Friday Flash Aug 22, 2025

New Year, New Theme: “Champion Your Future.”

Our membership theme for the 2025-26 school year is “SkillsUSA: Champion Your Future.” This theme is designed to inspire the amazing work in our SkillsUSA chapters during the school year as students develop their Personal, Workplace and Technical Skills through our SkillsUSA Framework and realize their incredible potential. The theme will also be the topic for the 2026 SkillsUSA Chapter Display, Prepared Speech and Promotional Bulletin Board competitions.

We set the stage for that new theme at the close of the last school year as we announced the largest membership in SkillsUSA history at 444,100 student and teacher members nationwide and 506,646 total members! Our 2025 National Leadership & Skills Conference (NLSC) set records, too, including 19,019 attendees, the most ever! Now it’s time to focus on the year ahead, and that starts right at the local level in our 18,798 classrooms across the country. Are you ready to “Champion Your Future?” We encourage you to download the theme art and to use it in your SkillsUSA materials and communications.

Save the Date for Elevate 2025!

The SkillsUSA Elevate Chapter Officer Development Conference will be held on Oct. 8 from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Elevate is SkillsUSA’s virtual leadership training for chapter officer teams that participate as a group from their classroom. The cost is $50 per chapter and there is no cap on the number of attendees. Elevate equips students to lead their chapter effectively, define their roles and create an actionable Program of Work to guide their year. Please encourage your chapters to take part in this dynamic, team-based training opportunity! View the flyer and keep an eye on elevate.skillsusa.org for more information. Questions? Contact Dan Kelly.

Share Your Champions

The SkillsUSA Champions magazine staff is always looking for potential feature stories to share with the SkillsUSA Nation. If you know of a SkillsUSA student, advisor, industry partner or graduate whose story would be motivating and inspirational, please submit the information through our online form.

Coming Soon at the SkillsUSA Store

Welcome back to a new school year! The SkillsUSA Store will offer over 60 new custom products this fall! There will be new unisex T-shirts and polos. There will also be new custom bags from Wolverine and High Sierra, as well as outerwear perfect for the upcoming season, plus so much more! The SkillsUSA Store offers fast and free shipping on every purchase! Fall is a great time to outfit your chapter officers, honor your seniors or recognize and appreciate supportive school administrators and advisors.