13 Predictions for Technical Education in 2026

With the pace of change in technology, geopolitics, infrastructure, and the economy, what should technical educators and workforce leaders be watching most closely in 2026?

In this year’s annual Predictions episode, host Matt Kirchner shares the fifth edition of a listener-favorite tradition, scoring last year's predictions and looking ahead to the trends and technologies that will shape Tech Ed in 2026.

What's in store for 2026? Energy, defense, materials, biomimicry, AI, smart tech, humanoids, design...and the future of technical education. Listen to the whole episode to hear about these and more!

Full show notes, links & resources on the episode page: https://techedpodcast.com/predictions26

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Transcript

TechEd Podcast Introduction: 0:09

This is the TechEd podcast, where we feature leaders who are shaping, innovating and disrupting technical education and the workforce. These are the stories of organizations leading the charge to change education, to rethink the workforce and to embrace emerging technology. You'll find us here every Tuesday on our mission to secure the American Dream for the next generation of STEM and workforce talent. And now here's your host, Matt Kirchner,

Matt Kirchner: 0:38

welcome into the TechEd podcast. It is Matt Kirkner, and it is one of my absolute favorite episodes that we do every year, believe it or not, this is the fifth rendition of our annual predictions episode, where we make the predictions of what we think is going to happen in and around STEM and technical education for the coming year. So this has become a little bit of a tradition and a staple among our audience. I'll give you a couple examples of how folks use this this episode, I had a community college president who confided in me little less than a year ago that he was on his way to a meeting with the state legislature and on his way to his state capitol. Listen to the predictions episode to get some ideas about what he could talk about when it comes to trends in STEM and technical education. I had a chancellor of a major university tell me that she actually uses this episode and shares it out with her leadership team, and then they do a leadership meeting to talk about the trends. Doesn't mean they all have to agree on them, but to use that as a little bit of inspiration for their discussion. I know a school district superintendent well, and that individual told me that he sent the episode last year to his entire school board to get them understanding and thinking about innovation and disrupting in STEM and technical education and education in general. So that's what we love to hear about. This predictions episode is that people are putting it to use. We get tons of great feedback for it, so I'm I'm glad you're on with us. I'm glad you're hearing what we think is going to happen in STEM and technical education in the coming year. Now I have to set up a couple things for you, if you haven't listened to this episode before, we spend a little time talking about the predictions we made last year and then giving ourselves a score on how well we do. And I actually take that inspiration from two brothers, Brian and alien bolio, both economics, or both economists, I should say, and those two gentlemen, every year would make predictions about the economy, and then when I'd see them the following year, they would talk about how they did on their predictions. They did that for a couple of reasons. It was interesting to hear. It held them accountable, and it also created a tremendous amount of credibility. Why should I listen to them and what they think is going to happen next year unless they had some degree of accuracy, which what at with what actually happened last year? So that's why we do it. Before we get to this, another question I get quite often from people is, where do these predictions come from? Well, I want to tell you that in some ways, and I'm not pretending to be what we call a polymath, because I'm certainly not one. But if you're familiar with that term, a polymath is someone who gains knowledge in a wide variety of disciplines and gains tremendous amounts of knowledge in a wide variety of disciplines, people like Aristotle or Ben Franklin or Elon Musk, Michelangelo, Newton, Da Vinci these people have all been described as polymaths. Now to be clear, I am not saying I meant anywhere near in the league as those individuals, but what I do believe is that the best predictions come about, not when we think about a specific bit of information or an individual discipline, but when we think about how multiple disciplines, things like politics and policy and education and religion and technology and science intersect, and it's at those points of intersection, and considering how they are going to affect each other that I believe would come up with the best predictions. So again, not pretending to be a polymath. Here is just a little bit of an idea of where some of this inspiration comes from when it comes to the predictions that we make every single year. I was reflecting a little bit on the year 2025, and I would tell you, and I mean this sincerely, I am the luckiest human being alive because of the work that we get to do in our companies, because of the work that our audience permits me and allows me to do on the TechEd podcast, we cross paths with all kinds of different disciplines, all kinds of geographies, all kinds of businesses, all kinds of educators. Just to give you an example, over the course of this year, 2025 by now, everybody knows I spent a week in China. It feels like it's all I'm able to talk about for the last 90 days, it was a totally transformative trip. Spent a week in Canada this year, 30 plus education and industry conferences that we attended. I keynoted almost 20 different events. Spent two different trips, visiting with business people in Florida. I hate to admit it, but I spent hundreds of hours a year on YouTube, shorts X. Was LinkedIn, gathering data from social media, 50 meetings a year with tech companies. I looked at dozens of private equity deals and venture capital deals over the course of this last year, spent seven weeks in the mountains. I spent a week in the San Juan Islands. Serve on nine boards of public and private institutions. Go to church almost every Sunday. I read the Wall Street Journal, as everybody knows, also political the hill and JS, online, my local newspaper, pretty much daily. I listen to eight separate political podcasts every week from two specific podcasters that produce eight podcasts every single week. Listen to those relentlessly meetings with elected representatives, including one, by the way, last year, with the house speaker, which I haven't spoken much about here on the podcast, but that was a pretty special, pretty special meeting. Several days in Washington, DC, I visited museums, libraries, bookstores, all of this here in 2025 and probably the most interesting and most important, 52 episodes of The TechEd podcast, where we talk to people that are disrupting and innovating in technical and STEM education, people who are affecting public policy in our space, people that are running huge companies and having an impact on the globe. And I can tell you, through all of that, it isn't any one of those sources of information, but the culmination of all of them, all these things I'm so blessed and fortunate to do throughout the year that inspires the predictions you'll hear a little bit later on this episode of The TechEd podcast. So as I mentioned early on, we have this tradition first of all, of giving ourselves a grade on how we did last year. We're going to talk now about what our predictions were for the year 2025 and how we did, and we give ourselves an overall score when we're done. So for those of you who listened to the 2025 edition of our predictions, as opposed to this one, the 2026 edition, you will remember that we started out with three competing trends in manufacturing that we thought were going to have a huge impact on stem and technical education and the globe. The first one was we said that there was going to be more onshoring of manufacturing that when we could get what we wanted, when we wanted at a price we thought was fair. It was really easy to take the supply chain for granted. Then covid happened. We realized the importance of domestic manufacturing and said that there would be more onshoring of manufacturing in the year 2025 so this definitely happened, but I will say that it was led really by just a handful of sectors. So we had huge onshoring here in the US, but it was, it was primarily pharma and semiconductors. So, as reported earlier this month in fierce pharma, which is a publication around the pharmaceutical industry, quote, collectively, major drug makers in 2025 have announced, get this. This is me talking not the not the article, but more than $370 billion in investments, says the article, in US projects over the next five years. So three, $70 billion with a B of investments in US projects in pharma over the next five years were announced in that market space. According to what it says is a new fourth quarter market trend report from California based contractor and construction manager, DPR conduction, that's what's going on in pharma. $370 billion of investments in the next five years in the world