Each of Utah’s 29 counties offers unique advantages for businesses and talent alike. Let’s visit Washington County.
Four years ago, a construction and materials company in Washington County was struggling to hire employees for a niche job: drivers for cement trucks. In-house training was expensive and required significant upkeep. Then the company learned of a program that helps businesses create custom training at a reduced cost. It turns out the program, Custom Fit, has been helping companies for decades.
Utah is the No. 1 state in the country, and the state’s economic and fiscal stability are among the many standout categories that got us there. While Salt Lake and Utah counties are recognized as urban hubs for business, thriving ecosystems across the state have been utilizing Custom Fit to upskill employees and remain competitive.
Custom Fit provides reduced-cost, customized training for Utah employees “through a dynamic partnership between Utah System of Higher Education Custom Fit institutions, the state of Utah, and local businesses.” In 2025, the program supported 1,847 companies, with 80% considered small companies, and 300 companies self-reporting as rural. However, according to a 2025 report from the U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy, Utah has 371,569 small businesses, meaning only 0.4% of Utah’s small businesses are taking advantage of this program.
Fill workforce gaps
Custom Fit has been training employees in Utah for 40 years. Each year, the Utah Legislature appropriates funds to cover 40% of businesses’ training costs conducted through the Custom Fit program. This means companies upskilling employees through Custom Fit pay a fraction of the cost for the same education. In 2025, most Custom Fit trainings were provided to companies in the construction, advanced manufacturing and life sciences sectors.
In Washington County, Suncore Construction & Materials is one of many construction companies utilizing the Custom Fit program. Jeremy Christensen, the ready-mix operations manager for the St. George, Hurricane and Mesquite areas, says he found the program around four years ago when he was struggling to hire enough drivers for cement trucks.
Initially, his team attempted to train drivers in-house. After the first round, however, they realized their process was too expensive and time-consuming to upkeep. Christensen, having previously hired drivers from Dixie Technical College’s CDL program, set up a meeting with the college to see if they could help.
“They said, ‘Our Class B program is three and a half weeks to four weeks long,’” Christensen explains. “We [needed] it condensed. … We didn’t want to have this long duration of employees getting paid to go to school — that’s just too much money. Then they said, ‘We have this program called Custom Fit. … We can build a program for you, and then we can reimburse you for the money for the tuition on a percentage basis.’”
That changed everything. Christensen says from that point on, he has worked closely with Dixie Tech to build programs to train around 30 employees.
“Custom Fit as a whole — it’s a fantastic thing to have, and it’s benefited us like crazy,” he says. “We’re going to try to utilize it in all different areas now, not just with our licensing.”
Customized training for company pain points
As of 2024, Washington County’s estimated population was 207,943 people. While the fifth largest county in Utah by population, local employers can still struggle to find qualified, trained employees — an issue that intensifies for each county in Utah lower on the list. Custom Fit solves this pain point by alleviating the upskilling costs for companies’ current employees.
Marie Bowcut, director of Custom Fit at Dixie Technical College, helps local businesses create the exact training programs they need to bring new employees up to speed or continue the education of long-time workers. Bowcut has organized trainings on specialized machinery and helped sign up employees for CPR classes — no training is too big or too small.
“I like to meet with the customer and find out what the issues are,” Bowcut says, explaining that for one company, “instead of hiring engineers, we took their welders and trained them to become engineers and run the machines.” For another company, Bowcut helped implement the Toyota kaizen program among employees to improve efficiency in a manufacturing plant.
“Being rural, you don’t necessarily have access to [a large] workforce,” she says. But that doesn’t have to be a barrier anymore. “With Custom Fit, you can train and upskill the employees you have.”
If Dixie Tech doesn’t have the exact training or instructors available, companies can find available trainings they’d like employees to take on their own and still apply for the 40% reimbursement from the Custom Fit program.
Elise Bunnell, the accounts payable clerk at RAM Aviation, Space & Defense, helps coordinate Custom Fit trainings for her company. Being a rural company handling highly technical work, the program’s flexibility is essential for RAM’s employees.
“Most of our training is not local; it’s either online or employees have to travel somewhere. If we didn’t have the ability for that, there would be a lot of lost training for our company,” Bunnell says, emphasizing the benefit of the 40% tuition reimbursements.
“Finding the right trainer for businesses like RAM, where everything is so complex and precise, we leave it up to them because nobody knows their business better than they do,” Bowcut says.
Enhance performance, boost profits
Jeff Staples, CEO of S&S Group of Companies, estimates he’s had hundreds of employees go through trainings with the help of Custom Fit. Every time one of the S&S companies adds a new machine or process, Staples says they consult with Bowcut at Custom Fit to bring in experts to train employees. Each time, he sees increased efficiency and increased profit.
“The more we’re trained, the more we see things as processes, and we have confidence that we can implement and affect change in positive ways,” he says. “We have roughly the same head count at S&S as we did 10 years ago, but our throughput is three-and-a-half to five times more.”
Even if you don’t have a training in mind yet, reach out to your local Custom Fit office to see how they can support your employee training needs. For Washington County, Bowcut’s experience in building trainings and connecting with local business owners has given her a wide network of people and resources she leverages to support local businesses.
“If it doesn’t impact our ability to leverage the grants,” Staples jokes, “I would definitely recommend reaching out to Marie and helping her understand your pain points. … She puts people together, and there’s a lot of value in that.”