Vaneza Zepeda credits her grandfather for where she is today: a massive machine shop on Holt Cat’s 130-acre southeast campus filled with heavy equipment Zepeda helps maintain in her role as a shop technician.
Yet while a childhood spent at the knee of her grandfather Ausbeto Silva at his body shop may have sparked a love of all things automotive, it was a paid internship program at Southwest High School that led directly to Zepeda’s new career.
The program is an intensive one, beginning when students are high school juniors and ending, for those who make it through, with a job offer from Holt Cat after graduation. But it offers a model the Southwest Independent School District hopes more San Antonio companies will consider as they struggle to fill entry-level positions and develop employees who can rise through the ranks.
For the construction and skilled trade industry in San Antonio, two main employment barriers exist, according to feedback Greater:SATX has received: low quantity of interest in entry-level jobs and a lack of experienced leaders. High school-level internships can help with both challenges.
For Holt Cat, one of the nation’s largest Caterpillar dealers, the SWISD internship is one of several pipelines it uses to train and hire shop technicians; it is a partner in the city’s Ready to Work workforce development program and works closely with St. Philip’s College’s Diesel Technology Academy, one of the Alamo Academies that trains high school students for high-demand careers while they earn college credits.
Working her way up
That’s how Maria Mendez arrived at Holt Cat. Now 27, Mendez began as an intern in 2015. She spent eight months training in different shops on the Holt Cat campus, emerging with a certification and a job.
Since then, Mendez has worked her way up the ladder, including a one-year stint as an office coordinator. She’s now back on the shop floor as a supervisor, leading a team of 16 technicians, including Zepeda.
She praised Holt’s continuous training opportunities, which for her has included soft skills classes related to her new supervisory position.
“It teaches you how to handle conflict, how to deal with different personalities,” she said. “You know, covering a shift of 16 people, I don’t talk to everybody the same way.”
Mendez called Zepeda “my go-to for [repairing] water trucks,” the tankers that spray water at job sites. “The mentor she had taught her everything. When I assign other techs I tell then, if you have questions, ask Vaneza.”
Zepeda and Mendez are currently the only women on the shop floor. They make up part of the 1.2% of female heavy equipment technicians in the U.S., according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Brad Brown, Holt Cat’s service manager for the machine division, said they see a handful of young women coming through internship programs but would love to see more.
“It can be a little challenging at times to be a woman giving orders to older men,” said Mendez. “It’s all about … meeting them where they are, and treating everyone with respect.”
Zepeda, who is 19, said she loves her job — and her supervisor.
“Every day is a challenge,” she said. “You have to adapt to the job that you’re given and learn the skills that job requires.”
Shaping employees early
Bertha Ortiz, director of Career and Technical Education at Southwest ISD said the district is always looking to increase its internship partnerships with local companies. SWISD is currently in talks with oil field services company Schlumberger about creating a internship program, and the district’s CAST STEM High School offers internships at Toyota Motor Manufacturing of Texas and Toyotetsu Texas, a Toyota supplier.
Wade Cherry, who teaches the diesel mechanics program at Southwest High School and oversees Holt Cat’s interns, said he would love to create a program for Navistar, the truck manufacturer that opened its nearly 1-milion-square-foot facility on the city’s far South Side last year.
Employers are “seeing that this is really the way to go,” said Cherry, “to start off with these young men and women while they’re in high school, so they can form them to be the employees they want them to be.”
Cherry also plays an instrumental role, from taking juniors to the Holt Cat campus for their first visit each fall to personally busing interns to and from the school campus to the Holt Cat campus until they graduate.
“Did he tell you he even does that during Christmas break?” asked Ortiz. “He really supports our students.”
Brown said the company is looking to expand its internship program into more high schools so that it can be even more choosy about who it enrolls. In addition to Southwest High School, Holt Cat currently pulls interns from James Madison High School in the North East Independent School District.
Ready to Work’s Joshua Scott, who is working to expand apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship programs — high school internships are considered the latter — in San Antonio, called Holt Cat “a leader in this space” and said it was great to see employers offering pre-apprenticeships to students.
“These work-based learning opportunities provide technical training with real-world applications,” he said.
Holt Cat CEO Peter J. Holt and President Corinna Holt Richter “are very passionate about workforce development,” said Justine Carroll, a senior marketing manager for the company. “We have interns all over the organization. Just the other day, two interns came to my office to fix my computer. We have interns in accounting, marketing, finance. It’s a very robust program.”
But Carroll said the company’s biggest need right now is for technicians. Interns earn between $12 to $18 an hour, she said, while technicians’ pay ranges from $20 to $48 an hour, depending on experience.
Cherry said when students learn how much they can get paid “their eyes blow up” — but before they visit Holt, many imagine that the work is hot, dirty and dangerous. “That’s the environment I came up in,” he said.
And indeed, the work can still be hot — or rainy, Mendez acknowledged. “Sometimes you don’t get a spot inside the shop,” she said, prompting a knowing laugh from Zepeda. “But if bringing a machine in that’s broke down, repairing it and getting it all ready to get back out to the customer, if that fulfills you, then this is it.”