of semiconductors, according to brownstone research, to date, more than 100 projects have been announced in 28 states, encompassing $540 billion in investment. Even more exciting is that these investments will result in more than a half a million new jobs more to come on, on shoring I think we're just getting started on this. So it's definitely a trend. Because that trend was limited to fewer market sectors than we expected. We gave ourselves four stars on this one. We couldn't quite get all the way up to five stars, but four stars on our first of 13, by the way, predictions that we made for the year 2025 the second one second prediction is that the Trump tariffs were going to have an impact. We were already seeing increasing tariff pressure on the likes of China, Canada, Mexico and our European manufacturing partners, especially in the automotive market. But in the end, I said in my prediction last year, tariffs will be nothing near the 25% numbers that were kicked about at that point in time. So we're saying on this particular one we are generally, generally correct. So we were way more correct than we weren't. In other words, the tariff numbers were going to come down significantly off the peaks that were being bantered about in early, late 2024 I guess it would have been. And here's what we figured out. You look back at several companies in our company portfolio and our business portfolio, we actually built a model early in 2025 for how the tariffs were going to impact our business. And I want you to compare what we were looking at a little less than a year ago to where those numbers are now. We did a lot of business with the EU at the European Union. At that point in time, tariffs were 20% those have settled in most goods around 15% China at the time, we were talking about tariffs of 145% best estimates today, and it's a mushy number because of all the different tariff tariff policy that we're dealing with, best estimates tariffs on China. Down from 145% that were being threatened to about 47% Japan was 24% it's now 15% the UK was 10% it is still 10% Canada was 25% and now, for goods inside the US, Mexico, Canada agreement, the usmca, there are no tariffs. And ones outside that agreement, they can be as high as 35% and in some of them are 25% and higher. We're talking about things like steel, aluminum, certain ag products and so on. But generally correct on the Trump tariffs, they are not anywhere near as high as what we were talking about a year ago. We gave ourselves three and a half stars out of a potential five on that particular prediction, Prediction number three from last year, the contracting manufacturing economy will become the story of q1, of 2025, if you recall, we said that, you know, our sense was the manufacturing economy was contracting, but nobody, nobody was talking about it. We absolutely nailed this prediction, five stars according to the Wall Street Journal us, manufacturing activity contracted for the ninth consecutive month in November of 2025 a decline manufacturers attribute to the Trump tariffs, regardless of where they are coming from. The Institute for Supply Management, the PMI for manufacturing, which is an index we track to find out whether the manufacturing economy is contracting or expanding, was 48.2 a decrease from 48.7 in October. Any number less than 50 is a contracting economy, and this level was, in fact, below the 50 score that divides contraction from expansion. Another great example the first paragraph from Deloitte, the big consulting company's manufacturing industry outlook for 2026 so this was published on November 13 of 2025 a little over a month ago. As I record this quote in 2025 the US manufacturing industry faced a challenging economic environment. The Institute for Supply Management's manufacturing purchase management index remained below 50 for much of the year, signaling contraction in the sector. Costs rose, employment fell. Remember those two, those four words, because we're going to come back to that a little later. And manufacturing construction spending, an indicator of investment in newer, expanded facilities, steadily declined. So that decline in the manufacturing economy that we predicted and we actually saw before anybody was talking about it, 100% happened in 2020 in 2025 five stars for that one, number four in our list of 13 predictions from last year, we'll see additional manufacturing layoffs in 2025 Well, the truth is that manufacturing layoffs did hold steady in the range of 150 to 150,000 per month, According to federal reserve economic data. We talked about that Deloitte Report in the number three prediction, where we noted that quote, costs rose and employment fell over the course of 2025 The Wall Street Journal. And everybody knows I read the journal almost every day. Their editorial board just week, just this week, as I record this episode, said one big statistical reason to suspect that tariffs are hurting jobs in the trend in manufacturing. Remember when tariffs were supposed to produce a US manufacturing boom? It hasn't happened. In July, Bureau of Labor Standards reported 12,755,000 workers in all manufacturing industries. The number rose by a few 1000 through April of this year, but then began to fall each and every month, and in November, hit 12,697,000 that's a net loss of 58,000 jobs, including 19,000 in the last three months. So technically, we were right on this one, but I will tell you, it wasn't actually the spike that we would have expected. We talk about 58,000 jobs a loss of that kind of a number across the US economy that is not necessarily wholesale layoffs. So as a result of that, we were willing to give ourselves four stars on our fourth prediction from last year, number five. Last year, we said for 2025 technical college enrollment would skew up, and the average age at technical colleges would skew up. In other words, we're saying we're going to see growth in enrollment and Technical and Community Colleges, and the average age of the students would skew up. We nailed the first half of that prediction, and I almost wish we would have made those two separate predictions. The first half of that the technical college enrollment would skew up according to community college daily community college enrollment was up 4% in 2025 in that article, it says, quote, while enrollment in programs like Computer and Information Science is seeing a large decrease this fall, that means this fall of 25 trade majors continue to grow in areas such as engineering technologies, 8.3% growth. Mechanic and repair technologies, 10.4% growth. Health Professions, 10.1% growth. All according to is that article references and NSC Research Center report age, however, is holding steady at around 27 to 28 years of age. So the prediction that we made that the age would skew. Up actually didn't come to pass. But the reason that it didn't come to pass is really interesting. It's not because older people aren't coming back to school. In fact, is an article in the Wall Street Journal just this week cited an article by Claire asenberry quote, and this was the headline to the article, Why workers in their 40s are going back to school. We are seeing more and more older Americans going back to school to sharpen their skills in an age when folks are worried about AI and other technologies maybe edging them out of the workforce. So it wasn't because older people weren't going back to school that the average age in the technical college and community college didn't skew up. It was because dual credit programs, which we are a huge fan of here at the TechEd podcast. So high school students taking college level courses at their community and technical colleges and enrolling in those colleges as part of those programs, and driving enrollment up brought the average age to lower, while incumbent workers coming back into the technical and community colleges had an impact on the other direction, and those two weighing against each other, kept the average age about the same. The reason that Technical and Community College average age of students did not skew up in 25 is because we had more younger people enrolling in dual credit opportunities. I am more than happy to be wrong on that prediction, if that is the reason so we gave ourselves three stars on that particular prediction. Again, we combined the enrollment increasing and the average age increasing into one prediction, three stars number six funding would skew toward dislocated workers, boot camps, rapid upskilling, third party certifications. Put the cart before the horse. We ended up giving ourselves four stars on this one, that funding, if for workforce training and training in general, would skew toward dislocated workers and short term training programs, according to the Institute for College Access and Success quote as part of the budget reconciliation legislation known as HR one, or the one big, beautiful Bill Act Congress expanded Access to Pell grant funds. And most of us know this if we are in the space for students enrolled in programs that are shorter than the previous minimum required length that our article goes on to say starting in July 1 of 2026 so this is next year, programs between 150 and 599 clock hours that can be completed in as little as eight to 15 weeks may become eligible for workforce Pell Grants for the first time. Previously, Pell Grants could only be used to pay