The newly appointed president of the Northwest College of Construction (NWCOC) has officially held the position for only a few months, but she is already tackling some lofty challenges.

Laurie Emery led the school with an interim tag for nearly a year before it was removed in April. She joined the NWCOC in 2007, starting as an administrative assistant and eventually gaining dual roles as director of human resources and director of operations.

For the time being, Emery’s main task is to keep the school’s programming running through the COVID-19 crisis, which has forced the NWCOC to adopt a new way of delivering curriculum.

“Like everyone else, we were surprised by how quickly we went from normal operations to sending all the staff to work from home and canceling classes,” she said.

Administrators closed the Northeast Portland campus in mid-March, but managed to get online classes up and running within two weeks. That was “no small feat,” Emery said.

The dramatic shift in operational methods has presented obstacles but overall is going smoothly, Emery said. Hands-on training has resumed on a smaller scale with social distancing guidelines in place; apprentices are set to complete their coursework for the spring term this summer.

With job fairs and high school visits canceled, recruiting efforts have gone virtual. Online informational sessions are drawing about as many prospective students as in-person ones, and the school has created a virtual tour of the building to showcase the different labs used for craft education.

The college’s shift to remote learning was done in haste, but the online coursework has drawn interest – and requests are being for NWCOC to create customized training courses. The school is weighing whether to continue with a hybrid (online and in-person) format in the upcoming fall term and beyond.

“We have talked for years about doing some kind of online training, but it seemed like too much and so we never pursued it,” Emery said. “(The pandemic) kind of forced our hand, but it’s not a bad thing.”

Moving forward, one of Emery’s long-term goals is to focus on retention of apprentices. Attrition is an issue in all apprenticeship programs, she said, and it’s vital to provide support for apprentices who are facing obstacles that might derail their training.

One of the most important things for apprentices to understand, Emery said, is that their apprenticeship coordinator is their advocate. She wants to ensure that the college’s staff spends time developing relationships with students so that when there is a hardship, they will feel comfortable reaching out for help and utilizing resources available to them – whether for child care, transportation or other issues.

“It’s not just about getting (apprentices) in the door, but it’s about keeping them through graduation,” Emery said. “I want them to be able to see that four years is going to go by no matter what, and even though there might be hardships along the way, where do you want to be in four years? I want our students to be able to reach that goal and succeed.”

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Sarah Moreno isn’t working much these days.

The heavy equipment operator has three kids – ages 12, 13 and 16 – at home. They would normally be in school, but with schools closed, Moreno is often home with them.

Moreno still goes to work whenever she can. Last week, she worked only one day – at a demolition site with contaminated soils at Portland International Airport for McDonald Excavating.

“You don’t want to use your kids as an excuse to miss work, especially me being a mom in the trades,” she said.

Moreno, an apprentice with Operating Engineers Local 701, moved to Portland from Southern California to take Constructing Hope‘s pre-apprenticeship program. Her kids can stay home by themselves, she said.

“They’re old enough now that I don’t really have to worry about it too much,” she said. “I’m grateful for that, because to find child care, it’s kind of hard.”

Many construction workers are juggling work and children during the COVID-19 pandemic. In recent weeks, contractors and subcontractors also have come to realize that their workers’ child care issues are increasingly their problem.

“I didn’t realize how many of our workers are single parents,” Maurice Rahming, co-owner of O’Neill Construction Group, said last week during an industry conference call that was organized by the Professional Business Development Group. “So with the schools being shut down, they’re responsible for taking care of their kids at home. They have to take the time off because they don’t have anyone else to take care of their kids.”

It can be difficult in the best of times for construction workers to find available and affordable child care. Before the coronavirus began to spread, labor groups in the Portland area were working to provide child care to pre-apprentices entering the industry. The Columbia Pacific Building Trades Council and allies were pitching a program called Labor’s Littles. Willy Myers, executive secretary of the labor council, said the group had asked Metro and other local governments to support the child care effort.

“We struggled to get public funding,” he said.

The COVID-19 pandemic has sharpened those concerns. Schools and day care facilities are closed, and many families are practicing social distancing from grandparents and other family members who would otherwise help out.

Child care is especially needed for beginning workers on labor’s lowest rungs.

“It’s more expensive than people can afford until they reach a certain level,” Myers said.

Meanwhile, the shutdowns of schools and day care facilities have been particularly difficult on women workers, minorities and those with lower incomes. Constructing Hope, a Portland nonprofit that operates a pre-apprenticeship program geared to serve formerly incarcerated people, women and people of color, is speaking with funders to reallocate money for child care.

“There’s really no availability for day care right now,” said Bobby Hamilton, case manager for Constructing Hope.

The pandemic could also slow the entry of new workers into the construction industry.

Anthony Williams, a heavy-machine operator apprentice at the Northwest College of Construction and a recent graduate of Constructing Hope, said he had to take time off from his part-time job at Subway to care for two of his children who live with him, a 7-year-old son and a 5-year-old daughter.

