These days, amid a long-standing shortage of skilled labor, many stakeholders in construction are taking a catch-as-catch-can approach to seeking and acquiring new talent. Now, more connections are being made between young people and the industry. Last week, a group of high school students enrolled in the Connections Academy online charter school arrived in Northeast Portland to visit the Sheet Metal Institute, which is operated by Sheet Metal Workers Local 16.

“I tell you, the advantage you have over me right now is you have time on your side; it gives you an enormous opportunity to establish yourself and gain a lot,” Kevin Roth, training coordinator for Local 16, told the students. “These opportunities are available in all the union construction crafts, not just sheet metal. If you like working with your hands and want to get into a great job at an early age that will pay off long term as a career, the apprenticeship programs are something you need. That demand is not going away at least for the next five to 10 years, if not longer.”

Each student visitor signed up for the trip after expressing an interest in learning more about the trades. For Roth and other recruiters, that’s a big head start compared with a lot of workforce development efforts.

“I currently am trying to aim for metal working of any kind, so I’m trying out welding,” said Connections Academy senior Lawrence Winowiecki, who lives in Newport. “I’m trying to see what trades work with metal, what’s local, what’s accessible. I’ve been going to workshops and the areas I’ve gone to, they say, ‘Hey, we need new people. The old guard is going out and we don’t have a ton of recruits.’”

Connections Academy, based out of Mill City, is authorized under the Santiam Canyon School District. Because it’s an online school, Winowiecki and his classmates had never met in person before.

“It’s definitely been something that has gotten me out of my shell,” Winowiecki said. “My plan is go to Coos Bay and Southwest Oregon Community College and their welding program, where I’ve been accepted. I just wanted to see this here because the closest I’ve come to sheet metal before is puncturing it.”

Students like Winowiecki are the prize for recruiters like Roth, who have long complained that the school system does little to cater to students who do not intend to pursue a traditional college path.

“What’s crazy,” Roth said, “and I don’t think the school system has figured this out, is that most people are visual learners.”

That, he added, is why the trades appeal so heavily to some students and not to others. The key is to provide students with that choice, he said.

For Connections Academy freshman Connor Tye, a career in construction may not be a consideration. But the dynamic of visual and hands-on learning still applies to his desired field of video game software development.

“I do enjoy building small things with my friends, but it’s not something that I see as a job,” Tye said. “The only thing I’m interested in now is game programming and design. And I’m not too good at it right now, but I’m hoping to get better.”

Trips like this are part of an effort by the Connections Academy to increase its emphasis on career and technical education. Currently, the school offers pathways to high school diplomas in business and management, computer science and medicine. But it’s increasingly clear that there will continue to be a need for more instruction in the skilled trades.

“This is going to count toward a senior project for me, and the Connections Academy recommended this for me as something I might be interested in,” senior Dustin Yip said.

Roth attended Benson Polytechnic High School in Portland in the 1980s and immediately after graduation entered a sheet metal apprenticeship with Local 16. He’s now retired at age 53 and collecting three separate pensions through the union.

“I tell people that at the time I got into it I did it because I wanted to go to college but I didn’t want the college debt,” he said. “So I chose the apprenticeship route.”

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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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