for programs that provide at least 600 clock hours of instruction and are offered for a minimum of 15 weeks. According to one organization that I follow, this is separate from the article I just mentioned, but according to HCM strategist, over the past year alone, states have committed approximately $511 million to launch 26 new short term credential initiatives, a clear sign that states continue to significantly expand their investments in short term non degree credentials at a moment of rapid change in national workforce and higher education policy. So you say, wait a minute, Matt, I am managing WIOA funding in my state. Wait a minute. We're seeing Department of Labor funding being cut in my state. And so we have funding that is coming out of, in many cases, short term training programs. I agree, and that is the reason that we only gave ourselves four stars on this the trend is 100% in the direction we said it would be. But as somebody who serves on my local Workforce Board, we also see some of the impacts of funding being reduced in certain areas of education funding, especially for incumbent workers. So we were only able to give ourselves four stars on that particular prediction. I will take it number seven, skilled trades opportunities will largely be immune from this trend of Workforce Funding disappearing and moving toward dislocated worker funding. This is 100% true, five stars on this one executive order from the Trump administration preparing Americans for high paying skilled trade jobs of the future. Quote, It is, and this is right out of the President's executive order. It is the policy of the United States to optimize and target federal investments and workforce development to align with our country's re industrialization needs and equip American workers to fill the growing demand for skilled trades and other occupations, my administration, meaning President Trump's administration, will further protect and strengthen registered apprenticeships and build on their success to seize new opportunities and unlock the limitless potential of the American worker. Funding has stayed still, and if anything, has grown toward apprenticeships and other skilled trades opportunities. Five stars on prediction, number seven, number eight, dislocated worker funding will be less focused on traditional workforce reskilling programs and more focused on emerging technologies like automation, robotics, integration, machine learning and artificial intelligence. I was tough on us for this one. I. Gave us two and a half stars. And here is why, if you think about those last two technologies, machine learning and artificial intelligence, plenty of effort, plenty of funding around AI and machine learning upskilling, where we missed a little bit, I think, is on automation, robotics and integration. I think we were just a little early on this one. I think if you believe what you're hearing, and you know, I read politico, I mentioned a while ago, every single, pretty much every single day, great, great publication, kind of a moderate publication when it comes to views on politics, I might even say a little bit toward the left, as opposed to the Wall Street Journal, that has a little bit more of a a rightward skew in its reporting, if you're asking me. But according to Politico earlier this month, Commerce Secretary Howard lutnik has been meeting with robotics industry CEOs and is quote all in on accelerating the industry's development. According to three people familiar with discussions, who were granted anonymity to share details, the administration is considering issuing an executive order on robotics in 2026 I think we were right on this one, but we weren't right about this being something that happens in 2025 so being only fair, we gave ourselves two and a half out of a possible five stars on that particular prediction. Now our prediction for this next one, number nine, on the other hand, received an absolute hands down five stars. That prediction was that we will see more flexible degrees like the University of Wisconsin Stout, automation, leadership degree in the coming year. And for those of you that aren't familiar, that particular degree awards ADA credits toward a 120 credit baccalaureate degree for credits earned outside the university, including credits earned at Technical and Community Colleges, and those earned because students hold the right third party credentials, the most innovative baccalaureate degree in the entire country, and I stand by that. And we said we would see more of those types of degrees here in 2025 did we? Well, let's talk about another Deloitte Report, Deloitte Consulting report from earlier in the year. It was called 2025 trends in higher education, Trend number three on their list, the future of the four year degree. And I read from that report, the rapidly changing economic, political and social landscape has shifted conversations about the traditional four year degree as questions about the value of post secondary education are added to concerns about access to college, increasing numbers of Americans are wondering about the applicability and financial sustainability of four years in college in response, and here comes the punchline. Some institutions have shifted their focus to new credentials. The result is a proliferation of alternative pathways from apprenticeships and certifications to accelerated degree programs. These options are increasingly favored by students their families and employers alike, for their cost effectiveness and quicker path to employment, challenging and I love this the traditional four year college model. Higher education institutions are creatively responding by breaking the 120 credit hour degree into shorter, more manageable segments, expanding dual credit enrollment programs, integrating more experiential learning opportunities and developing flexible, competency based degree programs. My goodness, if that isn't exactly what we're about here at the TechEd podcast, shaking up the world of higher education, technical education and STEM education, I don't know what is. We were 100% right on that particular prediction, five stars, and let's make them gold stars. Number 10, blurring the lines of technical colleges and universities both ways, meaning we're going to start to see less of a firm line between what is a two year degree, what is a four year degree, what is a technical or community college program, what is a four year university program? Back to the community college daily and an article from just three days ago, written by Angela Kirsten Brock. According to the CCBA, which is the community college Baccalaureate Association, and their national program list, there are now more than 737 workforce focused Bachelor's degrees in approximately 203, community colleges across the country. For just one example, they note there are significant teacher and healthcare workforce shortages in many states, their community colleges are creating baccalaureate degree programs that directly meet these critical needs. These programs are affordable and accessible to everyone in the community, and especially working adults. You're going to see more and more of that blurring between technical colleges and community colleges trying to offer baccalaureate degrees, and, for that matter, four year universities trying to offer degrees and programming that appeal to working adults and shorter bits of competency based learning. Four and a half stars for our prediction number 10 on to Prediction number 11, energy education would be a key education issue in 25 this one gets five stars as well spend any time looking at your news feed. One example from just a couple weeks ago, Washington, DC, the Gulf research program of the National Academies of Science and. Engineering and medicine announced today an award of $2.7 million to support four projects designed to prepare young adults in the Gulf region for high quality careers in the US energy sector in Pittsburgh, September 25 2025 at the University of Pittsburgh. The headline says, the University of Pittsburgh launches first of its kind undergrad degree in natural gas, renewables, in oil engineering, Drexel University, June 2025 undergraduate research prepares physics majors for careers in, you guessed it, sustainable energy. Energy Education is alive on fire. People are innovating. We're trying more to find more opportunities to prepare the workforce at every level for these great careers. Five stars on energy education. Prediction number 12, this one was that EV focus would not go away, but would evolve, and we would see a major focus on training for EV manufacturing certifications for those working in EV manufacturing, continuous focus on battery technology and a focus on infrastructure. Well, first of all, EV sales were not what we expected them to be. This year. There's still people still buying EVs. But the truth of the matter is that, according to Cox automotives, EV market monitor for November of 2025 the new electric vehicle sales estimated. New EV sales totaled 70,255 units down 41.2% from a year earlier, declining 5.2% from the month of October. We are buying fewer electric vehicles here in the United States, and there is no question about that. Our idea that that focus would remain strong, hard to say that that is what's happened. On the other hand, on the training side, that side of the equation is alive and