“My child care facility closed,” he said. “I wasn’t able to work for about two weeks until I figured it out. I was forced to try to find someone who does in-home care.”

Williams began taking online classes earlier this month at the Northwest College of Construction. The move to online education has slowed what’s usually a four-year process to become a journeyman.

“Things are moving real slow as far as classes go,” he said.

Williams, 41, entered construction after attempts to have a white-collar business career ran aground because of a 15-year-old felony on his record.

“Construction is the only thing you can go through that you can make a living wage,” he said.

Construction firms in fact have seen some employees come back to work after they were unsuccessful in obtaining unemployment benefits, said Robert Camarillo, executive secretary of the Oregon State Building and Construction Trades Council.

“We saw a lot of folks ask for voluntary layoffs early on,” he said. “What I’m hearing now, the reports that I’m getting, is a lot of those people that asked for those layoffs realized the unemployment system wasn’t there yet, wasn’t ready to be the safety net they were hoping. And so a lot of them have started to return to work.”

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A cluster of tiny homes in North Portland that serves as a shelter for homeless women has been moved to a new location thanks to the efforts of a small army of volunteers and the support of the local building industry.

Kenton Women’s Village opened in summer 2017 as a one-year pilot project on a city-owned lot in the Kenton neighborhood. The idea was to create a transitional housing community for women experiencing homelessness without the constraints of a traditional overnight shelter environment, where women’s safety can be at risk and a sense of permanence is lacking.

“This is more individual; it’s their home,” said Deborah Kamprath, development project manager with Catholic Charities, which operates the shelter. “They have privacy and a place to put their stuff, where with shelters you don’t have that. You’re just going in for the night and leaving in the morning.”

The original village had capacity for 14 residents, all whom were housed in small sleeping “pods” designed and built by the Partners On Dwelling Initiative, which included Portland State University’s Center for Public Interest Design and several local architecture firms. The goal was to create a replicable model for tackling the homelessness issue by building small, inexpensive housing units that would be easy to mass-produce and transport.

The village proved to be a success, and when the yearlong trial period expired the Kenton Neighborhood Association voted overwhelmingly to allow it to stay in operation. Imminent construction of a low-income housing development on the village site meant a new location had to be found, and a suitable one on another city-owned parcel just a few hundred feet away was chosen.

LMC Construction has spearheaded the effort to prepare the new site, an approximately three-quarters-acre parcel at 2420 N. Columbia Blvd., for the move. The firm has been working pro bono since this past fall to build concrete pads for the housing pods, grade and landscape the site, and install electrical, plumbing and sanitary service.

The project has come to fruition thanks to the help of multiple contractors, suppliers, design and engineering firms who have donated labor and materials to make the move happen. Scott Kotlarz, a superintendent with LMC Construction, said he has received overwhelming support from firms that are eager to support the effort.

“I don’t have submittals (and) I don’t have contracts with anybody, but everybody has stepped up,” he said. “They’re here no matter when I call. It’s been great.”

The Northwest College of Construction (NWCOC) has been instrumental in supplying labor, Kotlarz said. Students have helped with multiple scopes of work, including concrete, framing, site work and landscaping. Late last month, students in a Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center pre-apprenticeship program, led by a NWCOC instructor, helped put the finishing touches on the new site by framing a trash enclosure, laying hog’s fuel paths and building decks.

Residents are expected to return this week to the village, which will reopen with six of the original pods, one donated tiny house and two donated temporary tiny homes on wheels. A second phase of work will bring the site up to its capacity of 20 pods; volunteers last week kicked off an effort to build additional units.

A total of 21 commercial and residential builders have committed to participation in the Pod Build Challenge, during which they will each construct a unit over the course of the next couple of months before installation on site in April. The units will be installed with the help of Andersen Construction. The remaining eight units will be installed at a second village location later this year.

For Kotlarz, whose work on the project will be wrapping up with the completion of this phase, it has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of his nearly 40-year career.

“It’s been neat to see this process develop as it goes,” he said. “It’s not so much a job; it’s more an honor to be present and be a part of this.”

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Last week was National Apprentice Week in the United States, and it’s an apt recognition of those just starting out in the construction trades.

But how do people get into the trades in the first place?

In recent years, it’s been a haphazard process that normally differs from trade to trade. One common denominator, however, is that the widespread abandonment of promoting the trades as a career option by public schools has, in part, been a key contributor to the ongoing shortage of skilled trades men and women in the industry.

“I’d definitely say there is a lot of work to be done,” said Katrina Cloud, the director of student services and apprenticeships at the Northwest College of Construction in Portland. “A lot of parents help guide that as well, so really the first one who has an opportunity to have an impact is the parent and also the teacher and counselor. So if they know about those options, that this is another viable option without any debt that is incurred to the apprentice.”

The NWCC recently hired new Director of Education James Reyes in part to forge stronger ties between the building industry and the educational sector. Reyes said the proportion of apprentices with college experience or even a degree is much higher than many would assume. He attributes this to the single-minded focus of educators on the college track, largely at the expense of other options for kids who may not be well-suited for an academic environment.

