How Tesla Is Driving Opportunities for Students and Teachers

Whether you’re looking at Tesla’s factories in California, Nevada, New York or soon to be Shanghai, or the company’s sales and service centers around the world, all roads lead to building pipelines at a local level.

“We’ve grown really fast from a small startup in California to 40,000 team members around the world,” Chris Reilly, Tesla’s lead workforce development and education, told Jessica Abo at the Social Innovation Summit in Los Angeles. “So, we have a lot of active programs that we’re building across different areas of our business.”

Reilly says one way to create a pipeline that will have a lasting impact within your community is “to reach out to schools and school districts and bring teachers out for externship opportunities, to have them shadow our technical leaders,” Reilly says. “For example, at Gigafactory 1 in Nevada, we’ve had over 3,000 students, teachers and educators through Gigafactory over the past few years, just to look at what type of work is going on there and to better understand Tesla’s mission.”

In addition to empowering the next generation of innovators, Tesla is on a mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. “We’re working hard to reach out at the local level and start to build more of these opportunities,” Reilly says.

When it comes to ways consumers can transition to sustainable energy faster, Reilly says the first thing we all can do is understand our energy usage at home. He believes understanding what the grids in our areas look like and where our sources of energy are coming from will enable people to put solar on their home to create sustainable energy from the sun.

“We have storage products that allow you to store that energy at night, and then we have electric vehicles that allow you to utilize that energy in your commute and really change that energy ecosystem footprint.”