well. I think people are recognizing that EV while, you know, there was, there was just some some tax policy, there were some incentives for people to buy EVs, and that was obviously, as many of us remember, a source of friction between Elon Musk and the President earlier this year, when a lot of those, a lot of those incentives fell out of the UX US tax policy, but people are buying few EVs. But I think people recognize that electrification, over time, is going to be a huge part of our future. I was just on a call yesterday with Mitch auto, which is the large statewide effort around mobility and electric vehicles in the state of Michigan, and several other organizations talking about how we train for careers in EV and EV manufacturing, EV battery technology, EV precision inspection, EV battery manufacturing systems. This is alive and well, and I think as we see spending on infrastructure over the long term, medium to long term, let's say the next five to 10 years, an increased focus on electrification, that is going to continue. So I think we got the training side of this right. We got the prediction prediction side in part because we didn't predict and anticipate some of the tax policy that came our way. We got the EV volume side wrong. Gave ourselves two and a half stars on that one. So half, half score of five, two and a half stars for Prediction number 12. Now we are talking about Prediction number 13, and this was teaching applied artificial intelligence. Gave ourselves four stars on the move toward teaching artificial intelligence, according to whitehouse.gov in April, President Donald J Trump signed an executive order to create new educational and workforce development opportunities for America's youth to gain interest and expertise in AI technology from an early age, and to enable the United States to maintain global dominance in the AI revolution. As part of that effort, Donald Donald Trump, President Trump, established the White House Task Force on AI education, which is establishing public private partnerships to provide resources for AI education among K 12. Through these efforts, our nation's youth will have opportunities to cultivate skills and understandings necessary to thrive in the AI driven workforce. So we are seeing more and more spending on artificial intelligence. Everybody's talking about artificial intelligence. Technical and Community colleges are implementing programs around applied AI, we had Mike Bigley, who's the superintendent of the White Hall School District, down with us not too long ago, talking about his emerging technologies lab, the incredible work he's doing in applied AI, I think our audience knows that I am both financially and personally invested in an effort called discover AI, which is bringing incredible hands on AI, applied learning to K 12, particularly to high schools. Lots of this going on. I think we could be doing more. I think I would have thought it was a little bit further along, or would be by this point in 2025 but, but a lot going on in applied AI, we gave ourselves four stars for that prediction. So how do we do? Those were our 13 predictions for the year 2025 added up all those scores and took their average again. Zero stars would mean we got nothing right. Five stars would mean we got everything right a year ago. By contrast, our average score for the predictions we made in 2023 420, 24 that score last year was 3.75 out of five. This year we scored, if you were keeping track at home and doing the math, 3.92 out of a possible five stars. Not perfect. We don't expect to be perfect, but I will take 3.2 3.92 almost four out of five on our predictions for this year. So does that give us at least a little credibility, heading into 2026 what is going to happen in STEM and technical colleges and community colleges and higher education and every level of education here in the United States for 2026 here goes by total coincidence. Last year we had 13 predictions this year. We also have 13 predictions. That's not on purpose. It's just where we ended up. And again, these are all things that we see converging. So it's not looking at any one discipline, it's looking at those converging different disciplines and then seeing what those are telling us for 26 what is going to happen in the year 2026 in STEM and technical education, one of 13 number one of 13 projections is that we are going to finally get over this argument about generative artificial intelligence in education, right? So I just picked a couple of headlines, a handful of headlines I saw from the last several weeks that showed up in my news feed according to Fortune quote, Gen Z is on the fence about AI in the classroom. That's a good thing. According to the 74 quote pre K, teachers are hesitant to use AI. Why? According to w, h, y, y, band it or use it, how teachers are grappling with generative AI in the classroom. Education Week, headline, rising use of AI in schools comes with big downsides for students. USC, today, AI is changing how students learn or avoid Learning and Education Week, again, teachers worry AI will impede students critical thinking skills. Folks, editorially, we got to get away from this idea that we can't be using generative artificial intelligence in the classroom. Of course, it belongs in the classroom. That's what our students are using whether they're in the classroom or out of the classroom, it doesn't replace and we can't let it replace learning. We have to modify how we're delivering learning, how we're testing competency, how we're creating experiential learning for students, so they're not replacing knowledge with artificial intelligence. But make, make no mistake, AI belongs in the classroom. I think as we get to the end of 2026 we will have put to bed most of these arguments about whether or not we should be using AI in education, and we will be on to figuring out how we can use it most effectively. All right, that is number one, number two, in no particular order, is in our predictions for 2026 rare earth minerals are going to become a huge focus in the world of education, one of the one of the news sources I read almost every day. I don't know if I mentioned it in the intro. I go to Reuters all the time and read the headlines. And if an interest article interests me, I dive into that. One did on October 30 of this year, talks about rare earth minerals. The rare earth minerals are comprised of 17 elements, including lanthanides and lanthanides and scandium and yttrium. Those are the 17 elements that comprise our rare earth minerals. Rare earths in the magnets that they're sometimes made into, can be found in all kinds of technology. You find them in our iPhones or in our appliances at home, military equipment, electric vehicles, metal medical equipment, oil refining, without these rare earth minerals, our economy and all of our technology grinds to a halt. Here's the tricky part. China accounts for 60% of all global mine production and 90% of all refined production, maybe even more than that and rare earth magnet output. So in other words, China is accounting for 60% of the mine production and 90% of the refining of rare earth minerals. There are projects underway all over the world, the United States in Europe, in Australia, to find another supply chain. We're not there yet. As we've heard in the news recently, China is restricting exports, in some cases, of a lot of these elements and the equipment needed to mine and refine them, and that is a big problem for the United States. So a couple things to note, despite their name, they are not necessarily rare. I talked on this podcast earlier this year, how my time, my friend Tim Sullivan, who was the chairman and CEO of Bucyrus, sold that company for 8.6 I believe the number was billion dollars to Caterpillar several years ago, said we have more rare earth minerals here in the United States, and we know what to do with it's just that we have so many permitting and environmental restrictions that are preventing us to get them. So we've got them here. The refining capacity is really expensive and can take five years to build. And so that's a constraint to be able to refine them and do materials we can use in technology that is no small order. And it takes time to do that, and then it's. Question of talent. I've talked about this on the podcast as well. Had a meeting with Secretary of the Interior, member of the President's Cabinet, Doug Burgum, in the fourth quarter of this year, 2025 and we talked about, you know, he said, Look, we're graduating 36,000 lawyers a year in this country. We only graduated 300 metallurgical and mining engineers in the whole United States in the last year, when my friend Todd wanick was on the podcast several weeks ago, Ashley Furniture industries, he talked about being in China and seeing schools where they are training 10s upon 10s of 1000s of people with these talents. Here we're graduating 300 had Jim Rankin, who, at the time, was the president of the South Dakota School of Mines. On the podcast not too long ago, he said, of these four disciplines, geology, mining, mining engineering and geology, Geology engineering, there are only four schools across the United States that teach all four of those disciplines. So we're in big trouble in terms of producing talent. We were waking up to that in terms of public policy, look for over the course of the next 12 months, increasing