Walk into a WorkTexas classroom on any given day and you might find students practicing welding, running conduit, or diagnosing HVAC systems. But spend a week in the program and something else becomes clear: technical skills are treated as the floor, not the ceiling.
“Technical skills are about 30% of what employers want,” Mike Feinberg says. “The other 70%? They all say the exact same thing: what we really need is people who get to work on time and can work on a team.”
That 70% — reliability, communication, the ability to accept feedback and collaborate under pressure — doesn’t appear in most training program curricula because it doesn’t appear in any certification standard. WorkTexas builds it in deliberately, treating soft skills instruction as core to the program rather than supplementary. The reasoning is direct: a student who earns a welding certificate but can’t show up consistently or take direction on a job site is not, in any meaningful sense, job-ready.
The Cyprus Mail’s profile of the program, which examines how the WorkTexas model could reshape workforce training nationally, highlights the employer co-design process as one of the key factors behind those outcomes. More than 200 companies have contributed to the curriculum — specifying not just which certifications they need but what entry-level hires most consistently lack on day one. That input shapes both the technical content and the soft skills emphasis.
TRIO Electric president Beau Pollock was among the first employer partners, contributing his company’s internal training materials and providing instructors when WorkTexas launched in 2020. He has since hired multiple graduates. In the Cyprus Mail profile, Pollock describes Feinberg’s approach as combining an educator’s perspective with an employer’s: understanding what students need to succeed while staying clear-eyed about what job sites actually demand.
Digital literacy has emerged as its own category of soft skill need. When pandemic closures forced remote hiring processes in 2020, WorkTexas discovered that experienced tradespeople who had worked for decades were suddenly required to interview on Zoom and communicate with employers via email. Skills that had never seemed relevant became essential overnight. The program now integrates computer fundamentals and digital communication training alongside trade certification — because, as Feinberg says, it’s not either/or anymore.
The broader conversation around workforce readiness and the skills employers need most has been converging on WorkTexas’s approach for several years. Employer surveys consistently show that soft skills — communication, reliability, teamwork — rank above technical proficiency in what hiring managers say is hardest to find in candidates. WorkTexas was built around that reality from the start.
Graduates track those outcomes over five years, not just at placement. Mike Feinberg has been consistent about why: a training program that only measures whether someone got hired has no way of knowing whether it actually worked. The question WorkTexas asks is whether graduates are still employed at one year, earning more at three, and advancing into supervisory roles at five. Those numbers, Feinberg argues, are the only honest measure of whether a program is delivering on its promise.
Research on education outcomes and workforce preparation has increasingly pointed to the alignment between curriculum design and employer need as the critical variable — more predictive of long-term outcomes than program length, credential type, or institutional affiliation. WorkTexas built that alignment in from day one, and the results suggest it was the right place to start.