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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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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The city of Portland is close to adopting a comprehensive plan for ensuring its lofty equity goals are employed on all city construction projects, after years of contentious debate.

But Wednesday’s hearing at City Hall showed the fight isn’t over for the new Community Equity and Inclusion Plan (CEIP), which Mayor Ted Wheeler’s office is calling one of the ambitious equity policies ever undertaken in Portland.

Dissatisfaction from longtime stakeholders was still present, but given the issue’s rancorous history in Portland, Wheeler’s plan may be close to the finish line.

“I bet a lot of you thought I was going to get up here and say bad things about it,” said James Posey, a contractor and longtime voice in equitable contracting in Portland. “But I’m not.”

Posey and nearly all of the two dozen others who testified said more work on the policy is needed. They asked for accountability for contractors who fail to live up to terms, a fine greater than $2,000 for failure to meet goals, and better data to ensure contractors don’t play with numbers to make a white, male workforce appear more diverse on paper.

Wheeler’s CEIP didn’t arrive at the hearing requiring the union-friendly policy tool known as Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs) on all projects – owners of projects over $25 million that use alternative contract methods are given the choice. This led to many speakers saying they could not support the policy as written.

“I urge you to not support this,” said Connie Ashbrook, executive director emeritus of Oregon Tradeswomen Inc.

The CEIP is intended to standardize equity requirements and keep project owners from having to devise new plans for each project. Currently, several city bureaus have their own plans, as do certain large capital projects. The CEIP was compiled with the help of various bureaus and is intended to provide a consistent approach to equitable contracting.

One issue that’s vexed Portland leaders going back to former mayor Bud Clark in the early 1990s is how to draft a policy like the CEIP that will stand up to legal challenges. City attorneys have warned that CBAs might increase diversity on city projects, but would put the city in a risky position.

The most charged issue in this arena going back to Wheeler’s predecessor, Charlie Hales, has been how to incorporate the signatory component of CBAs. Many people who’ve testified to the council have said this component is crucial to ensuring the engagement of stakeholder groups. These include industry-focused nonprofits like Oregon Tradeswomen, Constructing Hope, Portland Youth Builders, and the Metropolitan Alliance for Workforce Equity.

These groups, along with neighborhood organizations like the East Portland Action Plan, and construction worker unions under the Columbia Pacific Building Trades Council have said the signatory requirement is critical because there needs to be a contractual relationship tying contractors to their promises.

“The problem with (the CEIP) is it doesn’t have any method of delivery for equity in workforce,” Willy Myers, executive director of the council, told the 91��Ƶ.

But contractors, including the heads of black-owned open-shop firms, and city project managers have expressed concerns about their obligations and the city’s enforcement ability.

The chief administrative officer under Charlie Hales, Fred Miller, was critical of CBAs. Miller retired at the end of last year. His successor, Tom Rinehart, along with the head of the Office of Equity and Human Rights, Dante James, have taken the lead devising the CEIP for Wheeler.

CBAs were used for two Portland Water Bureau projects, and not without controversy.

They were regarded as successful in achieving diverse worker and owner participation, but an independent report criticized several aspects of how they were used in the pilot projects, including project set-aside money going to things unrelated to the projects. The report, by Framework LLC, also said the CBAs were employed in ways that could provide the appearance of conflict of interest.

Miller said at the time he did not want “pure” CBAs used for the Portland Building reconstruction project, which his bureau was gearing up to take on.

Wheeler’s solution to address this dilemma is a CEIP-supporting document to be signed by contractors selected for city projects – a . It will effectively serve as the signatory document to the CEIP.

The scope of the partnership agreement is narrower than that of the CBAs piloted by the city. But Wheeler thinks it can achieve the right level of stakeholder engagement while keeping separate the contractual relationship between the city and its prime contractor.

The proposed fix is intended to allow both union and open-shop firms to compete for city projects, which for years has been a major sticking point in the conversation around equitable contracting. A number of local businesses belonging to the National Association of Minority Contractors are open shop, and some of their owners say it’s easier to hire from their communities absent unions. And they point out that unions haven’t always lived up to equity goals.

Commissioner Dan Saltzman introduced an amendment requiring CBAs for projects over $25 million. But because Saltzman introduced his amendment at the start of Wednesday’s hearing, no one in the room had prepared to address it. NAMC Oregon Executive Director Nate McCoy said he needed to check with people before publicly agreeing to support the amendment.

McCoy has said he favors an equity plan that allows all NAMC Oregon businesses to participate. He and national NAMC board member and Raimore Construction head Jeff Moreland sounded open to it on Wednesday.

“So, just to be clear,” Wheeler said, “with this amendment, we don’t lose you, Nate, and we get you, Willy?”

Seated at the same table, Myers and McCoy offered signs of assent to Wheeler’s question.

The CEIP would also establish a body – the Community Equity and Inclusion Committee – to oversee the city’s and its contractors’ performance. Not all of the CEIC’s formal duties have been assigned.

James, of the Office of Equity and Human Rights, said at the outset of the discussion that underlying all of Portland’s struggles to achieve diversity in contracting are racism and sexism.

“I want to be clear about this,” he said.

Wheeler’s office on Wednesday forwarded three resolutions relating to the CEIP. They will return to the City Council next month, when votes, including on the new amendments, will be taken.

“We have 30 days to figure this out,” Wheeler said.

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