Manufacturing

Luke Buzzard

Production Machinist

High school: Radford High School ('04)

Career & Technical Ed. Program Studied: Precision Machining Technology

Additional Studies/Training: New River Community College

Technical Talents

When Luke Buzzard enrolled in that Precision Machining Technology class as a 10th-grader, he wasn’t expecting it to turn into a career. “I didn’t know what I was getting into,” he recalls. “I thought I would take something different…and somebody suggested I might like being in the machine shop. I enjoyed it…so the next year, instead of one hour, I took two, and two in my senior year. As a senior, I competed in a SkillsUSA competition and won state, then went on to nationals. Before the nationals, I had to go to a company to learn CNC programming (because we mostly had manual machines at my high school). The company I trained at ended up hiring me!”