interest and investments in rare earth minerals programs at every single level of education. Okay, Prediction number three, taking place in STEM and technical education for 2026 growing opportunities in geographic information systems. So geographic information systems the combination of two technologies. It's really geographical features, or you need to think of maps in us in the simplest form. So, so think of maps and then combining that with tabular data or or labeled data, so that we can pull data from both a map and we can pull data from a database to create all kinds of interesting insights and analyze and assess real world issues. There's all kinds of examples of where this this technology is taking place. You're seeing it in emergency response and urban planning, management of the environment, transportation, distribution, logistics, public health, agriculture. So it's really taking huge amounts of data, and it is combining it with the knowledge of maps and the technology related to maps to draw all kinds of conclusions. So think about an example. So most of us, I suppose, anybody who's listening to this podcast lived through covid, if you think about those days of trying to figure out where people were getting sick and how they might be getting sick, and what you know, where they were in proximity to other individuals and how a virus might be spreading. I mean, you need to take two things. You need to take both the knowledge of maps and geography, and a knowledge of information and data, and put those two things together. There's just so many applications for this technology, in many ways, it's an emerging technology, and we're going to see a lot of opportunities for students to be learning this technology. Great jobs in this space, by the way, combining technology, information systems and a love and an interest in the outdoors is just one example. This is from an article I read back in September of this year. The University of Cincinnati secured a donation of Geosciences software from a global energy technology company and that, and that was just around GIS, what we call this GIS, and it was a donation of $158 million just in the GIS space. So expect this to be a hugely emerging technology, a hugely emerging discipline, and when we look back at the end of 2026 we will be saying, wow, there's all kinds of interest and all kinds of advancement and investment in GIS, because it affects every single aspect and every single sector of our economy, going out on a limb in a podcast around education and a topic that you would never think anybody would bring up, but we are going to bring it up, and that is defense technology, right? One of the most interesting news stories I watched over the course of all of last year was a 60 Minutes episode on a guy named Palmer lucky. A lot of you know who Palmer is. He actually is responsible for creating Oculus Rift, the VR headsets, Palmer lucky, his company, Andrew industries, and they are doing all kinds of crazy stuff in the world. The defense like, is forward thinking and as off the wall as somebody like Elon Musk is. This guy is the same way when it comes to defense equipment. So things like, and I'm just going to read off a few of them, tactically integrated, unmanned aerial systems, unmanned combat aerial vehicle, quad copters, drones using vision systems, air breathing cruise missiles, autonomous underwater vehicles, ground based sensors, autonomous submarines and the list goes on and on. This technology is a huge growth area in our economy. I think we all we all know that. And regardless of what people's opinions are about, you know, military action and all those kind of things, you have as many opinions as you do people living here in the United States, the truth is, being able to defend ourselves in an age of technology is something that I think. Most Americans would agree, is important to us, especially as the world becomes more dangerous, especially as our adversaries are investing in this technology and growing, we have to make sure that we're keeping pace and staying ahead. Now look, we're not going to bring a bunch of students in and put them in a class in K 12 to teach them about AI driven munitions, right? I mean, that's that's not appropriate. We're not going to do that. I get it, but we can teach a lot of these technologies in ways that transcend the world of defense and aren't necessarily focused on defense contracting and on the defense industries. Examples of those are teaching the edge to cloud continuum, teaching drone technology, teaching UGVs, teaching aerospace, teaching advanced materials, teaching aspects of biomimicry. We'll talk about that in just in just a moment, but all kinds of ways we can teach the competencies, the skills and the knowledge that will be valuable when it comes to making sure that we are protecting our way of life and protecting the United States of America. So keep an eye on that and how we can teach defense technologies at every level of education, certainly Technical and Community Colleges, certainly our university programs. When it comes to engineering and technology, defense technology will play a major role in education in the year 2026 even if we call it something else. So we'll wait to see what kind of buzz words we come up with. But when we look back at this on 2020, 26 and we judge ourselves, if we get five stars for this one, it'll because be because we found ways to and educators found ways to introduce this technology and grow this technology in our programs around the United States of America. Number five. This is a hot button for me, number five in our 13 predictions for 2026 entrepreneurship and the ownership economy, right? And listen to what I say here. And this isn't original. I've heard it a bunch of places over the course of this last year, people who own houses, people who own buildings, people who own businesses don't riot in their own neighborhoods? Who of us, who among us hasn't been heartbroken by seeing somebody turn over a car or burn down a building or riot in their own neighborhood for whatever reason, whether they think it's a good reason or a bad reason, it's heartbreaking to see something like that happen. The truth of the matter is, when people own assets, when they own their cars, when they own their houses, when they own their buildings, when they own their businesses, they don't want to see those things destroyed, and they will protect them. It's only when people don't recognize the value and the importance of ownership, of building wealth, of building equity, that they behave in ways like that. So the truth of the matter is, politics aside, concentration of ownership here in the United States has been consolidated in the hands of too few people, and I'm a believer that that is a big source of many of the problems that we have here in our economy. Now it's the collateral damage of things like gig, the Giga economy and the shared economy, where we don't want to own things, we just want to be able to tap in and use them, right? What difference does what the Dow is doing, or the S P or NASDAQ s and p5 100 or NASDAQ is doing, make to someone who isn't in the stock market, they probably don't care, right? Talk to any Gen Z real estate. And owning real estate where they would want to live is almost unreachable for them. The combination of mortgage rates being where they are, the combination of real estate prices being where they are, in many cases, because we've got tremendous wealth concentrated in the baby boom generation, and they are, and they are owning those assets, and they are owning multiple houses. For example, I'm not, against that. That's all fine. But these, these assets, have gotten so expensive that they're out of reach for many, many young people. And when we don't have an ownership economy, when we don't people don't see the way or the opportunity for them to own or run a business, that creates all kinds of challenges in an economy, I think people are waking up to this. I think people are understanding you can even see some of the public policy coming from the administration now with longer mortgages and so on. You could argue for or against those, and I've got mixed feelings. But a lot of that is around, how do we create more of an ownership opportunity, an opportunity to build wealth among people who are maybe younger millennials, Gen Z, those that come later, that's going to be a big focus in education. So watch for in STEM and technical and career education, a focus on ownership and a focus on entrepreneurship. Over the course of 2026 number six, We lumped these two technologies together, quadropods and humanoids, right? I saw a ton of this in China. You know, we visited 26 tech companies in six days, probably eight humanoid robot companies. Quadropods, by the way, are those four legged dogs that you see a lot of times. I will tell you, we haven't gotten this right yet here in the United States, in our industry, in our general markets, or, for that matter, in education. You know, you see these things at the technology. He chose, and educators get wowed by a humanoid that's boxing or four legged dogs running around. I mean, that's fine, and it's kind of cute, and it certainly is a great gimmick to get people into a trade show booth. If you're somebody that is selling that kind of technology. Very, very few educators, if any, are using that to teach the