Years of Top 50 Electrical Contractor surveys by EC&M have consistently shown companies deem worker hiring and retention to be the biggestsobstacles to growth. In 2019, 80% of contractors said labor availability posed the biggest challenge. But then came 2020, when more than half identified the coronavirus pandemic as the primary impediment.
That comes as no surprise; COVID-19 tossed so much of what was known and predictable up into the air that by early summer, worries about workforce needs and even growth itself took a backseat to more mundane concerns — like survival. Several months on, the future looks a bit clearer as paths out of the crisis and a return to normal take shape. For many contractors, however, simply clawing their way back in a more constrained environment remains a front-burner issue, maybe replacing chronic demand-exceeds-supply labor worries.
Yet labor concerns are not far from the surface. The dynamic that has been turning the screws on electrical contractors ― an aging workforce, dwindling interest in the field among career-seekers, and the crying need for skilled workers as opportunities grow ― remains fully in play. Assuming an end to the pandemic, those labor issues will surely resurface with a vengeance and could leave contractors scrambling even harder to fill ranks that might be even thinner in the aftermath of the crisis. Whether they’re working in the construction arena (where skilled labor shortages have become a fact of life for nearly all contractors) or in the service space (where trained technicians are at a premium), electrical contractors likely have a formidable and sustained challenge ahead.
Some quarters of the industry are continuing to respond to a labor challenge on track to become more acute with vigor and creativity. With projections of a steep curve for future demand still in place despite the pandemic, proactive contractors are leading or supporting initiatives to wade deeper into the prospective labor pool, carrying the message that skilled electrical careers beckon for entry-level and experienced job seekers alike. And they’re sweetening their pitches with promises of flexible combinations of affordable and accelerated training, paid work, and credential attainment.
Student connections
Encore Electric, Inc., Lakewood, Colo., continues to refine and recalibrate its career opportunity pitch to high school and even middle school students, says Dave Van Stelle, training manager. At career events, the company plays up the industry’s and company’s growing interplay with emerging technologies like green energy that may resonate with more environmentally conscious youth. It also looks for engaging ways to connect, he says, most visibly an “escape room” concept that sets up problem-solving challenges that demonstrate electrical fundamentals. Participants compete to see how fast they can decipher instructions to activate low-voltage electrical connections that allow them to move from the entrance to the exit of a mobile trailer.
“This is the kind of thing that beats the pants off getting up in front of an audience in a gym and droning on and on about construction trade opportunities,” Van Stelle says. “Starting last July, we took this to 50 different school events in the state, and we’re getting calls for it again for after the pandemic subsides.”
Student outreach via schools has grown as a component of Encore’s recruiting and talent acquisition effort, Van Stelle says, partly because Colorado public schools, shadowing a national trend, now must give students as much information about vocational-technical/skilled trade career options as they do about traditional college opportunities.
“The pitch is that this is a viable career option where you can get in-house and third-party training for a lifetime career and be earning money the entire time instead of incurring debt,” Van Stelle says. “There’s been a big swing in this direction by more schools.”
USIS, an electrical contractor based in Pearl River, N.Y., is seeing growing receptiveness to its high school and vo-tech school outreach efforts, says Training Director Kelly DiLello. With the traditional college path drawing more scrutiny, he says the share of students looking for alternatives that can get them into the workforce and on a robust skills development path at the same time is increasing. To entice students, USIS plays up its pre-apprentice program designed to expose prospects to the career at a rudimentary level that incorporates both paid work and paid classroom time.
“They get to kick the tires and see what it’s like to go to work and school, and we get to see them,” he says.
USIS introduces enrollees to the field by deploying them to its extensive prefabrication operation following orientation, aptitude testing, and training in basics of tools and the production skills needed in the work. Once deployed, they’re able to contribute labor and absorb a progression of electrical work fundamentals in a setting conducive to paced, hands-on learning.
“It’s a much more controlled and safer environment where they can learn basic skills by prepping materials, building panels, and assembling circuitry and security systems,” DiLello says.
Program participants, a group that often includes older prospective career-changers as well, are evaluated at regular intervals to determine if they’re ready for subsequent steps that would include putting them into field roles such as job-site assistants and eventual movement into full apprenticeship program participation, says Trevor Castagna, warehouse and logistics manager.
“Part of our aim is to identify future company leaders early on, so we’re focused on trying to get our eyes on them any way we can,” he says. “One of the things we do in orientation is to use games like ‘Concentration’ to see who has a mind for the kind of thinking we need.”
While program drop-outs do occur, success stories are common, and not all involve following the apprentice electrician route, Castagna adds. One participant, for instance, eventually moved into CAD-CAM design work for the firm.
