REALITY AND PERCEPTIONS
The talent deficit isn’t new; a declining emphasis on vocational training in the U.S. — the traditional breeding ground of skilled tradespeople — has been under way for decades. “We’ve been talking about the labor shortage for the last 25 years,” says Mark Richardson, president of Case Design/Remodeling.
Neither the shortage nor a major shift to Hispanic workers ever really materialized at Case, in part because of the well-known company’s magnet-like allure to experienced workers from shuttered companies [see “Into the Fold,” in Best Practices].
What Case is starting to experience — and what seems to be the root of what many believe to be an impending labor crisis nationwide — is an aging workforce. The median age of workers in construction occupations is 38.9, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Citing job growth and worker loss data from the Bureau, “the construction industry will be short 2.3 million workers by 2025,” says Brindley Byrd, a former remodeler who is executive director of the Capital Area Construction Council of Lansing, Mich. “Demand is increasing, and the workforce is being depleted,” even in depressed economies like his own, he says.
“We’re all asking where the next generation is coming from,” says Dave Borgatti, a carpentry instructor at The Wood Construction Center at Seattle Central Community College. He and others agree that a key sticking point is society’s wholesale devaluing of blue-collar work, which has spurred severe cutbacks in construction education and an otherwise unflattering image of a profession that many remodelers know can be lucrative, intellectually challenging, and personally gratifying.
“The problem is part image and part awareness,” says Jim Carr, a professor of construction management at the University of Arkansas, in Little Rock. He cites a Wall Street Journal survey that ranks careers: Construction laborer ranked 248, just after cowboy.
“Our image is that of dirty, stinky men,” says Brett Pressler of Timberland Construction, in Orem, Utah. Echoing Reeves and others, he notes that many kids live in a virtual world of You-Tube and Xboxes, with “PCs and TVs in every room. They have it much easier” — coddled by parents, in many cases, and given trophies even if their team never wins — and often “have no sense of delayed gratification.”
“I can’t imagine a young person naturally being drawn to carpentry. There’s just no emphasis,” says Wanda Poe, executive director of the Austin (Texas) chapter of the National Association of the Remodeling Industry (NARI). Exacerbating the problem, Texas bans people under 18 from construction jobsites. “Construction is not on their radar screen” unless a relative or educator steered them toward it, she says.
Increasingly, the opposite seems more likely. Dan Taddei, director of education at NARI National in Chicago, witnessed this first-hand when one of his sons decided he wanted to go straight from high school to a career in graphic arts. “I got the impression the counselors wouldn’t even talk to him until he committed to go to college,” Taddei says. He’s heard similar stories from NARI members nationwide, particularly in affluent areas where “the parents all want their kids to go to college, or at least the school superintendents perceive that to be the case.”
Not that the industry is opposed to higher education. On the contrary, “we love to have workers who are college educated,” says John DeCiantis of DeCiantis Construction, in Stonington, Conn. “We want them to be able to problem-solve — it’s very important in my line of work,” and many carpenters at his and other companies do have advanced degrees.
How educators view remodelers may be a different matter. After a meeting with educators, DeCiantis heard that “they were surprised that we were coherent — we had our teeth, we spoke intelligently, and some of us are highly educated.” More people need to know “that construction workers aren’t uneducated slugs,” he says only half-jokingly.
“College has its place, but one of the things we’ve forgotten in education is that not everybody learns the same way,” Taddei says. “Some kids don’t learn by book, but by working with their hands. And they’re being left behind.” He adds that there’s also a giant skills gap between novice construction worker and professional remodeler. “In order to get the skills required to be a carpenter in remodeling, it’s hard to get there from being a laborer.”
BACK OF THE CLASSROOM
So what of skills training programs? Interestingly, vocational education itself — today called “career and technical education,” or CTE — seems to be on the upswing. There were 15.2 million U.S. high school students in CTE programs in 2004, up from 9.6 million in 1999, according to the Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE). But the CTE umbrella covers diverse fields — carpentry and electrical, yes, but also programs like 3-D animation, physical therapy, and emergency medical care. Only 58.1% of public schools had a construction class in 2002, ACTE reports.
“Every time you turn around, you hear about a construction program being closed down or consolidated,” says Tom Holdsworth, director of communications and government relations with SkillsUSA, which prepares students for careers in 130 technical and service occupations. “We’ve seen good, healthy increases in programs such as robotics and computer networking and CAD [computer-aided design],” he says, “whereas the more traditional construction trades have more difficulty in attracting or keeping students.”
Some newly constructed high schools, if they have a construction program at all, “have a programmed computer for CAD,” Borgatti says. “That’s their nod to it.”
There are wonderful construction programs, to be sure, but others are underfunded and underattended. “It’s a numbers game,” says Dave Snyder, a school support specialist and special education teacher at the Career and Technology Center of Frederick County (Maryland) Public Schools, referring to the challenges of maintaining enrollment in the center’s carpentry class. “Public education is focused on raising test scores due to the unfunded federal mandate created by No Child Left Behind legislation,” he says. Hands-on classes such as woodworking “are at the bottom of the totem pole,” beneath “academic” (and, it’s worth noting, less space- and material-intensive) subjects such as science, math, and English.
In the meantime, “we’re losing the kids who are sitting at the back of the classroom, staring out windows,” DeCiantis says. In response, he has worked with the Home Builders Association of Connecticut to develop an accredited two-year degree program in construction technology (stay tuned for more details in next month’s issue of REMODELING).
And the kids who do find themselves in construction classes? Too often — at least for now — they seem to be there because they don’t test well and educators don’t want to deal with them.
The result can frustrate even the most dedicated teachers, many of whom could be making far more money working in the trades than in the classroom.
A telling example is in West Virginia, where David Yost left a fulfilling career with the military (and took a $70,000 pay cut) to teach building construction at the high school he graduated from 40 years ago. He estimates, “conservatively,” that 98% of his students can’t read or do math beyond the 7th grade level, and says that “they literally have not been taught” even such basic life skills as critical thinking, work ethic, and integrity.
To prepare his students for construction careers, which do require those skills and many others, Yost has a classroom budget that averages $600 a year. “I’ve had to beg for donations from the local home builders’ association and building supply companies,” he says. But “the thing that really blows my mind is that we spent $1.4 million on an Astroturf football field and $270,000 on a basketball court that we don’t need,” he says. “The problem isn’t really the students,” Yost says. It’s the adults. “We’re failing the students.”