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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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.”

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