Tech school lengths and locations can be super confusing. Does it go by classroom days? Do weekends count? Why are some schools at army and navy bases? Don’t worry, you’re not alone.
Even when I was in the process of joining, I had a lot of these same questions. So let’s talk about it. Tech school length. I know a lot of people want to have some sort of estimate of when they’re going to graduate tech school before they even leave for basic training. So let’s get the first thing out of the way.
The length of tech school is in days, but that stands for classroom days. So that does not include weekends or federal holidays. So the day after you end up graduating basic training, they’re going to ship you off to tech school. You’re not going to go home. You’re going to go immediately to your tech school after graduating BMT.
Now, once you arrive at tech school, you probably won’t start class until sometime between three and 30 days later. It all depends on how many airmen they need to fill a class. So you might be waiting a few weeks for basic training graduations to roll around so new airmen can show up to your tech school. Now, let’s say that you just got your BMT ship date, or you already know your BMT ship date. That ship date is going to fall on a Tuesday.
So if you have your ship date, but your recruiter didn’t tell you a graduation date, the easiest way to calculate that is to count out seven weeks from that Tuesday that you’ll be shipping and then go to the Thursday of that 7th week, and that will be your graduation day. That Friday will be when you ship to tech school. Then you can count out three to 30 days from that point to figure out what your start window might be for your tech school class. Keep in mind, all of this is just generalized to kind of give you guys a window or an estimate of when you are going to start and graduate tech school. So starting out from your start window, you’re going to calculate out how many classroom days you have of tech school.
So you’re going to skip weekends and federal holidays. And if you’re going to be in tech school during Christmas time, they actually have a period called exodus. This is typically the week of Christmas. You’ll be completely off of school all the way until the first week of January. And after you’ve calculated out all of those classroom weekdays, not counting weekends or holidays, that will be your estimated window for your graduation of tech school.
There’s no way to calculate the exact dates until you finally arrive at tech school, and the air force gives you what your graduation date is going to be. Now, let’s talk locations. It might be confusing if you look into some jobs and it says that their tech school location is at an army base or a navy base, and you might be thinking, what the heck is going on? I thought, I’m joining the air force. Well, the military, in a way, to save money, will have multiple branches.
All train at one location. If they have similar jobs, you might have a class that consists of people from multiple branches, but you might also have instructors from different branches. Or you could have an entire class of all airmen, and all of your instructors are airmen. For instance, McKenna is at Fort Mead right now, which is an army base, and she is training for public affairs. In her class, she has every single branch, and she has multiple instructors that are from several different branches.
However, when I was in, I went to Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, and that is a Navy base. The air force had their own separate section of the schoolhouse. So our entire class was all airmen and all of our instructors were airmen. There might also be some air force bases that have tech schools that have other branches training there. If you’re interested in how long or where each job will be for tech school, head on over to airmenvision.com, where we have web pages for every single job, plus a bunch more information on there.
Also, I asked an MTI for five tips that he wants trainees to know before they show up to basic training, and this is what he said.