“The average age of apprenticeships is much higher than you think it is,” Reyes said. “There’s a lot who go to community college or maybe university, and they’ll get so far in debt and then they figure out we’re around and they apply. And they realize they’re making more money than they can with a degree. And they don’t find that right out of high school with the college track.”

To change that, Reyes and the NWCC are busy forging different types of programming at school districts throughout the metro region. In addition, the college works with pre-apprenticeship programs and non-profit groups to draw new apprentices.

“We align with a number of pre-apprenticeship programs,” said Reyes, who formerly was the lead instructor and trainer at Constructing Hope, a Portland-based pre-apprenticeship program that specializes in working with low-income and formerly incarcerated individuals. “We have schools that interface with our facilities, K-12, and some of them do have vocational training programs.”

In addition to hosting pre-apprenticeship classes for Constructing Hope and Oregon Tradeswomen, the NWCC hosts the Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center‘s pre-apprenticeship students and provides instruction. The college also works hand-in-hand with Portland Youth Builders to assist that group with its mission of educating at-risk youth about the possibilities existing in construction and technology.

Reyes said the college also is trying to build stronger ties with Portland Public Schools to bring more vocational training to the state’s largest school district.

The college also jointly offers CTE education in Vancouver’s Evergreen Public Schools district, while bringing high school students from around the metro area directly to the college for instruction through externships.

“They can go into a registered apprenticeship,” Reyes said. “That’s key. You can go to work anywhere, for any company.  That doesn’t mean it has an apprenticeship program, but the goal is to get a skilled labor force out there.”

Exacerbating the industry’s problems in attracting talent is an aging workforce that still is reeling from the loss of hundreds of thousands of skilled workers in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Overall construction job numbers still have not returned to the glory days of 12 years ago, leaving an ever-increasing proportion of trades workers on the verge of retirement.

“If you look at the stats, in ‘99 about 10 to 12 percent of skilled trades workers were getting retired,” Reyes said. “And now it’s about 25 percent. You have had a doubling as they’ve gotten behind the eight-ball where they weren’t bringing in apprentices for the long term.”

The industry is increasingly looking to women and minority candidates to fill the gap, and with increasing success. This is boosted by public sector hiring regulations that help ensure those candidates find work.

It’s working, Cloud said, boosted by both traditional and social media advertising.

“Most of our programs these days are between 30 and 50 percent minorities,” she said. “We’re doing some really unique things. Everybody is doing social media these days, and we’re trying to relate to millennials, folks of all age ranges. We’re also looking at ways to get people connected with contractors right away; how do we make the needs of both meet?”

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It’s difficult to find a more passionate advocate for women in the construction trades than Rachel Stark.

“I think some women, they don’t think of it as an option, but they should try it out,” said Stark, a journey level carpenter with R&H Construction. “There are literally so many trades, there’s bound to be one that fits you; there are hundreds of different things you can do in the trades and there has to be niche for everyone.”

Stark knows of what she speaks when it comes to construction, having earned journey status a little over a year ago only after an uphill battle that left her lamenting the lack of entry points to the field for high school students.

“From when I was a little kid I knew I liked to draw and work with my hands,” she said.

After graduating from high school in 2002, she looked around for options and saw only a college-or-bust path which eventually led her to completing a degree at the Art Institute of Portland.

Upon graduation, Stark found that having a degree meant little when it did not lead to a sustainable job and career path.

“I got my degree and shortly after that I got a job working as a commercial painter for the season when I graduated,” she said. “I liked it, but it wasn’t really going anywhere.”

A job making wooden bicycle frames followed. And while it wasn’t the career breakthrough she was looking for, Stark also found inspiration in woodworking.

“I worked there for a few years and it was becoming a little stagnant,” she said. “So I tried to think about building on the skills I already had.”

Discovering hundreds of open positions in the skilled trades while browsing Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries website led Stark to pursue a career in carpentry.

She signed up for an apprenticeship through the Northwest College of Construction in 2013 and quickly found she had a knack for the work. The academic aspect was no problem for her, and despite being one of the few women in the field, Stark held her own and charged through her first year as an apprentice.

“I’ve always worked with a lot of males, so that wasn’t really an issue for me,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ve been lucky, but I’ve been surrounded by good people and I feel like if people want to hear a real struggle, the female bosses that I have started in the late 80s and 90s, and it’s crazy the stuff they went through.

Jason Ramey was Stark’s lead carpentry instructor during her apprenticeship. He’s also the client services coordinator for R&H Construction and Stark’s direct supervisor. Ramey said Stark’s experience mirrors lessons he himself learned years ago.

“Teaching for as long as I have, I’ve seen people come in as old as 55,” he said. “I had an individual come through that had a master’s in biology, and he was throwing his hands up in the air about if he wanted to get a PhD. And he decided to do construction instead. He basically realized that when you do this, you get paid to learn, and I don’t think you get that in college.”

