Winning the 2026 OpTIC Path Rodeo and the Future of Workforce Development

The second annual Fiber Broadband Association OpTIC Path Rodeo crowned a new winner at Fiber Connect 2026 in Orlando. Dillon Ferguson, CEO and owner of Ferguson Communications, LLC claimed the top spot this year, competing against eleven other fiber optic technicians in this year’s multi-event challenge.

“The OpTIC Path Rodeo helps raise awareness of the ongoing skilled work occurring in the field performed by fiber technicians,” said Todd Jackson, FBA’s Director of Workforce Development. “It gets people enthusiastic, giving fiber technicians an opportunity to showcase their skills and knowledge. From my experience, technicians are very competitive and they take great pride in their work. Bragging rights are always good, too.”

Ferguson hails from Mineral, Virginia. He and his company’s 7 employees – including his father – install fiber across a variety of situations across the mid-Atlantic area, mostly in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, with occasion trips further north and south. He started learning about telephony from his father as a young child, then worked for various phone companies as a technician before starting his own business, which has been in operation for 5 years.

Moving between different phone companies and then different contracting jobs helped Ferguson build a deep portfolio of skills. “Fiber is so broad,” he said. “You’ve got inside plant, outside plant, single mode, data center, multimode, there are so many aspects. Big telco, they have their place, but a lot of times, their work is maintenance, they don’t see all the different builds. As a contract splicer, we work for multiple customers, we see it all, one customer wanted ComScope, another customer wants AFL. You have to learn to use all these different products.”

Ferguson had never been to a Fiber Connect event before but received an invitation this year to compete in the rodeo. He signed up and used the opportunity to both participate in the event and make business connections with other firms and vendors at the conference. The rodeo was a much different experience than a typical installation project, where everything is planned and ready to go, but he used the same techniques and tactics he would at any job site, applying best practices on the task at hand and sticking to basic fiber principles to ensure everything works properly.

The biggest challenge he faced was the MDU exercise requiring installation of fiber within a building using Lightera’s low-profile fiber-to-the-room technology. “It was new to me, and it was really intricate,” said Ferguson. “You had to take your time over tight bend radiuses. Everything was really really tight, you didn’t have a lot of room for error. Plus, I don’t deal with that every day. We usually drop off [a connection] at the road and then a company guy takes it from there to the house or MDU or what have you.”

Ferguson is already planning to return to Fiber Connect next year, but the path to get to the finals in 2027 is going to become more challenging, said Jackson, as the event continues to expand and gain traction.

“There’s been a lot of growth and interest in the Rodeo,” he said. “Last year, people didn’t know what to expect, they didn’t want to be the first. Now that they’ve seen it, they want to participate. We had a wait list going into Fiber Connect 2026 and there’s already a list started for participants for next year. Because of the interest, we are establishing regional Rodeos initiated by FBA and assisting others in conducting an OpTIC Path Rodeo in their region to increase awareness and encourage others to pursue a career in the fiber industry.”

Wilson, North Carolina, will have its own regional rodeo in October of this year, while some of the Regional Fiber Connect events will also have rodeos starting in 2027.

Eligibility for participation in FBA OpTIC Path Rodeo events will also progress along with the development of different categories or classes of participants. “The only filter for participating in the first Rodeos was to make sure that participants had experience and knowledge,” said Jackson. “There’s a safety aspect. We wanted people to know what they need to do from a safety perspective, so we reviewed and had conversations with participants before they went on the event floor.”

Next year, Jackson hopes to have different tiers of competition at Fiber Connect, with the first day of events encompassing high-school students in one group, and a second group consisting of new OpTIC Path graduates and for technicians with one to three years of experience, while the second day of activities would be for more experienced technicians. Regional events would serve both as an avenue of participation for more people and a way to select participants for the capstone event at Fiber Connect. Given the needs for judges, equipment, and space, OpTIC Path Rodeo events will likely be limited to 12 participants per tier or per day.

 

Progress Proliferating OpTIC Path

The FBA’s OpTIC Path fiber technician training program is now active in over  20 states, with eight additional states currently being brought into the program as of May 2026, and is supported by more than 38 training partners, including community colleges, technical schools, workforce centers, and veterans’ organizations.

OpTIC Path provides scalable, 144-hour, apprenticeship-aligned training designed to prepare job-ready workers quickly and effectively.  The foundational course equips novices who haven’t seen a strand of glass before with hands-on skills in fiber installation, splicing, testing, troubleshooting, and maintenance.

Since the first classes started in 2022 at Wilson Community College in North Carolina, the program has graduated more than 1,700 students, but there is plenty more work ahead across the nation, given an estimated need for 180,000 additional fiber technicians over the next decade.

As anyone in the HR world would attest, training doesn’t stop once minimum requirements are met at entry level positions but should continue throughout a technician’s career. To provide an upward path for workers and adopt to new innovations, FBA has expanded its micro-credential offerings to help employers upskill existing technicians and train new employees without pulling them from the field for extended classroom instruction.

Additionally, a new  OpTIC Path Data Center Technician Add-On Certificate will be released in the third quarter of this year, expanding fiber workforce training to high-growth data center environments where there is significantly increased demand. “The rapid growth of data centers is creating strong demand for skilled fiber technicians,” said Jackson. “This new OpTIC Path add-on certificate directly connects foundational fiber training to high-quality, in-demand data center careers.”

Data Center Technician certificate students will gain both theoretical knowledge and hands-on experience aligned with real-world demands of hyperscalers, neoclouds, enterprise, and colocation facilities. supporting career pathways for today’s expanding digital infrastructure.

Beyond training outcomes, OpTIC Path helps strengthen local economies by accelerating onboarding training, reducing the typical time for onboarding a fiber technician from 6 to 9 months down to 1 to 2 months. More available fiber technicians faster within the community means broadband reaches people faster.

“OpTIC Path continues to prove that scalable, hands-on workforce development is possible at the speed the broadband industry demands,” said Deborah Kish, Vice President of Research and Workforce Development of the Fiber Broadband Association. “By expanding access to state-funded training opportunities, we are helping to scale the fiber workforce more quickly and effectively.”

 

This article and similar stories can be found in the Q3 edition of the Fiber Forward Magazine.