Contractors in the Portland-metro area are continuing to address the skilled labor shortage by reaching out to educators. Walsh Construction, for example, is helping Benson Polytechnic High School build up its construction technology program.

Last year, Walsh employees spent time in the Benson woodshop to give students hands-on carpentry construction. This year, expansion has allowed instructors to take better advantage of Carpenters International Training Fund (CITF) curriculum. And from a pair of half-full woodworking classes a year ago, the construction technology program has grown to around 100 enrollees – approximately 10 percent of the Benson student body – engaging in classes that could lead them to careers in the skilled trades.

Participants in the two-year program take courses focusing on construction industry soft skills and preliminary hard skills they can use to eventually learn a trade or even go into project management. Students even are taught how to use 3-D modeling software.

“We’ve dramatically changed in the sense of participation,” said Benson woodworking instructor Dave Ketah, a former design professional. “We started the new elective woodworking, and last year was my first year on staff here, so on some level there is new direction for our department. We have gained some really good, new strategy; we have the partnership with Walsh and we’re amplifying our participation and our coverage of the curriculum we use from CITF.”

All told, students who participate in woodworking all year will have taken enough CITF coursework to earn pre-apprenticeship level 3 status, Ketah said. They will have soft skills and building skills needed to qualify for an apprenticeship with their local carpenters union – in this case, United Brotherhood of Carpenters Local 1503 of Oregon City.

A few of Ketah’s former students already are making their way into the industry.

“The results are that we have had students in our partnership with the (Pacific Northwest Carpenters Institute) entered into an apprenticeship,” he said. “We had a visit from a student last month who graduated last year and he told us about it. He got some credit for this stuff here and for doing the PNCI construction camp. He got pre-apprenticeship credits that put him as a second-term apprentice.”

Someone following that same path, Ketah said, could earn as much as $80,000 annually after reaching journeyman status at age 22.

“We’re able to tell that story to our students as we recruit them to come into our program,” he said.

The partnership with Walsh Construction came about through Portland Public Schools‘ new Partner Connect initiative.

“We’ve talked before about increasing participation in the workforce and getting more people into construction at all levels,” Walsh Construction senior project manager Afton Walsh said. “Being involved in the high schools is a really critical piece of that, and especially being in a high school like this, which is very much targeted at getting people some fundamental blocks to enter the trades or enter into construction with.”

Walsh Construction volunteers spent three months during the 2018-19 school year mentoring and advising Ketah’s students as well as brainstorming new ways to improve the construction career program at Benson. One of those volunteers was project engineer Courtney Mitchell.

“If you look at the way I grew up, I was not exposed to any of this,” she said. “It was an accident how I even ended up in construction. And I want these guys, especially at the high school level, to know that this is something that is attainable. You don’t have to go to a four-year college, and if you get into this field anything is possible. I feel like I have been a result of that.”

Benson senior Dinah Sosa-Martinez does not have family in the construction industry; instead, she learned about career possibilities from friends and now intends to apply to be an apprentice carpenter when she graduates at the end of this school year.

“Originally when I came here I wanted to (pursue) the health occupation major,” she said. “But I had friends in construction and saw what they were making. They have the creative freedom to do what they enjoy and they are in the construction industry.”

Sosa-Martinez enrolled in the woodworking course last year and worked with classmates to build a tiny house. That work helped her land a summer internship with Skanska USA Builders; she spent eight weeks learning the ropes on jobsites.

“This program means so much to me because now I know I want to be a carpenter, and that can help pay for my college and then (I can) become a project manager,” she said. “And honestly I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for this program; I would have went to Jefferson instead as my home school.”

Hearing such messages from peers “can be really influential,” Benson construction technology instructor Luke Hotchkiss said.

“We’re helping them understand the different paths to careers,” Ketah said. “We’re project-based here, but I have just as much of a boss mindset as I have a teacher mindset. Jobsite culture is taught here – soft skills and professional expectations.”

Much of students’ resistance to the idea of a construction career comes from their parents, according to Hotchkiss.

“A lot of kids’ parents want them to go to college, and we’re still fighting that struggle,” he said. “But the kids who want to come here and take advantage of the opportunities, the sky is the limit. They can go into the carpenters’ or laborers’ union and get a head start in life, and we see a lot more response to that recently.”

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