Personal circumstances led Stark to withdraw from the program for a year, but she rejoined the program and after her second year was able to double up her course load and finish up her apprenticeship in the summer of 2017, right on line with her original four-year timetable.

“There were definitely days that were long,” she said. “And then you go to class at night, dog tired and wet from working outside, but oh yeah, it felt killer, probably as good as getting my bachelor’s.”

These days, their daily routine takes Stark and Ramey across the metro area dealing with warranty items and other small jobs. Or, they could wind up for an extended period of time working on larger projects. It all depends. Either way, Ramey said, Stark has more than proven her worth to the company, both on the job site and as an ambassador for the company and women in trades.

“R&H has several outreach programs,” Ramey said. “And the college has used her a couple of times. She is very enthusiastic about construction and doing the work, and she’s very good at spreading the energy and getting other people involved.”

Katrina Cloud, the director of student services and apprenticeship at NWCC, said Stark made a video during her time as an apprentice that demonstrates her level of enthusiasm and willingness to go the extra mile to help a colleague.

“She will have a great career in the industry,” Cloud said. “And she’s definitely someone who wants to give back. There are just certain people that stick out.”

Cloud recounted an encounter Stark had with another apprentice who was struggling to discover why her efforts to waterproof a project were failing.

“It turned out that they had a wet cloth in their pocket,” she said. “So just for Rachel to take the time to help another apprentice that’s struggling is pretty fantastic.”

As her experience grew, Stark started branching out and participating in company outreach events involving young people. She found she had a knack for connecting with other women as she spread the word about opportunities in the trades.

“We’ve done the Women in Trades career fair for a few years and in a few weeks we’re going to Canby High School to do a presentation with a few other folks,” she said. “It’s just to encourage them that it’s an option. We went last year and they asked us to come back. I also talk to my girlfriends and encourage them, and I even got one into an apprenticeship this year.”

It comes down to frustratingly stubborn traditions and gender roles, she added.

“I think some women, they don’t think of it as an option,” she said. “But they should try it out. There are hundreds of different things you can do in the trades, and there has to be niche for everyone.”

Ev Galloni is a vice president at R&H Construction and a veteran tradeswoman herself. She said Stark’s creativity and passion for her work meant that she quickly became a valuable member of the company’s team.

“My ears perk up when a woman is out in the field,” Galloni said. “Luckily we have a few women here, and my interest was sparked then. I love to hear it when I hear great responses from superintendents about how she’s carrying her weight and learning. I met her at events, and her attitude is just infectious.”

Galloni said Stark absolutely has excellent management potential should she choose to move in that direction.

“It’s like this woman needs to go someone here, and we need to focus on her and help her get where she wants to go,” Galloni said. “Someone with that creative of a mind needs to be constantly challenged, and she fits that bill absolutely.”

Ramey and others who work with her daily mirror that sentiment.

“If I was going to say anything it’s that Rachel is my model employee,” Ramey said. “She stepped up to the plate when my previous foreman left, and she’s always going to learn new stuff and better herself when she’s working. She’s just a great individual to work with and has a great work ethic.”

The post Advocating for women in the trades appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

The longstanding shortage of skilled construction labor is forcing companies’ leaders to take more concrete action to remedy the situation.

A generational lack of workers can be attributed to aftereffects of the Great Recession, when hundreds of thousands of them left the industry in response to a lack of steady work. Now, however, construction is booming in the Pacific Northwest and other markets, and the total number of workers still has not reached the figures seen over a decade ago.

“It is has always been a concern to find enough skilled trades workers,” Kirby Nagelhout Construction President Jeff Deswert said. “Recently, if you look at the average age of our tradespeople, it’s not sustainable right now. What we’ll see is due to the efforts toward technology and higher education and the results of the recession, where nobody was entering the trades then. We’re going to find ourselves in a real pickle in the times ahead, not that we’re not in a pickle now.”

Deswert and his Bend-based company are taking action. Together with Central Oregon contractor Sunwest Builders, Kirby Nagelhout Construction is spearheading a public-private partnership with Central Oregon Community College to offer a to prospective construction workers.

Operating much like pre-apprenticeship programs in the Portland-metro area, the COCC course offers students an introduction to construction – instruction of both technical skills and soft skills.

“It definitely started with the contractors coming to us,” said Rachel Knox, the continuing education program manager at COCC. “For a long time, we wanted to do something here in Central Oregon, but we really didn’t know where to start. So when it landed in my lap I made a commitment that we would start this fall. It’s not a perfect start, but we’re just getting going.”

The non-credit course started last month and will run for six weeks. Classes are held two nights a week in workshop space provided by the Bend college. The first 14 students are being taught the very basics of the industry, including how to read blueprints, carry out construction math, prevent injuries, use tools and communicate clearly. The basic expectations of the industry, such as punctuality, are laid out for students.