kind of things that we need to be teaching in the edge to cloud continuum. It's one thing to have a little robot that runs around in boxes, and we're using remote controls to control that robot that isn't anything more than kind of a high power, powered physical video game. There's not a lot of learning going on there. The real opportunity in those spaces is going to be in teaching. Edge the cloud continuum, advanced materials, autonomous systems, battery technology, biomimicry, compute, global positioning, electrification, LiDAR, smart sensors, vision systems, telemetry. We can teach all these on these technologies. Nobody's quite figured out how to do it. Well. Again, there's still gimmicks and toys, but expect that to change, especially as that technology advances to the point where we start to see it in manufacturing and industry. So quadrupods and humanoids, not just seeing them in education, because we see them all the time. It's just there's not a lot of learning there. Yet, expect us to see and place learning around applicable technologies, in and around those those technologies. One of the things I've mentioned already twice on this podcast, and I actually said a little while ago, we get to it. And if that word occurs to you, and you're right about the word that I'm thinking of, and about our seventh prediction for the year 2026, that word is biomimicry, and this is something that's fascinated me for a long, long time. The whole idea, the whole idea, is that we can take inspiration from nature and use it in the world of design. There's some really, really good examples. We've created some really, really cool, germ resistant materials by looking at how shark skin works and how it reacts to the potential of germs being introduced. One of my favorite examples, and I live not too far from Lake Michigan in Wisconsin, and there's this bird. It's called the kingfisher. You can look it up. They're really, really cool birds, and we have one that hangs out by our house in the summertime. It's a beautiful, beautiful bird. And if you look at a picture of that bird, you will notice that it has a very, very unique beak. The beak on the Kingfisher is what inspired the bullet trains in Japan. The shape of that beak, its aerodynamics, its strength, is what inspired how they designed a bullet train in Japan. So this is just one of hundreds and hundreds and 1000s and 1000s of examples of biomimicry, where, when we're talking about mechanical design, when we're talking about designing new products, new applications, new materials, looking to nature for inspiration and then mirroring what we are seeing in nature. So biomimicry and we can expect to see more and more education educators at every level, building that into their design programs. It's something that fascinates me. Okay? Another thing that fascinates me is quantum physics, right? And if you have ever looked at, you know, one example would be schrodingers cat, you can look that up. That's kind of a quantum physics theory. There's another experiment where they shoot an atom between two slits and kind of look at the results of that on a wall. Fascinating, fascinating stuff. And I'm not it's I'm not doing any justice to that explanation. But if you look at the quantum physics Slit Experiment, it'll kind of explain it. There's all kinds of crazy stuff that happens at the quantum level, like the level way, way, way, way too small for us to be able to see things that we just don't understand. You know where the laws of nature, the laws of physics, just get blown up and things at the quantum level that will absolutely blow your mind. This is the basis, by the way, of what we call quantum computing. Great article that I read from the Sloan School at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They wrote their quantum Index report. Published it on August 19 of 2025 it said quantum processor performance is improving. Quantum technology patents are soaring. By the way, 60% of them are held by China, followed by the United States and Japan. When it comes to technology patents for quantum computing, there's more venture funding in this space for quantum tech, and that reached a new high last year. As a matter of fact, quantum skills and training are growing in importance as companies begin to focus on workforce development, demand for quantum skills has tripled since 2018. And 10s of billions of dollars are being spent on quantum computing. Why is this important? Well, it uses quantum mechanics to process information, and it allows us to solve super, super complex problems, way faster than we've ever been able to solve them before. So they're going to be able to transform areas like artificial intelligence, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, finance, cybersecurity. It involves insane amounts. Of math and physics and computer science. But it is fascinating. Cool is quantum physics, quantum mechanics and quantum computing. So look for careers like quantum software and hardware engineers, quantum algorithm researchers, quantum physicists, etc, to explode over the course of 2026 degrees in things like physics, nanotechnology, computer science, will be increasingly important. So as we continue to move into the age of quantum computing, that is going to transform every single market space, there will be all kinds of opportunities for students of all ages and at every level of education to learn this important technology. When we look over our shoulder at 2026 we will have seen an increased focus on that technology. Okay, I have a name for this prediction, number nine, that we are going to come back to over and over and over again. And I have a theory behind it, and I'm having fun with this theory. When we think about marketing, careers, what discipline, let's think about a university, just for the sake of argument, what discipline or what college or what school within a university, does marketing belong in? Think about that answer, that question. I am going to venture a guess that the vast majority of us said communications and or business. I am going to venture a guess that that is all going to change. And one of our big predictions for the year 2026 is that marketing goes stem and what I mean by that is that less and less will marketing be about necessarily raw communications or selling the sizzle, like we learned in business. It's going to be all about data, and it's going to be all about science, technology, engineering and math. I've talked ad infinitum on this podcast about the observations from China in the world of E commerce. We'll link those episodes up in the show notes if you want to go back and listen to them. But I learned in China that it is absolutely amazing what is happening in the world of marketing and E commerce, and it's all becoming tech as Todd wanick, the CEO, as I mentioned before, of Ashley furniture industry, said when we were reflecting on our trip to China, when he was in this space on the TechEd podcast, he said that traditional marketing is dead. He said it's not gone yet, but it is dying. And I think he is exactly right. There's a really, really interesting article in the Wall Street Journal on the 15th of December of 2025 the title of it was, AI is about to empty Madison Avenue. As we all know, Madison Avenue is the street in New York where we're kind of the the marketing disciplines live. He says smart. It's written by, by the way, by Rajiv Coley is, if I'm saying his name right, last name spelled K, O, H, L, I, smart advertisements from Google meta and Amazon sideline agencies and creative workers at their core, Google meta and to a lesser extent, Amazon, are advertising behemoths. Last year, Google earned 78% of the $346 billion in revenue from advertising meta. 98% of $164 billion stem from AD ads. Amazon earned 56 billion from direct advertising together. These three companies ranked in nearly half of the $1 trillion in ad spending world wide. All right, so, Nielsen, again, according to the same article, tracked more than 1 million performance campaigns and found that, for example, AI powered campaigns on YouTube delivered 17% higher return returns. Google reports that advertising you using AI powered search campaigns typically see 14% or more conversions, 14% more conversions at a similar cost. Now here's one of the things that I love, and it is when we talk about something here on the TechEd podcast that nobody else is talking about because of those convergences and disciplines that we see that we talked about earlier and then three or four months later, or maybe even longer, we start reading about them in places like the Wall Street Journal, when I started, you know, singing the praises of the incredible e commerce transformation that I saw when I was in China, and brought that back here to the US to tell our audience about that we were months and months and months ahead of what we were just starting to see. Now in let's just call it traditional media, or in the mainstream media, and I don't mean that in a political sense, but just in terms of our usual media outlets, we're way, way ahead on this right marketing is going stem you heard it here first on the TechEd podcast, back in September or so, when we started talking about this. We've now heard it put a label on it. Marketing is going stem watch that. Remember that it happened. Remember that you heard it here on the TechEd podcast, and hold