Thoughts from the Sand Pile

The following link is an excerpt from Tom Snyder’s recent blog post on HuffPost.

“The first thing we need to do is address the skills gap in this country. Baby boomers are retiring and businesses are looking for workers who are trained in emerging technologies.This is a national trend.  . . . Community colleges are ideally positioned with solutions for the skills gap. These schools can move quickly to establish curricula that precisely address local workforce development needs. Adjunct faculty are often also employed by local businesses, so they know exactly what skills employees need to get a job and advance through the ranks. Increasingly, community colleges are looking to create apprenticeships with local businesses so students can earn while they learn.”

Click the link for the whole article.

Having worked in construction for over 20 years, I am inclined to dwell on the skills gap issue in our industry. I’m grateful for the efforts of organizations like Mike Rowe’s Profoundly Disconnected and SkillsUSA who are working to refresh our workforce through marketing hype and providing skills training to new recruits; however, the attempt to close the skills gap simply by training more people is like filling a broken bucket. Retention is the real concern – we have to fix the bucket before we can fill it!

The current average age for a journeyman construction worker is well over 55 years and around 25 for apprentices. With a typical learning curve of 4 to 6 years from entry level apprentice to journeyman why is there a gap of nearly 30 years between these positions? I think it is early burnout. Generally, construction companies gauge their success strictly on productivity, yet, beyond skills training, they do very little in the way of employee development/enrichment to internalize productivity in their workforce. We have really high turnover in lower-level positions. I see it all the time: Apprentices come into the trades with ambition, wanting to learn; they work for 6 months or a year, showing tremendous potential, but the company does nothing to nurture their ambition and advance them to more fulfillment with deeper commitment to their careers. Eventually, the employee feels exploited and becomes disillusioned with a dead-end job, so they either leave on their own or they lose motivation and their productivity decreases until they are cut loose through seasonal layoffs. Sadly, many young apprentices are walking away from the trades, soured and with no intention of returning. It takes a long time to train a skilled craftsman, and with our seasoned workers aging out and retiring, it’s a shame that we are not working harder to retain these young people! We have a strong focus on training the necessary skills; we need a stronger emphasis on lifelong career paths in construction trades and long-term, individual development.

The construction industry touts the honor and satisfaction of working with your hands and we boast of the global employability of skilled craftsmen – but until we address retention issues, flooding the workforce with new apprentices will not solve our skills gap problem. To borrow a thought from “Human Resource Management in Construction” (an excellent study on this subject), we have to stop thinking of our workforce as a resource for optimal deployment to production tasks – our employees are people who possess special attributes that need to be harnessed, nurtured, developed, and understood!