Deswert and Steve Buettner, owner of Sunwest Builders, are lead instructors for the course. They are joined by tradespeople from other partners, including Griffin Construction, Hayden Homes, Northwest Framing Systems, Miller Lumber, Skanska USA, the Central Oregon Builders Association and CS Construction.

These firms also helped set up the Central Oregon Community College Construction and Trades Scholarship Fund to support students pursuing a career in construction. The COBA was especially helpful, contributing $50,000 toward the cause, Knox said.

The program is based on National Center for Construction Education and Research curriculum, which is also used by Portland’s Northwest College of Construction for its apprenticeship programs.

“We’re trying to address the most painful skills gap first,” Knox said. “We’re starting at the absolute basics, and really there are so many pain points. Some of it is technical skill for sure, and some of it is the soft skills like how do we get them to ask (instructors) intelligent questions and build confidence.”

The program will be more refined by next year, Knox said.

“We’re just at the launch right now,” she said.

The industry’s workforce situation, Deswert said, is not just a product of the recession, but also the public education system’s long-standing devaluation of skilled trades. Deswert acquired in high school valuable welding skills that allowed him to find employment immediately after graduation. From there, he worked his way through the ranks to eventually become a company president. That path barely exists anymore, he said. Yet there are signs of change.

“We’re seeing that the high school levels are starting to put CTE programs back in place where they were really missing for the last couple of decades,” Deswert said. “The education community has heard our cry loud and clear and I think we’re seeing that.”

The COCC program, he added, is at least in part a response to that.

“We’re wanting to add on to what the school systems are coming back to,” he said. “It’s best for kids who learn hands-on, and the school systems are seeing that.”

The students are now approaching the end of the program, which had them construct two small structures in a college workshop space. The course’s classroom portion takes up a minority of students’ time.

“It has to be very hands-on,” Knox said. “If we’re in the classroom for more than about an hour and a half we’re going to lose these folks; they gravitate toward construction because they don’t want to be in the classroom.”

Another part of the issue, Knox added, is that it is really a community-wide discussion.

“We are talking to the high schools and their CTE programs, all the alternative programs, the GED programs,” she said. “And if I’m doing this, I’m holding a pipe and I don’t have a pipeline. So what we’re more interested in is how … we find ways to link up to other options in Central Oregon.”

The post Bringing construction instruction back to school appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Though the shortage of skilled workers is continuing to plague the construction industry, the number of potential solutions is expanding.

One is to reach the next generation of youngsters before they’re old enough to safely use power tools, let alone operate heavy machinery.

“I think with the good intention of making college accessible to everybody we unintentionally made trades appear as a lesser path,” said John Hurd, talent acquisition manager for Lakeside Industries, a heavy highway construction firm with asphalt plants in Portland, Hillsboro and Washington state.

A profound culture change is needed, Hurd believes, before the trades are again considered a viable route to building a successful career.

“When you build this concept that you’re only successful if you go to college, even if you’re successful and work at what is traditionally known as a blue-collar trade, maybe you don’t feel proud about it and maybe you don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “That’s why I get back to the fact that we need to give all students options in what they want to do. We need to stop telling them what success is and give them the tools to decide what success is for them.”

That belief is driving an award-winning program . Leaders of the aim to bring educators from across the state to the metro area to meet with contractors, apprenticeship program officials and others in construction.

2018 marks the third year for the program, which recently wrapped up a two week long camp for approximately 75 teachers. They visited jobsites, checked out business offices and spent time with a construction contractor. Participants also toured both union and open-shop apprenticeship program facilities, community colleges and technical universities. The Educator Externship is run in partnership with the Willamette Education Service District (WESD) and gives participants professional development or graduate-level credits.

While educators gain a better picture of the career possibilities available to their students, the challenge is to convey that information effectively.

“Most of the stuff we’re able to do is get kids to trade fairs,” Woodburn High School teacher Mario Garza said. “But we’d like to bring more of that stuff on campus. It’s important for us to expose them to the different pathways that are available so they can make good choices for themselves.”

That’s where AGC and the WESD are looking to fill a gap.

“The reality is if you go to school and want to be a teacher, your pathway is marked,” said Cherie Clark, WESD manager of careers and college. “It’s the pathway they know.”

The lack of exposure to trades in public schools is so profound that even ancillary areas of construction often are overlooked.

“When kids think of construction they don’t think of advertising, accounting, project management or safety,” Clark said. “So what we tried to do with construction is to open that up so they could see the back office part of it.”

The Externship started July 16, at the Pacific Northwest College of Construction before teachers split into groups and headed to the Pacific Northwest Carpenters Institute and the Sheet Metal Institute. P&C Construction President Steve Malany and safety coordinator Rick McMurry then led tours of an R&H Construction project site, an Andersen Construction site and a Bremik Construction site. Yorke & Curtis and Lease Crutcher Lewis business offices were shown, and educators visited specialty contractors as well as highway and roadway contractors. Program participants also stopped at the NECA-IBEW Electrical Training Center, Oregon Tradeswomen Inc. and Andersen Construction offices, as well as colleges that host technical training programs.

