With 60% to 70% of Wyoming youths leaving the state by age 30, Wyoming may have the highest outmigration of young people in the nation.
Cheyenne high school student David Whitehead, however, is confident he is going to buck that trend. Not only that, but he believes that right now, for any other youth who wants to do the same, Wyoming can be their oyster.
“A lot of people say there’s not opportunity here,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “But I see opportunity everywhere, and places to grow, and for others to grow as well.”
Whitehead is one of 26 brand-new Metallica Scholars ready to take the southeast Wyoming world by storm — and yes, it’s that Metallica. The heavy metal band who sings songs like “Nothing Else Matters,” "Seek and Destroy,” And “Master of Puppets.”
Now however, the group is seeking to become the Master of Education. A band that still fills stadiums with screaming fans is also filling trade classrooms across the country, including in Wyoming.
The Microsoft Hat, T-shirt And Business Card
On Wednesday, Whitehead and his colleagues gathered for an inaugural celebration of the Metallica Scholars program, which is a partnership between Laramie County School District No. 1’s Trade Academy, Laramie County Community College, and industry partner Advanced Comfort Solutions.
The celebration was timed to coincide with Trades Day at the Archer Event Center, which annually exposes about 900 junior high and middle school students to careers in southeast Wyoming.
Whitehead was grinning like a kid in the proverbial candy store after he saw a roomful of shiny opportunities with a capital “O.”
Among the employers he scored a chat with was Microsoft, and he was all about it.
“I got the shirt, the hat, and the business card,” he said with a grin that just wouldn’t stop. “I got their signatures and their numbers, and I gave it all to my dad to put in the car, because I don’t want to lose it.”
Whitehead stuck around after collecting all the swag to talk more about his future and what he’d need to do if he wanted to work at Microsoft — which he does. Very much.
“One of the hiring managers there said he’d love to see me work there for him,” Whitehead said. “So, I’ll go to LCCC first to get my associates in electric and engineering, or a field like that, which is just another opportunity for a lot more. So hopefully, I could work for Microsoft someday.”
Whitehead can’t imagine leaving Wyoming. The hunting is too good, for one thing. But he doesn’t understand what his fellow youths are talking about when they say Wyoming lacks opportunities for their future careers.
“They’re just not looking,” he said, shaking his head. “They should just come out here (to Trades Day) and then there’s every row, a new opportunity looking to hire you.”
The fact so many data centers are coming to Cheyenne has Whitehead particularly excited for his Cowboy State future.
“That’s growth for decades and decades,” he said. “Just a bunch of work opportunities. I’ll take that and be very successful.”
Simple Question Led To Metallica Scholars
Lead singer James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich formed the heavy metal band Metallica in 1981, and the group has become one of the successful and influential musical acts of all time, with more than 163 million albums sold worldwide as of 2023.
The band’s Metallica Scholars program grew from answering a relatively simple, seemingly unrelated question.
That question was about what to do with all the leftover food backstage at sports arenas and stadiums where the band was playing.
The obvious answer was to donate it to local food banks, but it was a case of one thing always leading to another.
The band was soon donating sizable checks to those food banks as well, which soon led into helping with disaster relief. From there, they realized that if they wanted to change the world to a place where hunger disappears, it was important to teach people to fish, as well as provide the actual fish.
They began the All Within My Hands Foundation in 2017, naming it after the title of their closing track on the 2003 album, St. Anger.
Metallica Scholars was revealed a couple of years later, with a $100,000 award for each of 10 colleges across the nation, supporting training for more than 1,000 trades students.
Hetfield, who is the son of a truck driver, has spoken frequently about what the program means to him.
“When we launched the Metallica Scholars Initiative, it really spoke to me,” he has said. “A collective goal of breaking the stigma of trades. Trade skills are vital to society. And what’s even more important is to support the many folks who are trying to create a career by learning and using these skills.”
Just In Time For Data Center Boom
Metallica Scholars has continued to grow and add more schools and is now in every single state, as well as in Guam.
Last year, the program invested $3M into 75 community colleges and 10,000 students.
Cheyenne’s program is one of about a dozen new additions for 2026.
