Construction Career Collaborative

The goal of all craft training is to build new knowledge, skills and abilities in our craft workforce. The best way to ensure this happens is to build programs that include both passive and active forms of learning activities. Passive learning occurs during lectures, videos, readings, and demonstrations. The learner is engaged with the content but only in a passive manner through observation. Passive instruction is a good way to deliver knowledge but doesn’t work on building skill or ability. Active learning, designed to build skill and competency, includes learning activities like group discussions, practice by doing, immediate use in real world simulation or application, and through the teaching of others.

The industry has been told that the current skilled labor shortages will get worse as the economy improves, a generation of aging skilled workers retires and a new generation enters the industry. Key to that recruitment of a new skilled workforce is a well-defined and executed training program. To assist in training and development of high caliber training programs, the Construction Career Collaborative (C3) launched a Craft Training Endorsement Program in January 2018.

Construction executives from around the Houston area gathered this week to learn more about how they can create “a robust craft training program in your organization and link it to a career path” through an initiative that continues to grow. Those were the words of Chuck Gremillion, Executive Director of the Construction Career Collaborative, as he kicked off an event at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston designed to give contractors more information about the kind of help available to them to invest in and retain their workforce.

As anyone in commercial construction will attest, the industry has a labor shortage and a perception problem. The combination of those issues has led to an unsustainable craft workforce. Demand for skilled craft workers is greater than people looking for jobs. Baby Boomers are retiring and the millennial generation has not been attracted to careers in the craft trades to fill the available jobs. Construction Career Collaborative (C3) was established to address this issue.