McMurry is convinced the industry needs to reach young people well before they finish high school. To that end, he’s taken part in the Educator Externship the past two years and found it a great way of making connections.

“This is where we think the real money is,” he said. “If we can get to the influencers of our kids, teachers and guidance counselors, people who are going to steer that decision a little bit in college or career and open their eyes to the fact there is all this stuff out there. There are lots of individual efforts, but this one seems so far to be the most coordinated effort with the target audience in the room. You don’t get the focused opportunity like this.”

Why is it so important to reach kids before they’re old enough to drive? Because if it doesn’t happen then, Hurd said, there will be a lot of baggage to overcome. That alone has led to the average starting age for an apprentice to rise appreciably.

“It starts fairly young,” Hurd said. “I remember growing up, it was about the fourth grade when I was starting to be told that I was either going to be getting a four-year degree or I was going to be flipping burgers.”

Those kinds of messages sink in, he added. But there’s no reason not to apply the same principles to the trades, he said.

“Our best options right now from what I’ve found is we’ve been doing grassroots efforts,” he said. “We’ve been doing teacher externships like this. We visit schools where we’re going in around the fourth grade and setting up field trips and talking to students about what it is, who we are and what it means to the community.”

Hurd’s entire job revolves around recruiting new talent. In that role he speaks with roughly 6,000 to 10,000 high school students annually and hosts more than 1,000 others at Lakeside Industries’ Northwest Portland asphalt plant.

Others in the industry agree that outreach is needed early on.

“I’ve been saying for the longest time the most important work happens in K-12,” said Bob Strader, president of the Northwest College of Construction. “The more exposure they get to all walks of life the better prepared they will be when they walk through the doors here.”

This year’s Educator Externship cohort is roughly three times the size of last year’s.

“It’s big when they tell you, ‘I didn’t know anything about this stuff,’” Garza said. “It makes you think: Why aren’t we talking more about this in K-12? Why just when they’re juniors or seniors in high school?”

A recent commissioned by Metro and the city of Portland arrived at largely the same conclusions in regard to bringing more women and minorities into the skilled trades.

“I think schools is where it has to happen,” said an apprenticeship coordinator quoted in the report. “The counselors and the teachers have to be educated to know the options available and what it takes to get into those programs. Then they can identify those individuals and direct them accordingly based off their interests.”

That’s exactly right, Hurd said.

“We need to help people understand and be able to follow their own desires,” he said. “That’s part of why we’re in the situation we’re in now, where a college degree has never cost more and it’s never been worth less in the marketplace.”

The post Workforce development starts early appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Workforce development has become more than a topic of discussion among contractors; it’s now a mantra.

“Everyone is looking for skilled labor and not finding it,” Northwest College of Construction President Bob Strader said.

But nonprofit and Rosemary Anderson High School have partnered to make a difference in the situation. They are offering a pre-apprenticeship course to young people ages 17-25, most of whom are minorities and come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Work Opportunity Training classes kicked off at the Northwest College of Construction in Northeast Portland a month ago, and the 12-week program will conclude June 21. At that point, graduates will be able to start work or continue their training in a formal apprenticeship program.

And even though the program is just starting, contractors from throughout the Portland-metro area already are expressing interest in connecting with these first 10 students, according to Torre Sathrum, a POIC instructor.

“We’ve been flooded with inquiries,” he said. “We’ve been overwhelmed.”

For 26-year-old Benson Polytechnic High School graduate and program participant Trayvayae Cason, there is little time to waste.

“I’m the old one in here,” he said with a laugh. “I want to become an electrician. So, first, I’m going to start off here and work my way into a union and their apprenticeship program if I can. I could also do carpentry or HVAC; whatever I choose in the next eight weeks or so, I can definitely see myself doing it.”

Cason said many of the men in his extended family have taken jobs in skilled trades. And at Benson, known for its construction course and other vocational programs, he developed an interest in trades that survived having two children and a stint in California before a return to the Northwest.

“When you enjoy learning it’s the best thing to do,” he said. “You can learn how to build your own house or whatever structure you want. It’s always good to have something to pass on to your children.”

A training program evolves

The POIC is an affiliate of the national , which was founded in 1958 in Philadelphia to help young black men and women obtain employment training and work opportunities. The Portland affiliate was established for the same purpose a decade later, and currently serves more than 700 students and work trainees each year.

Three programs are offered to young adults (up to age 25) in Portland: Rosemary Anderson High School, for those in need of a diploma; POIC Work Opportunity Training, for those in need of career training; and Rosemary Anderson Transitions, for graduates in post-secondary education in need of mentorship and support.

“Our focus has shifted over the years toward youth,” said Lanya McClintock, director of employment and training for the POIC. “We work with students who have not had success in traditional high schools. And we’ve always had a focus on employment and training.”

In addition to the new pre-apprentice program, the POIC also offers family services, young parent education, street-level gang outreach and other initiatives geared to help people in poverty.