The program is particularly timely for southeast Wyoming, where at least four large data center announcements have recently been made.
The companies Crusoe and Tallgrass are building Project Jade, a massive AI data center campus on Terry Ranch Road, which will start with an initial 2.7 gigawatts and can scale up to a massive 10 gigawatts.
Microsoft has announced it's building new facilities at Cheyenne Business Parkway and Bison Business Park, as well as a newer project on HR Road, while Meta has announced an $800 million, 715,000-square-foot data center in south Cheyenne. Related Digital broke ground in October of last year with a smaller, $1.2 billion data center campus.
The wave of data centers is fueling an acute labor crunch for plumbers, electricians, and other trades workers in southeast Wyoming. In Cheyenne, it would take 12 years' worth of Laramie County High School graduates just to fill all the plumbing jobs the announced data centers will require.
Those data centers aren’t going to wait 12 years for workers, though.
It’s an acute crisis for the pipeline talent in southeast Wyoming, Laramie County Community College Dean of Outreach and Workforce Development Tanya Hacker told Cowboy State Daily, which is what prompted the community college to pursue a Metallica Scholars program.
While Whitehead intends to attend LCCC to pursue his goals of working for Microsoft, the goal of the program is not about feeding students into the community college, Hacker said. It’s more about training the students for employment as soon as they graduate from high school.
“Part of our mission is really to support economic development and workforce development in the communities we serve,” she said. “Our service area includes all of southeast Wyoming — Laramie County and Albany County. So being part of that talent pipeline development and that workforce development effort is important to us. It’s something we really want to support, regardless of whether students come to us or not.”
Hands-on Exploration Of Trades
The Metallica Scholars Program is a hands-on exploration of a broad array of trade careers that can help southeast Wyoming with its labor crunch, Workforce Partnership Facilitator for Laramie County School District No. 1 Adam Kaiser told Cowboy State Daily.
“They come to the Storey Gym, and we spend an entire half day, twice a week, with the instructors learning about HVAC, plumbing, electrical and mechanical,” he said. “It’s been pretty fantastic.”
So far, the students have tried their hand at sheet metal and now they’re working their way through the plumbing section.
It’s been mind-blowing to Pierce Winn, who has become interested in the career field as a direct result of the program.
“I never knew that so much time and effort could be put into plumbing,” he said. “And when people think about it’s just water in my house, like turn on a sink. In reality, it just takes so much effort to make any bit of water actually function in a home. It’s just amazing, mind-blowing.”
During Trades Day, he was able to meet with Cheyenne’s water treatment supervisors about future career opportunities, which has him excited about his own future prospects.
“It was just really nice to talk to people who were actually excited to have new people to teach and just help out the community,” he said.
Skipping College, Maybe
Robert Trent, meanwhile, has been similarly amazed by plumbing, though he’s already got his heart set on a future module which will focus on electrical systems.
“I feel like a lot of people just take for granted how much technology we use nowadays,” he said. “Everything surrounding us is technology, from what’s below us, what’s above us, what’s to the left and right of us.”
Trent wants to be part of the future workforce that will control and run all of that stuff, which he sees as paramount to future survival.
He left the event with a stack of business cards to follow up on, in his quest to find a job just as soon as he graduates this May.
“These students have all said they want to go straight into the workforce,” Kaiser said. “And every partner we work with is going to hire them on. Then they’re going to have more schooling as they go.”
Some of the students, Kaiser added, are starting to see that if they want a job that will grow with them, college may have to be part of their pathway.
That can be worthwhile, he believes, as long as it’s all being done with a plan in mind, which is what the Metallica Scholars program helps them figure out.
Private Industry Stepping Up
LCCC’s Metallica Scholars program started with an initial $75,000 to get the program off the ground. If the program is successful, it will be eligible for another $50,000 grant in year two.
After that, the funding amounts will get smaller and smaller, but Hacker is not worried about keeping the program going. She, too, sees a lot of opportunity ahead, long after the initial seed money from Metallica.
“We saw a lot of industry partners here today who have stepped up and stepped forward to say, ‘How can we help you?’” she said. “So, a lot of private industry funding comes forward to help continue these programs, and we’ll also continue to apply for other grant funding.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
