For Dianne Leveridge, director of technical programs for the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS), the road to a successful career in engineering was not a direct route.
Taking the long way, however, has given this former Lexmark electrical engineer valuable personal insight into the challenges and opportunities involved in building a globally competitive workforce in Kentucky.
As a young woman, Leveridge never put much stake in her own intellectual abilities, she said. After graduating from high school, she enrolled at Midway College and set her sights on becoming an Olympic-caliber equestrian, but the classroom could not keep her attention. After one year, she dropped out to pursue employment in the horse industry, starting as a hot walker and working her way up to assistant trainer at a local horse farm.
She soon realized, however, that the career path she was on was not going to get her where she wanted to be in life.
“I decided that if I was 50 years old and still mucking stalls, it was going to be because I owned them,” she said.
She switched gears and enrolled in beauty school, which seemed like a convenient and attainable goal for herself at the time, she said. It gave her the chance to study something new and showed her she had the ability to retain and apply that knowledge. Soon, though, she soon realized cosmetology wasn’t going to satisfy her career goals either.
She enrolled part-time at Lexington Community College at age 23. Leveridge said she struggled to bring her math skills up to speed, but with the help and encouragement of educators such as her calculus professor and mentor Lillie Crowley, she found a new appreciation for her academic potential and a talent for engineering. After two years, she transferred to the University of Kentucky, where she was awarded a Singletary scholarship and eventually earned her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, while co-oping with IBM.
“I got initially exposed to global business with IBM and would help solve problems for customers in other countries, and that’s when I began to see this [industry] is really bigger than us [in Kentucky],” Leveridge said.
Leveridge continued her education while working for IBM and later Lexmark, earning a master’s degree and eventually a Ph.D. in civil engineering/project management from the University of Maryland.
That’s not to say there weren’t bumps along the way.
As an employee for Lexmark, assigned to manage all electrical components for the company’s laser printers, Leveridge traveled frequently to meet with suppliers. On one trip to Toronto, Leveridge recalled, a customs offi cial pulled her aside for a closer inspection of her passport, calling into question the career listed on her documents.
“He told me I couldn’t possibly be an engineer, because women can’t do math,” Leveridge recalled.
Leveridge has experienced that kind of judgment on several occasions throughout her career, but on the whole, she said, her job choice has off ered more personal benefi ts for her than drawbacks.
“I’ve always been very privileged to have the positive side of being a woman engineer contribute more to my progress than the negative,” she said.
After retiring from Lexmark, Leveridge applied her knowledge and experience to introduce K-12 students in Kentucky to promising STEM careers of their own, as the state affiliate director for Project Lead the Way, a nonprofi t that provides hands-on STEM curricular programs to schools throughout the country. Her current role at KCTCS, which she began in September 2014, continues that development and enhancement of the state’s pipeline for STEM education, knowledge and innovation.
Toward that aim, Leveridge’s outlook and experience are key for a community college system that is looking to make individuals work-ready and move them quickly into globally competitive industries. That requires meeting the needs of underrepresented student populations and individuals from wide-ranging backgrounds with a variety of potential career paths that embrace both academic pursuits and technical training, Leveridge said.
“For too long, academic institutions at all levels have been having an ‘or’ conversation; you are either vocational and technical, or you are academic,” Leveridge said. “It’s time to have an ‘and’ conversation. ... There’s room at the table for every option, and there better be, because if we are not exercising every option, we are doing a disservice to our economic base.”
In addition to changing attitudes about educational opportunities, Leveridge said the state also needs to overcome the prevailing stereotypes regarding industries such as manufacturing.
“It is not dark, dirty and dangerous anymore. It is crisp, clean and comprehensive — and lucrative,” Leveridge said.
What it boils down to, Leveridge said, is that educators are in the economics business, and to remain competitive in that regard, education, industry and government will need to focus on new avenues of cooperation.
“Time is of the essence, and we can no longer afford. economically or educationally, to remain in our silos and think that we can do these things in a vacuum,” Leveridge said. “Anything that we can do at KCTCS to facilitate the same thing that happened to me 35 years ago with our current population of students — whether they are learn-on-demand, online, incumbent workers or dual-credit kids at a county high school — anything that we can do to facilitate rapid, comprehensive and deep learning, then we’ve prepared them for the global economy.”