us accountable at the end of 2026 when we come back and review our predictions for that year, okay, closing in. We're now on number 10. Number 10 on our list of 13 predictions for 2026, and that is the rise of the smaller universities, right? I talked, I think a year ago, probably it might have even been in the predictions episode. Don't, don't quote me on that. About how we're seeing a lot of these smaller universities that are starting to close their doors. I added several examples here in my home state of Wisconsin, one of them just really a mile or so from my house, Cardinal Stritch University, which is being now rebirthed into a really, really cool STEM school. More on that. In fact, I think we had the CEO of that school, Abby andrich, on the on the podcast. I'm off on a tangent, we'll come back. The truth is that we're seeing smaller universities starting to shutter themselves. We're going to continue to see that, right? I mean, we are in a world of declining enrollment. We're in a world of changing perceptions about higher education, and we know that that space, especially when it comes to four year degrees, is going to be more and more compelling. More competitive in the coming years. And a lot of us have made the prediction, including myself, that that is going to be particularly hard on our smaller institutions, you know, schools that have 1500 2500 maybe 5000 students, maybe a little bit more. I'm starting to turn my opinion on that a little bit, and I'm going to tell you why. One of the things that I believe is really, really important in higher education is that universities, we just know that they have to morph. We talked already on this podcast about about shorter term competency based learning, about by dividing learning into smaller bites, about going after incumbent workers and showing them how we can provide not necessarily a baccalaureate degree. It's still fine if they want to work toward that, but to reskill them and upskill them in this age of really rapidly transforming economies, what I'm starting to see, and I spend a lot of time with higher educators, a lot of time with chancellors and provosts and vice presidents of universities and deans and and others the right. Smaller institutions are innovating way faster than the big ones, and so for those smaller institutions that are looking at education a new way, that are looking at in their nimble and they're chopping up their degree programs, and they're building more technology into their programs, and they're really quickly pivoting to things like artificial intelligence and machine learning and applied AI, they are starting to find an edge in the world of higher education, and it's those larger institutions with the huge names and the gigantic endowments that I see changing much more slowly. So they're they're blaming things like abet. They're blaming things like the Higher Learning Commission, the HLC, for not being able to pivot, and they're finding excuses, and a lot of times they have entrenched faculty, and people are way too hung up on things like tenure. And we're finding, as we spend time with institutions large and small, that a lot of these large institutions, which with huge brand names, are not changing fast enough. So I believe, for the smaller universities, the smaller colleges, four year universities, and colleges that are morphing quickly and telling their stories they are, there's a great opportunity in the market for those schools. And in many cases, they will, if they do this right, get the edge on the higher, on the larger institutions. So Mark my words. By the end of 2026 we will be example after example after example of small, nimble institutions that pivoted in a way that allowed them to remain relevant where some of their larger, much larger brothers and sisters did not. And I think that the future is actually really bright for the right smaller institutions in higher education. So we'll come back and we'll revisit that in a year and see how we did. Number 11. Nuclear energy is going to be huge in the year 2026 so we're just starting to hear some of this stuff. I talked about that book, breakneck neck. In fact, Todd wanick And I talked about it when he was on as a book by Daniel Wang. We're going to get Dan on the podcast here sometime in 2026 if I have anything to say about it. It was a great book. It's called break neck, just all these fascinating examples. In 1991 China had their first nuclear power plant, and it started producing electricity. By 2024 China had caught up to the United States in the number of nuclear plants, 55 and 54 respectively. The United States has just one nuclear reactor under construction. 31 are under construction in China. The only US nuclear plant in the 21st Century to be built took 15 years and cost $30 billion with a B in August of 2024 China's nuclear authority approved construction of 11 new reactors, which are all collectively expected to cost about the same amount as that one reactor in the United States. So the truth of the matter is that we are losing ground in the US to China when it comes to nuclear power, and we are starting to see a huge focus on this as data centers proliferate. We'll talk about that in a little bit as other sources, other consumers of energy, continue to come on the grid, our need for energy here in the US has never been greater. And to my belief, our ability to create clean, efficient, safe. Safe energy using nuclear is a better solution than anything else available to us. I triple E spectrum wrote an article the headline us plant's largest nuclear program since the 1970s and it says the United States aims to embark on its most active new nuclear construction program since the 1970s in its most high dollar nuclear deal yet, the Trump administration, in October of this year, launched a partnership to build at least $80 billion with a B worth of new large scale nuclear reactors. We are investing in nuclear here in the United States. We need a talent pool at every level, nuclear engineers, nuclear plant and energy plant technicians, HVAC technicians. We'll come back to that topic, all of these career opportunities we had, Patrick O'Brien of Holtec International, huge player in the nuclear space on the podcast earlier in 2025 we will link that episode up if you want to hear about the amazing transformation toward nuclear here in the US and the incredible career opportunities that await those with the requisite skills and abilities. Educators will wake up to this. Some of them already are. We will see huge investments in 2026 in nuclear technology and education. We've got two to go here on our list of 13 predictions for technical and STEM education in 2026 number 12 is the huge impact that the gigantic, unbelievable investments in data centers is going to have on the United States. So we all know we talk about the edge to cloud continuum. The what we call the fog, or what we call the cloud, is these data centers. They're popping up all over this, all over the place, just this morning as we record this episode of the podcast here on the 19th of December, headline in my hometown paper. Quote, Vantage data centers officially broke ground on the company's$15 billion Lighthouse data center campus for Oracle and open AI in the city of Port Washington, if it is about 25 to 30 miles north of the city of Milwaukee in Southeast Wisconsin. Give or take, I'm going to go back to that article that I referenced a little while ago by Rajiv Coley in the Wall Street Journal. Just recently, within the last month, quote The Corporate arms race for dominance and artificial intelligence is on. Gotta get some of these numbers. This year, America's large tech firms will spend about $400 billion on AI infrastructure. Nvidia CEO Jensen Wong estimated that 3 trillion with a T to $4 trillion will be spent on AI infrastructure by the end of this decade. That is an unfathomable number. Here's probably the most interesting piece that I saw when it comes to this, and I think people who know the podcast, people who have listened to me, people who know my employment history know that I've had an ever evolving relationship with labor unions. I've worked in plants where I thought that they were way too powerful and held us back. I've seen where they can be incredibly, incredibly effective at protecting workers' rights and making sure that we have safe environments for our employees to work in. So this is not a political observation or a value observation on labor unions one way or the other, because, depending on the circumstance, like anything else, I think there's some positives and some negatives. But I want to hear when we think about these kind of developments, right, a huge data center being built in in my home state of Wisconsin, for all kinds of reasons. Why that? Why they're popping up all over the Midwest, mainly related to national security and physical security and climate. But at any rate, here's an article that was transcribed from the Wisconsin Public Radio November 18 of 2025 and it says labor unions and educators are among those in Wisconsin's construction industry hailing data center projects as long term job creators, while companies pour billions of dollars into data center projects in Wisconsin and across the country to fill the high demand for artificial intelligence, those projects would serve as training grounds for the next generation of construction