IFMA Boston hosts local Facilithon

Boston, MA The Facilithon is a SkillsUSA competition, the nation’s fastest-growing career technical student organization. With over 400,000 high school and post-secondary members in 2019, SkillsUSA creates students with skill and career vision through sharpening of personal, workplace and technical skills grounded in academics.

The Facilithon is a competition designed to introduce high school and technical school students with their advisors to careers in facility management. The Facilithon competition tests a student’s ability to thrive in a facility management environment through a 50-question common-sense quiz, a 10-minute FM role play, and the FM Challenge, an emergency scenario that the student must react to immediately. Students that do well in the Facilithon represent excellent future facility management professionals.

WHO IS FACILITHON
Experienced, energized association volunteers from built environment careers who figured out how to turn on the next generation of facility, building, property managers and maintainers.

WHAT FACILITHON DOES
Publish, promote and administer the SkillsUSA Facilithon program, a three part competition in facility management along with the “1 in 30” SkillsUSA marketing message platform.

WHAT DOES FACILITHON DO?
Facilithon creates the pool of energized students for other programs you foster, whether they’re scholarships, job-shadow, internships or direct-hire.

IFMA Boston committed three years ago to bring a Facilithon competition to Boston as part of its Career Expansion initiative to help close the FM talent gap. While the original goal was 2020, the pandemic had other plans, but that did not stop our dedicated volunteers from persevering and bringing a virtual competition to fruition on April 28^th. More than 40 students from technical schools in Massachusetts, most from Plymouth North High School and nearly 30 volunteer judges convened on competition day for the three-pronged event.

The judges, made up of all disciplines within the built environment were so impressed with the level of dedication and imagination that the students brought to the competition, most were sophomores and juniors. In the end, three pulled ahead of the rest.

Local Career Expansion Volunteers Honored at Annual Facilithon Gala

Bringing Facilithon to Massachusetts was no easy feat and was spearheaded by the efforts of the Career Expansion committee. The local Facilithon champions are Mary Mills, CFM of Raytheon and Gretchen Barron, CFM of Massachusetts Medical Society. They have worked tirelessly over the past year under the direction of Frank Rhodes II, CFM of Marriott to build a relationship with the FM Pipeline and SkillsUSA to secure support for a local competition. They then volunteered the day of and helped in the recruitment of all of our judges. As a result of their efforts they were recognized at the annual Facilithon Gala. Gretchen and Mary both won Facilithon Judge(s) of the Year. There were 8 winners throughout the country. And Mary was recognized further as the Facilithon Chapter Champion of the Year. The Chapter is so appreciative for all that they have done to help promote FM as a profession to a younger generation.

Interested in our Career Expansion team focused on closing the FM talent gap? Just reach out to ifma@ifmaboston.org for more information.