Leading After FFA: What Six Past National Officers Say About the Skills They Use
The Long Game: How FFA Leadership Pays Off in Careers, College, and Life
Leadership does not look the same in a hospital, a lab, a trade association or a congressional committee. FFA’s January 2025 feature “My Work After National Office” offers a useful sample because it profiles six past national officers in very different jobs. This article compares what they say, adds an earlier president’s long career in advocacy and pulls out practical lessons without claiming more than the sources can support.
- Key takeaway: six past officers in six fields describe people-centered skills: advocacy, trust, mentorship, curiosity and learning from experience.
- Caution: all six come from one FFA-published feature, so they illustrate range, not averages.
Six Careers, Six Lessons
According to the feature, the six profiled past national officers are:
- A registered nurse. Tess Seibel served as 2019–20 eastern region vice president and now works at a children’s hospital. She says FFA prepared her to advocate for patients and that after FFA
we can still be impactful
. - A trade association staffer. David Townsend, the 2016–17 president, directs member programs at a fertilizer trade group in Washington, D.C. He says career paths are not one straight line.
- A systems engineer. Caleb Gustin, a 2014–15 western region vice president from New Mexico, completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering. He credits the people who helped him along the way.
- A congressional staffer. Taylor Wiseman, the 2015–16 president, is a professional staff member on the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources and stresses mentorship.
- A research fellow. David Lopez-Larios, 2020–21 western region vice president, works for a California State University agricultural research institute and says FFA gave him curiosity about how systems work.
- A development advisor. Adrian Schunk, 2018–19 eastern region vice president, advises at a global nonprofit and says getting real-world experience is useful even in areas you later reject.
Reading Across the Six
None of the six names a specific contest skill as the thing that transferred. They describe habits instead: advocating for someone else, trusting a process, relying on people, staying curious and trying work before committing to it. That fits how NACE defines career readiness, as a set of competencies that can be demonstrated in many ways rather than a single credential.
It also fits the habits listed in Advance CTE’s Career Ready Practices, which describe twelve practices, from communicating clearly to working productively in teams. Neither framework is about agriculture, which is why they help translate FFA experience into any field.
An Earlier Generation
For contrast, FFA’s 2026 profile of Gary Swan, the 1966–67 president, describes a career that moved from the New York Farm Bureau through legislative staff work to the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, plus volunteering with more than 30 organizations. He traces his success to public speaking events and calls FFA a voyage of self-discovery. His path, like the six above, rests on people and advocacy rather than one technical specialty.
A Comparison Worksheet
To apply this to yourself, answer three questions about any leader you admire:
- What does their daily work consist of? Name the people they serve.
- Which FFA experience would help most? Choose one concrete example, not the whole organization.
- What would you still need to learn? Name one skill FFA did not give you.
The third question matters most. The feature notes that FFA prepares members for careers both inside and outside agriculture; it does not claim FFA is enough on its own. This worksheet is this site’s suggestion, not an FFA program.
Questions Readers Ask
Do I need a national office to benefit?
No source here says so. The six profiled served at the national level, but the skills they describe, such as advocacy and mentorship, are practiced at the chapter level too.
Is a career outside agriculture a departure from FFA?
FFA’s own framing says no: the feature introduces its six examples by saying FFA prepares members for many careers inside and outside agriculture.
What if I do not know what I want to do?
Schunk’s advice in the feature is to try short experiences, such as an internship, because learning what you do not want to do is also valuable.
Honest Limits
All six profiles come from a single feature that FFA wrote and selected, which favors success stories. Job titles are as published in 2025 and 2026 and may have changed. No source here measures how much FFA contributed compared with school, family or other experiences.
On this site, David Townsend, Taylor McNeel and Gary Swan have short bios built from the same FFA features.