Tango Lima Professional Services builds competency-based education and workforce training programs for aviation, healthcare, and the skilled trades. It was founded by a vocational educator and academic dean who spent twenty-five years being asked that question in classrooms, operating rooms, and accreditation reviews.
Tango Lima Professional Services is a Colorado workforce training company serving aviation, healthcare, and technical industries. It was founded in 2024 by Dr. Thomas Lescarbeau
Before TLPS, he directed technical training programs at a regional vocational school, a community college, and a multi-campus college district. As an academic dean he was responsible for eighteen programs — nursing, surgical technology, dental hygiene, radiologic technology, physical therapy, pharmacy, veterinary technology, health information, fire science, and emergency medical services. For five years he sat on a fifty-member system council with review authority over more than two hundred workforce programs.
He was a board-certified surgical first assistant for nearly three decades before any of it. He knows what a competency gap looks like in a room where the consequence is immediate.
Competency-based education was not a discovery here. It was the coursework.
His undergraduate degree is a Bachelor of Science in Education in Occupational and Vocational Education, cum laude, from Westfield State University — a licensure program built specifically for tradespeople who teach, taught in the evening because its students are working their trade during the day. Two of its required courses are Competency Based Curriculum Development and Implementing a Competency Based Curriculum. Another is Vocational Education for Students with Special Needs.
Everything since has been the same idea at a larger radius. A master's in higher education administration from Sam Houston State University, with a graduate certificate in assessment and institutional research. A doctorate from the University of New England, with a dissertation on competency-based education in postsecondary settings — later published in the Community College Journal of Research and Practice. A graduate certificate in diversity, equity, and inclusion from Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. And throughout, a Massachusetts vocational teaching licence and an Administrator/Superintendent licence from the same department that issued it.
That sequence is now a registered mark: Cycle of Learning: Educate. Demonstrate. Validate.®
Those programs were not all healthcare.
Lone Star College is one of the largest community college systems in the United States — more than ninety thousand students a semester across eight colleges, with over two hundred programs. Its Workforce Council is the body that decides which of those programs exist. Nothing launches without passing a nine-step review, and nothing reaches the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board until the Council has signed off. Step four of that review is competency identification.
Sitting on it meant evaluating proposals in energy and manufacturing, construction and the skilled trades, HVAC, welding, information technology, visual communication, fire science, emergency medical services, cosmetology, business, and dual credit — most of them fields that were not his own. That is the point of a council. Nobody approves only the programs they already understand.
The accreditors are why the standards work is not theoretical. Programs under his direction have been reviewed by SACSCOC, NECHE, CAAHEP, ACEN, ACOT, AHIMA, ARC/STSA, JRCERT, CAPTE, CODA, and CoAEMSP, and approved through the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
He started at a regional technical school in northern Massachusetts, as a student. He went back and taught there for eight years.
Twenty-five years of being measured against other people's standards produces a fairly specific opinion about what a good one looks like.
The Cirrostratus Course Quality Standards™ is the framework every course on the platform is built and audited against — how competencies are defined and tied to an external standard, how evidence is recorded, and what has to be true before a learner is called competent.
One of its eight domains governs the use of artificial intelligence. The short version is the part that matters to a regulator: no mastery decision is made by AI. Not as a policy, but as an architectural constraint — the system is built so that it cannot be.
A platform, and the scholarship it came from.
Cirrostratus™ is a patent-pending competency-based learning platform — U.S. Patent Application 63/784,390 — built on the Dual-Ascent Competency Model™ and the Cycle of Learning™. It maintains two competency ledgers at once: what a learner is developing, and what a learner has demonstrated. Its Intelligent Alert System is deterministic and rule-based, not AI. Every alert traces to a published standard, a specific lesson, and a specific performance event, which is what makes it auditable. The first vertical deployment is CSAP, the Cirrostratus™ Supplemental Assessment Program: a forty-lesson, 358-competency private pilot curriculum mapped to the FAA Airman Certification Standards.
CirroSync™ extends that evidence capture to the equipment itself. Where a competency has to be demonstrated on a device — a training simulator, a diagnostic instrument, a field service system — CirroSync connects it to the competency ledger, so the record of what a learner did is captured from the equipment rather than reconstructed afterward from memory or a checklist. The first deployment runs against a flight training device feeding Cirrostratus™ directly.
Five textbooks, published through BookBaby. Four are on competency-based education — vocational instruction for postsecondary and adult learners, apprenticeship programs, program fidelity in the age of AI, and remediation for learners with disabilities. The fifth, The Art and Science of Aviation Instruction, is a book about instructional method for flight instructors, grounded in the same competency principles; it received the Literary Titan Gold Book Award.
The books are the scholarship. The standards and the platform are what the scholarship was for.
Tango Lima Professional Services, LLC is a Colorado limited liability company founded in 2024 and based in Littleton, in the Denver metro region. It is owner-funded, its intellectual property is unencumbered, and it is small on purpose: the person who wrote the standards is the person who answers the phone.
That is not the whole résumé. Since 2019 he has also served as Vice President of Administration for a family-owned Colorado marketing firm, where the operating and financial side of running a business was refined.
Mission. To drive excellence in technical education and workforce development through bold innovation, strategic leadership, and a commitment to evidence-based solutions.
Vision. To be the foremost innovator in technical education and workforce development — setting industry benchmarks and building solutions that let individuals and organizations excel.
Select the intake that matches your organization. Aviation operators and flight schools follow one path; colleges, healthcare systems, and workforce programs follow the other. Both are reviewed directly by Dr. Lescarbeau.
Or start with the books — twenty-five years of the underlying scholarship, in print. Published works →