“For a while we have wanted to train youth for a specific career path,” McClintock said. “There’s such a need in Portland to fill these construction jobs, and especially with young people of color and women, that’s really where this came from. The wages and opportunities are so great in the trades and construction, it’s really a pathway out of poverty.”

Expectations and experience

On a recent Monday, the 10 students enrolled in the program filed back into their college classrooms after an early-morning visit to a new POIC space. Remodeling is under way in the former home of a Gresham Police gang outreach office at the corner of Southeast 187th Avenue and Stark Street. Located in the heart of Rockwood, in east Multnomah County, the new space will give the POIC a seat in the Rockwood Rising development poised to rise soon. It’s a central location that likely will attract additional job seekers.

But for now, it’s a first glimpse for the 10 students at what construction is like in the real world.

Sathrum said students, who must pass an application process, must be at work or in the classroom by 6:30 a.m. each morning. Attendance is compulsory, just like an employer would demand. And students are expected to adhere to industry safety standards and regulations while they work.

Each student gets a paycheck during the entirety of the 12-week course, along with the skills needed to step into an apprenticeship either via another training course or with a company looking to fill a labor gap.

“It’s like a real job for them,” Sathrum said.

Sathrum knows full well the value of pre-apprentice and apprentice programs like those offered at the Northwest College of Construction. He’s worked as a general contractor as well as an instructor. And in the latter role, he said, he has often seen students quickly succeed in the construction after completing their training.

“A lot of those guys come back here and the first year they’re driving new trucks,” Sathrum said. “And then the second year they’re looking to buy a house.”

Opportunities are out there

There is an increasing emphasis on getting minorities and women into apprenticeship programs and jobs in the field, in part because of increasingly rigorous public project workforce requirements.

For instance, subcontractors working on the ongoing Multnomah County Courthouse project are required to employ at least 20 percent minorities and 6 percent women on the job. And that’s among the journeymen working; for apprentices, the numbers are even more aggressive: at least 20 percent minorities and 25 percent women, said Justin Paterson, a project manager with Hoffman Construction.

“There’s this message out there and that is: ‘Get out there and get women and people of color into trades,’” he said. “It’s a big systemic issue we’re not going to solve completely on this project. But more and more, people recognize it. Public agencies like the county are pushing for it, and we’ll push the needle on projects like this.”

Strader agreed, saying construction in the public sector is what is driving students to the Northwest College of Construction.

“The demand generator is the U.S. government,” he said. “A third of everything that’s built is owned by the public, and the public agencies require prevailing wage; they require 20 or more percent of the hours on a job be dedicated to training. That’s what creates the demand, and that’s what has me in business.”

Some contractors working entirely in the private sector still send students to training schools like the PNCC. But that represents a “small minority” of the industry, Strader said.

“There are contractors that don’t perform public works that still send their students,” he said. “But it’s based on getting their people skilled up, not based on public works.”

Outreach to young adults

Money for POIC’s pre-apprentice program comes from Worksystems, a Portland nonprofit that focuses on workforce development. Worksystems receives money from local, state and federal governments and distributes it to workforce development programs around the region.

Further, Metro and Mortenson Construction have chipped in to help develop the program so that it would be able to complete the Bureau of Labor and Industries pre-apprenticeship program certification process.

This has allowed POIC students like 23-year-old Jennifer Geisler, who commutes daily from Kelso, Washington, a chance to achieve something meaningful.

“I enjoy it so far, it’s really interesting being the only girl here,” she said. “The first day it was (intimidating), but after I got to know everyone I was like, ‘This is fine.’”

Unlike her twin sister, Geisler added, she had to navigate through a number of life obstacles before finding herself responding earlier this year to an online ad for the POIC program.

“I’ve had a few bumps in the road,” she said, admitting to a yearlong stint in a juvenile facility as a teenager. “Now I’m just trying really hard to find somewhere that I’m comfortable. I’m trying to stick with something. I don’t even care what type of job it is, if it’s going to make me money and pay my bills I’m going to stick with it.”

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A Portland community-impact organization will use a monetary award from Bank of America to expand a training program used to help students enter careers in construction and manufacturing.

Earlier this month, All Hands Raised was selected as the recipient of Bank of America’s 2018 Neighborhood Builder award. Each year, the bank donates $200,000 to a Portland nonprofit geared to provide leadership training.

All Hands Raised aims to support children in Multnomah County. The program focuses on the educational experience, including kindergarten transition, K-12 attendance, ninth grade transition, and post-secondary access and completion. Also, funding is provided to high schools as part of the Pathways to Construction and Manufacturing Careers program.

All Hands Raised will use a portion of the money from the award to build upon the Pathways to Construction and Manufacturing Careers program partnership and collectively serve nearly 12,000 students. The initial partnership with two schools, Reynolds High and Centennial High, will expand to incorporate four more schools with active construction trades and manufacturing programs. The program also will receive support from the Pacific Northwest Carpenters Institute.

