Confident, Skilled and Determined

Bailee Stiles has come a long way since she entered Fannin County High School as a ninth-grader. From being shy and “standoffish” with “no idea what I wanted to do,” Bailee has spent her high school career transforming into a confident young woman and a skilled welder in the FCHS Class of 2025. Along the way, she’s become a SkillsUSA champion, her school’s SkillsUSA club president, and a welding fabricator at a local company, Blue Ridge Manufacturing, making $21 an hour.

“It’s wild to think back on,” she says.

Welding never crossed Bailee’s mind until she made a fortuitous connection in, of all places, a hair salon. It was her mother’s workplace, and she was hanging out there the week prior to her freshman year when she began chatting with a customer. It turned out the woman was a welder.

“I said, ‘What’s a welder?’” Bailee remembers. “I really didn’t know what that was. That was my first [notion of], ‘Oh, women can do something like this.’”

Another pivotal connection came the following week, when Bailee tagged along with a friend to a SkillsUSA club meeting. She met CTAE instructor Terry Flowers, who, as she recalls “walked up to me … and he was like, ‘Hey, you’re gonna weld.’ And I was like, ‘OK!’ And then he put me into an Occupational Safety class and I ended up loving it.”

From that point, Bailee began to learn welding and quickly “realized how much I loved it. It’s something I know I can always get better at, and I strive to be the best at everything I do.”

Flowers began encouraging and preparing Bailee to enter competitions. “At first, she didn’t do so good,” he recalls. “There’s a lot of growing pains to go through. [But] she never would take no for an answer. If she wasn’t good enough at it, then she’s going to be [eventually]. She’s always working, she’s always pushing.”

Bailee spent the last three years of her high school career competing in a variety of welding fabrication competitions, including ones hosted by SkillsUSA and the Xcel mentoring network. Her team qualified for the SkillsUSA Georgia Championships in 2024 and 2025.

She’s also worked with her classmates to fabricate custom firepits, which Flowers found a market for at a local arts and crafts festival. From that project, the class raised more than $3,000 to help pay travel expenses for SkillsUSA competitions.

Flowers marvels at the impact SkillsUSA has made on her. “If you could think of someone who has grown inside the program, she is picture-perfect of what you think would happen,” he says. “You could watch her transform into who she is now.”

Bailee says SkillsUSA not only helped her grow as a welder, it turned her into a leader. “It helped me speak out on what I know, because I’m confident in it,” she explains. “As club president, I knew I had to sound confident, because otherwise these kids weren’t going to listen me. They’re high school students just like me.”

Bailee’s growth continued when she began seeking a part-time job that would challenge her. She had been working in a minimum-wage position at her local rec department, but she recognized she “could do so much more,” she says. She explained her dilemma to Flowers, and he introduced her to Blue Ridge Manufacturing, a maker of commercial truck beds and bodies.

She aced the interview, was hired immediately, and has progressed through several pay raises over two years. She worked full-time and earned ample overtime pay in the summer of 2024. By the time her senior year began, she was driving a new Chevrolet pickup.

“She’s worked her way up into a really good spot,” says Flowers, the FCHS Teacher of the Year for 2025. The admiration between him and Bailee is mutual – Flowers, she says, “really pushed me to be the woman that I am today.”

Besides her work and SkillsUSA involvement, Bailee has taken dual-enrollment classes at the University of North Georgia-Blue Ridge and North Georgia Technical College. After graduation, she plans to begin an apprenticeship with the International Brotherhood of Boiler Makers Local 454 in Chattanooga, TN, where she’ll work for the Tennessee Valley Authority as a boiler maker apprentice. Right out of high school, she can expect to make more than $40/hour en route to the journeyman level, where pay can increase to as much as $60/hour. Ultimately she hopes to travel the country as a boiler maker.

Wherever her career takes her, Bailee is grounded when her mask comes down and her torch is lit.

Welding, she says “is kind of calming in a way. Whenever I’m in the booth, I don’t worry about anything else. I just worry about what I’m doing and what I can control. I find peace in that.”