continue to repeat down that path.
Lance Glinn:
Well, Jerome, I appreciate you speaking with me here at the NYSE, and thanks so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.
Jerome Grant:
Hey, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:
That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen, and follow us on X @ICEHousePodcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week Inside the ICE House.
Speaker 1:
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Speaker 1:
Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
