Cummins, a global leader in power solutions, is expanding their partnership with Texas State Technical College’s statewide Diesel Equipment program, offering educational resources to students and instructors that will be incorporated into course modules.
“Cummins is one of the leading engine manufacturers in the world,” said Richard Ferrell, the director of alignment for TSTC’s Diesel Equipment program. “All of the students are going to be exposed to these engines no matter what shop they’re working in.”
The Diesel Equipment program is also available at the Abilene, Fort Bend County, Harlingen, Marshall, North Texas, Sweetwater and Waco locations.
Cummins began its partnership with TSTC by offering free virtual learning resources to a few of the college’s Diesel Equipment instructors. Chris Bishop, the company’s technical training manager for Texas, Oklahoma and the East Coast, said Ferrell approached him about further developments last year.
He explained the program’s students and instructors have been given free subscriptions to QuickServe and INSITE — the company’s virtual learning tools that contain everything from diagnostics to training manuals and diagrams.
“We assigned them a training ID that is with them for the rest of their career, so if they leave the school and go work for a dealership, that training goes with them — it never expires,” Bishop said.
The Diesel Equipment program will be bringing the virtual tasks to its hands-on labs as well. Ferrell said that the program’s curriculum will be updated to include Cummins’ most applicable and beneficial training modules. This change will be fully implemented in fall 2027.
“Instead of the students simply reading from the text and applying that in the classroom, the Cummins training also gives animations and explanations farther in depth than our current text does; the students will be training on the task virtually before completing it in the lab,” Ferrell said. “It’s going to make them more hireable for a higher salary and make them more competitive with people applying for the same job that don’t have that background.”
Several Diesel Equipment instructors have already taken advantage of the free learning modules, and many of them agree with Ferrell that it will give their students an advantage in the industry hiring process.
Alex DeLaGarza, a Diesel Equipment graduate and instructor at TSTC’s Abilene campus, said with technology constantly evolving, the Cummins modules have helped his career too.
“For my job, everything changes from month to month, year to year, so just being able to have access to this kind of training for instructors is great because change is always happening in our field,” DeLaGarza said. “Being able to keep up with the training is going to be great for us because we get to pass that along to the students.”
Kyler Walls, a Diesel Equipment instructor at TSTC’s Sweetwater campus, said he is grateful to have access to more specific training modules.
“With a lot of our teaching, we have to be very broad,” he said. “We don’t have access to a whole lot of OEM (original equipment manufacturer) specifications, but now that we have access to Cummins, it just makes our job that much easier because we can go right to specifics and get more detail out of it.”
The Diesel Equipment program will also be implementing other specific OEM training from Peterbilt and Freightliner in fall 2027.
The program offers several associate degrees and certificates of completion.
Registration for the fall semester at TSTC is underway. For more information about TSTC, go to tstc.edu.