New apprenticeships
Prefab operations like those at USIS present not only an alternate venue for training future electrical workers, but also a way to possibly navigate a future where that ready-made skilled labor is harder to find. That’s the apparent thinking at Interstate Electrical Services Corp., Billerica, Mass., where last fall an apprenticeship program for workers in its prefab operations ― the first Team Assembler Electrical Apprentice program to be registered with the state of Massachusetts ― debuted. Interstate created the program to help build a pipeline that will both attract workers into an important and growing part of its business and seed the ranks of its electrical apprenticeship program. Recruits commit to a one-year program requiring 2,000 on-the-job hours and 150 classroom hours that earns them a state-approved assembler certificate that can open a range of new career development doors within Interstate or opportunities with other employers.
Luiza Mills, Interstate’s vice president of human resources, says the company envisioned the program as a means of building interest in entry-level manufacturing assembly work among a potentially diverse group of applicants and as a way to partner with Massachusetts in its effort to assist the private sector in building the state’s manufacturing base.
“We’re trying to reach an audience who didn’t know that this type of work is an option,” says Mills. “There’s a very strong misconception that trade jobs like this and others are backbreaking and maybe not very classy. For someone fresh out of school or who is maybe older and working in a warehouse job, it may be attractive to enter this program and end up with a viable registered assembler certificate that they’ll have for wherever they want to go in life.”
Workers in the prefab operation, housed in a 100,00-square-foot UL-approved facility, assemble project-specific parts and components that are delivered install-ready to Interstate job sites, helping the company improve efficiency. Up to 70 workers are on the assembly floor at any given time, Mills says, building a host of products utilizing lean construction methods. The work, she adds, has become increasingly dependent on well-developed worker skill sets and innovative thinking to come up with new and better methods of assembly, justification for extensive training, and awarding registered assembler status to those completing the program. As of June, a dozen Interstate employees had that designation and a certificate in hand.
A quicker route
Shortening the time a new hire needs to secure a valuable certification in the trade ― up to three years less than what’s needed to become a journeyman electrician ― could work to Interstate’s advantage in a filling a key set of jobs in a tough hiring market. That also may be the calculation of Independent Electrical Contractors of Central Indiana in crafting a new training-only program that condenses the curriculum of its standard four-year employment-based apprenticeship course into one year. Enrollees in the full-time learning program pay $25,000 to take 30 hours of classroom and hands-on training weekly for 40 weeks, emerging from it educationally ready and certified to seek work with a member electrical contractor and begin logging the hours and gaining experience needed to attain journeyman status.
This alternate path, says Blake Behr, president of Ridgeline Electrical Industries, LLC, a Greenwood, Ind., company that helped design the program, addresses contractor needs to fill openings with more work-ready applicants and those of enrollees looking to fast-track training that will get them into a skilled trade job. Those who complete the intensive program, he says, may even prove to be better candidates than experienced electricians whose knowledge and skills gained in the workforce may be less comprehensive than that of program graduates.
“Guys with six, seven years of experience come in and sometimes they still don’t know some of the basics of things we’re trying to do,” he says, partly because employment with contractors no longer necessarily guarantees the attainment of well-rounded knowledge. “And this idea of learning in the field may not be as true as it was because the pressure put on foremen today is less to train than it is to produce.”
The availability of an intensive, shortened program focused solely on training may also be attractive to young people starting out who are focused on academic alternatives, Behr says. For them, the one-year program is an option that sits somewhere between going to work full time and following the traditional college route.
Identifying and securing prospects as they near the end of their secondary education has been a priority for Faith Technologies, Inc., Menasha, Wis. The company scouts for interested and qualified high school seniors in its areas of operation and guides them through the process of applying to attend its Faith Technologies University Apprenticeship Institute education and training program. Those accepted in their final year of school, aided by available scholarships, begin preparation to become electricians or electronic systems technician pre-apprentices after graduation, working for the company while gaining full classroom and hands-on skills and knowledge.
Billi Kiester, the company’s director of talent acquisition, says the robustness of Faith’s long commitment to recruiting, education, and training sets it up to move aggressively on the job of finding and developing the talent to meet future hiring needs. Today, she says, the more that an electrical contractor can demonstrate the value of an industry career and a clear path to career growth, the better positioned they’ll be to cope with future hiring challenges.
“Companies like us are doing a better job of getting information out there and telling people that trades can be a true career,” she says.
That’s a crucial part of the formula for addressing what’s likely to be an ongoing industry challenge of finding enough workers to support anticipated growth, one that will outlive the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Electrical contractors, says Jeremy Flanders, industrial relations manager for Cupertino Electric, Inc., a San Jose, Calif-based contractor whose student outreach tools span summer helper programs, internships for college students in construction-focused programs, participation in Associated Schools of Construction competitions, and sponsorships of Career and Technical Education programs, must see recruitment as a creative and aggressive marketing and selling job.
“The perception for the industry should be the reality we [industry veterans] have experienced: that construction has numerous opportunities... projects we build are fast-paced and challenging, and require critical thinking, decision making and leadership skills,” says Flanders. “Awareness and education are critical to exposing young people to these career options.”
Zind is a freelance writer based in Lees Summit, Mo. He can be reached at [email protected].