workers. This gentleman by the name of Pat Nelson, is the executive secretary treasurer for the North Central States Regional Council of Carpenters. He represents nearly 27,000 union members from six states. Here are the quotes on Wisconsin Public Radio's Wisconsin today. Quote Nilsson said, the boom in data centers and AI technology is essentially guaranteeing long term work for trades workers like his union. And this is him speaking, data centers are so big and they need such a workforce that it gives us the opportunity to go out and recruit. He said, the apprentices go through our apprenticeship program, but they also get on the job hours that they need. We are talking about electricians, HVAC, technicians, production leaders, engineers, project managers, maintenance, TechEd. Institutions, data architects, big data engineers, data center security engineers, infrastructure engineers, IT operations managers, AI specialists, cloud experts, all of these amazing career opportunities resulting because of the proliferation of data centers of AI infrastructure, incredible investors, investments in these technologies creating amazing jobs across the employment spectrum, Okay, number 13. Number 13 on our list of 13 projections and predictions for the year 2026, is smart. HVAC are That's right, smart, heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration. We talk a lot in this podcast about opportunities in electromechanical technology, robotics, automation, advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, not as much as we should about the incredible career opportunities in HVAC. And we are going to see a huge renewed focus on these technologies and on these careers, not just because they're great careers when it comes to commercial HVAC are, as they call it, not just because they're great careers when they when it comes to residential HVAC are, but because of this huge growth in data centers and data technology, we need even more of those folks. Let me give you a couple examples. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, occupational handbook, the need for HVAC our technicians will grow at a rate of 8% for the next 10 years, adding 40,100 openings every single year. I saw this article in aChr news. October 10 is when I saw this article. Enrollment in college level. HVAC our training programs in the US jumped this year. 2025 an encouraging development for educators and others trying to help people find a career in the trades. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, this is an organization that keeps track of US college enrollment statistics, 25,971 people were enrolled this spring in two year HVAC art programs at schools that offer associate degrees, a nearly 29% increase when it came compared to spring of 2024 now here's what I'm going to note. Is that 25,971 people enrolled is great. Those are two year programs. We have 40,100 openings every year. And that's the reason, by the way, for this prediction. We were talking about careers like AV Technician, HVAC Installer, HVAC service tech, not technician, refrigeration technicians, HVAC engineers, project managers, service technicians. And by the way, this is at every level of education. I'm going to come up with a little bit of a shout out to a very good friend of mine, a longtime friend of mine. His name is Scott Larson. His his family owned, owned, and continues to help lead a huge HVAC distribution company, one of the largest in the country. His family created a program at the University of Colorado Boulder called the Larson Building Systems Laboratory. I've been there. It's amazing, but that building systems Library is a facility in the HVAC industry that where they study entire HVAC systems in a controlled, dynamic environment, and they've got repeatable test conditions. They're checking out the latest and greatest and smart HVAC technology for our higher educations. Yes, it's used for education, but it's also used for research and designed for dynamic testing of complete and full scale commercial HVAC building systems. And activities in that lab are things like evaluation and testing of algorithms and hardware for HVAC, looking at multiple control systems of HVAC, dynamic interactions between building thermal responses and system controls, you can start to see that a lot of this technology is so very similar to what we see in advanced manufacturing and the technology we talk about here all the time on the TechEd podcast, in many ways, this technology is emerging. It's becoming smarter. It's becoming more data driven. It's it's relying on those smart sensors and smart devices that we talk about here all the time on the TechEd podcast. So really, really cool stuff happening in HVAC are that is our 13th prediction. Is when we come back and look at this, a year from now, we will see more growth and more investment in these really, really cool technologies. So I'm going to really quickly go back through what we're expecting for 2026 number one, we are going to see more use of generative AI in education, and so we are going to get away from this idea that we shouldn't be using generative artificial intelligence in the world of education. Of course, it needs to be there. Our students should be using it. Our teachers and our professors and our instructors should be using it. Number two, huge focus on rare earth minerals. We are going to see that technology come under huge, huge interest in the world of STEM and technical education over the course of the next 12 to 18 months, I think particularly in the next 12 months, growing opportunities in GIS geographic information systems. We are expecting that our fourth prediction was more. And more opportunities to teach defense technology in creative and age appropriate and education appropriate ways in STEM and technical education. Number five, entrepreneurship and the ownership economy. Number six, the advance of systems that actually teach quadropods and humanoids in a way that brings some of the emerging technologies to life, not just a cool toy for the classroom. Number seven, biomimicry. Number eight, quantum computing. Number nine, remember, you heard it here first marketing goes stem. Marketing will be a career in the stem and technical education realm, and we're going to hear about that more and more over the course of the next 12 months. And you heard it here for the first time, right here on the TechEd podcast. Number 10, the rise of the smaller universities, those that are nimble, those that are creative, those that find ways to meet students where they are, to meet the workforce where they are. You're going to see incredible growth in smaller universities, if they're playing their cards right. Number 11 was nuclear technology. We're going to see more and more nuclear tech, and the huge investments in nuclear tech that's going to drive a huge need for the talent that is needed in that space. Number 12, our data centers are going to create, and continue to create all kinds of new and growing career opportunities for young people and students of all ages and learners of all ages. Education has to adapt. Number 13, smart. HVAC. Smart HVAC are, I should say so, heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration, and that will continue to grow here in the year 2026 that is about a wrap on our predictions for the coming 12 months in STEM and technical education. Again, we got a 3.2 3.92 out of five on our predictions for last year. We'll see if we can't better that score next year. Oh, and by the way, as we do every single year, one final prediction here on the TechEd podcast, and then it doesn't count on our list of 13. It's a 14th secret one, but you all know what it is. We guarantee you that the place to come for the best in news, in trends, in interviews, in advancements in STEM and technical education will absolutely be hands down the number one podcast in STEM and technical education, one of the top technical and technology podcasts on the globe, 99th percentile, by the way, in terms of downloads and views for technology podcasts and the entire planet. That, of course, is the TechEd podcast. And yes, of course, we'll be here for another year, our sixth year, believe it or not, here on the TechEd podcast, bringing you another 52 episodes of incredible, incredible content. Thanks so much for an incredible 2025 we are so blessed to have so many amazing people as part of our ecosystem, as part of our family. Here at the TechEd podcast, wishing you the happiest of New Years. It is going to be an incredible 2026 in STEM and technical education. Can't wait to spend that year with you here at the TechEd podcast. Check out the show notes for this episode. By the way, at TechEd podcast.com/predictions 26 so TechEd podcast.com/predictions the word and then the letter or the numbers, I should say, two six predictions. Two six. When you're done there, check us out on social media again, we are taking off absolutely on YouTube, insane amounts, amounts of views of certain episodes. You will find us all over social media as well, Facebook, TechEd, Instagram, LinkedIn, wherever you go for your social media, check out the TechEd podcast. We would love to hear from you, and we would love to hear you and see you next week on the TechEd podcast, where we will begin 2026 thanks for being with us, everybody. I'm Matt your host, and this is the TechEd podcast. You.