Jeanie-Marie Price, vice president of communication for All Hands Raised, sees the money from the award as an investment.

“Over the next 10 years, 30,000-plus construction and manufacturing jobs will be added to our region and our community,” Price said. “With this significant grant from Bank of America, All Hands Raised will focus on ensuring our high school students are aware of the opportunities that exist in the trades, connecting high schools, community colleges and increasing overall awareness of these high-wage jobs.”

Dan Ryan, CEO of All Hands Raised, recognizes that there are gaps in the pathways to those careers. His organization seeks to fill those gaps, partnering with teachers and local employers to inform students of options both in direct trades training and continuing education at community or traditional four-year colleges.

“This well-timed investment by Bank of America will allow our local partnership to develop a stronger awareness among educators of the living-wage job opportunities in our community,” Ryan said, “and will truly be a game-changer for our local high school students and their families.”

Since inception of Bank of America’s Neighborhood Builders program in 2004, it has invested more than $220 million in training across the country.

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When it comes to providing entry-level training for people looking to step into careers in the construction trades, Montie Boyer knows there’s no substitute for real-world experience.

That’s why Boyer, the manager of craft instruction at the Northwest College of Construction, has made it a habit to try to find projects for the school’s students that provide hands-on experience while giving back to the community.

The most recent of those efforts is under way at Pleasant Valley Elementary School in Gresham, where the construction college’s students are building a boardwalk and trail system so that students from the grade school and people from the community can easily access a 10-acre site called Wildside.

Since 2007, Pleasant Valley science teacher David Scharfenberg has been working with his sixth-grade students to turn the field from a tangle of blackberry brambles and weeds into a place that is equal parts outdoor laboratory and forest restoration project.

At least twice a week, students leave the classroom and head out into Wildside to conduct experiments. Scharfenberg and his students have planted 4,200 trees and conducted studies to monitor their health. They’ve studied, identified and removed invasive species and worked to re-establish native plants in the area.

The work to transform the site has offered other lessons outside the world of science. With a limited budget to improve Wildside, Scharfenberg’s students have learned to write grants. Those efforts have resulted in drumming up about $225,000 from agencies that include Metro, the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board and the Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District.

They’ve also learned about the intricacies of developing and building in sensitive natural areas as they’ve started to use some of the grant money to install a boardwalk and trail system that will allow others to visit – and learn – about Wildside.

“We had to go through a huge permitting process,” Scharfenberg said. “We discovered it doesn’t matter if you’re a for-profit developer or a nonprofit – you still have to pay for fees.”

In order to stretch the grant money they received for the boardwalk project, Scharfenberg and his students had to get creative. Working with a Tualatin-based company called Western Wood Structures, they found a basic design and a pin-pile foundation product called Diamond Pier that minimized the amount of concrete that would have to be poured to create a foundation for the boardwalk.

The teacher and his students also needed to minimize the cost to actually build the boardwalk and trail system. Scharfenberg had been in talks with ACE Academy to have students in the school build the boardwalk. But the school ended up closing before the projects reached the construction phase. A plan to work with pre-apprentices from Oregon Tradeswomen Inc. also fell through because the school was too far outside of OTI‘s coverage area.

Then Scharfenberg remembered the building he’d passed by near Northeast 82nd Avenue more than once – the Northwest College of Construction. He figured someone there might be able to point him to a new resource. He contacted the college, and soon he and Boyer were discussing how the school and the college could work together on the boardwalk project.

The students at the construction college first began gaining field experience through community projects about 10 years ago when an instructor at the school told Boyer that volunteer help was needed to build the Heroes Memorial in Gresham. For Boyer, the project provided a solution to the challenge of evaluating how students would perform on a real project while providing them with hands-on experience to support their classroom learning.

“For our concrete students, it’s really hard to give them experience with concrete; you can’t pour concrete in a shop,” Boyer said. “So I started trying to get them opportunities outside of the school.”

Soon after the construction college’s students wrapped up a year of working on the Heroes Memorial, more community project opportunities came their way. Although the flood of community projects dried up during the recession, it resumed about four or five years ago, Boyer said.

The Pleasant Valley boardwalk project is more than just a basic hands-on experience, though. It also is providing students exposure to new techniques as a result of working with the Diamond Pier system, which Boyer said he had never worked with until now.

The project also has offered an opportunity for the college to begin to forge a new partnership with Portland Youth Builders and Constructing Hope, which also are providing pre-apprenticeship students for the work crew.

“It’s just opened up a whole new avenue of opportunity,” Boyer said.

The boardwalk project, which includes construction of between 1,000 and 1,200 square feet of gravel trail, is approximately one-third of the way toward completion. Work is expected to wrap up by the time the school cuts a ribbon to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Wildside.

In the meantime, Scharfenberg’s students are already busy on their next project.

“(They’re) writing grants for monitoring equipment,” he said. “They want to install game cameras to capture images of both human and animal users.”

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