Creating a Skilled Workforce

We’ve been hearing it for years, in NYC the lack of skilled tradesmen and women has been masked by a Workforce Development movements that believes that the bare minimum is doable as long as someone knows what a hardhat is and how to put it on.

But the lack of actual skills has killed the integrity of the profession, being more concerned with bodies in the field rather than productivity and craftsmanship.  

The lack of a skilled workforce in construction has continued to be problematic as the industry struggles to find enough qualified workers to staff the growing demand for construction projects.

In fact, 80% of construction companies can’t find enough qualified workers to staff projects.

This has lead to less-than-qualified workers being chosen to work in the field. Which in turn causes safety, communication and quality control issues, along with a host of potential legal issues if they are not trained or vetted.

Most contractors in the city don’t have the time to train existing tradesman and laborers properly. Most have packed schedules, scrambling to keep up and move onto the next project.

This is a mistake.

As an industry we must invest in the existing crews that have already been seasoned in the field, as well as incoming newcomers joining the ranks.

Training must be on all levels and throughout a workers entire career in the industry, especially as technology and AI take steps to alleviate some of the more laborious and physically grueling tasks.

For more on automation in Construction, check out Deep Dives article, “Automation's opportunities and threats”, which paints a grim picture of displacing workers, which I think is a little more gloom and doom then necessary.  A highly skilled labor force can utilize automation to take out redundancies and tasks that don’t require a great deal of skill or sophistication, but I digress.

Back to the point at hand.

Train everyone, all the time.

In order to create a group of qualified workers at your company, training must occur not only at the beginning, but also throughout the career.

A study from Construction Industry Institute’s research team found that for every 1% of the project labor budget that is invested in training, productivity increases by 11%.  

That is significant.

To increase productivity, firms must have an extensive training program in place for all new employees to train them on the skills needed to perform a job safely, and productively and they should not stop there.  

By illustrating the path upward in the ladder of success, companies can ensure that everybody is constantly evolving,  reminding them of safety issues and to foster more teamwork and continuous learning.

This lifelong learning mentality creates a more engaged workforce. And mutually beneficial relationships for both the employee and employer emerge.

Planned, progressive training programs can allow construction employees to thrive in their work environment, creating safe, challenging and achievable goals in an environment where they feel as though they are contributing to the company in an ongoing process of evolution. As the company goes, so do they.

This creates more job satisfaction, enabling comradery and higher retention rates.

Similarly, employers benefit from high quality work, along with fewer mistakes, lawsuits and safety issues; which lower job costs overall.

Partnering with organizations like CMC Workforce to offer Apprenticeship Programs is an excellent way to offer training to existing staff, while also on-boarding new hires with the same training.

Our programs start new trainees  in general labor, which gives the apprentice a broad base of knowledge before choosing which trade path to follow.

Aside from technical skills, these programs also help teach leadership, teamwork, work ethic, along with employability and communication skills.  

Continuous training is beneficial, and all employees are not going to be struggling with the same skills. This is why is it important for construction managers to perform assessments on a regular basis.

Foreman are often excellent frontline observers to their crew, if trained correctly they can gauge where employee’s strengths and weaknesses lie.

Once communicated back to HR and CMC training can be implemented specific modules towards each individual in order to fine-tune the areas that they could improve on.

This personalization of training can be coordinated with others which allows for more productive training and higher acceptance of the training by employees.

People want to work for a company that will invest in their employees. Therefore, by investing in training programs and proving the ability of your company to expand on the skills of their existing workforce, prospective construction employees will be attracted to your construction company over its competitors.

Construction companies that invest in their employees through training programs are more likely to have lower turnover rates, and higher productivity from their workers.  

By training employees from the beginning to the end, employees will be more qualified to move up within the company, have high job satisfaction, and stay with the company for long periods of time, which can save countless hours and dollars.