Emily Stover DeRocco Speech
Construction Industry Round Table
April 26, 2005
Arlington, VA
Good afternoon. And thank you, Mark, for inviting me. It has been a pleasure partnering with you and the Construction Industry Round Table and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to speak to all of you.
Over two years ago, this Administration began a project now known as the President’s High Growth Job Training Initiative. The goals of the Initiative were to identify the high growth sectors of our economy, determine the workforce challenges facing those sectors, develop solutions to those workforce challenges, and demonstrate those solutions through partnerships between businesses, education, and the workforce investment system.
Our research showed…and I’m sure all of you in this room will agree…that construction is a high growth industry. The Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that over 1 million new jobs will be added to the industry by 2012 and an additional 1 million positions will have to be replaced as a result of turnover and attrition.
As many of you will recall, this time last year, we held an executive forum during this conference to better understand the workforce challenges that you face. We held four additional forums similar to yours around the country with other groups from the industry.
Those forums yielded a strong consensus on four major challenges:
- First, the construction industry’s image suffers from negative stereotyping and misinformation. Whether it is career options, safety issues, or pay and benefits, the perception of the industry among young people, their parents, and the public at large negatively affects potential workers.
- This leads to the second challenge, recruitment. With the industry needing over two million new workers by 2012, finding and recruiting individuals is critical. In addition to changing the public perception of construction, the industry must also look to other demographic groups to find available workers, including women.
- The third challenge is one common across nearly every industry; the lack of basic academic and employability skills in our nation’s youth. Without an academic foundation and a strong work ethic, youth are simply not employable in these advancing fields.
- And finally, the skill requirements of both entry-level and incumbent workers are constantly changing and many education and training providers are simply not training in the skills required today.
With the primary challenges now identified, it was time to find solutions. Our discussions and focus on construction helped to drive creative thinking by many inside and outside the industry and led to over twenty proposals being submitted to the Labor Department for review and potential funding.
After considerable research and review, 7 projects were selected to demonstrate potential solutions and awarded over $12.5 million. These projects are not specific to one particular challenge but instead cut across several of them. Fuller descriptions of each are contained in the red folders you received, but I would like to highlight just a couple of them.
- In response to the difficulty recruiting youth with the skills needed by employers, the Associated General Contractors of America and its partners created two construction career academies in Chattanooga and San Antonio. These academies provide high school students with academic instruction in the context of acceptable training. This helps students learn both the academic and vocational skills needed for specific occupations and the connection between the two.
- Our grant to AGC will help them expand this model to eight other locations by supporting partnerships between local AGC chapters, local high schools, employers, and workforce investment boards. I believe that career academies are an effective way to teach students, not just in construction but in many different industries, and I am proud to help construction lead the way in this innovative education design.
- One area where construction trails many other industries is the recruitment and retention of women. One group that is working to change that record is a community-based organization called Chicago Women in Trades. Through the project that DOL funded, the Chicago Women in Trades are creating professional outreach and marketing materials that focus on women and conducting orientation sessions and job fairs that highlight construction industry career opportunities for women.
They are also helping women address their barriers to employment through an array of education, training, and support services, such as career planning, placement, and mentoring by women currently working in the industry. I traveled to Chicago late last year for the grant announcement and the commitment and passion of those women was contagious. I have little doubt that they will reach their goal of enrolling 750 new women into apprenticeship programs.
Beyond the seven local projects funded under the President’s High Growth Job Training Initiative, we believed that the construction industry needed a national project designed to help change the image of the industry. That is why we undertook a separate initiative focused specifically on construction called Skills to Build America’s Future.
The goal of this Initiative is to educate young people and their parents as well as individuals thinking of changing careers about opportunities available within the skilled trades.
To build a successful national project though, we first needed national partners that would represent the broad range of sectors within the construction industry. So we reached out to three major organizations to partner with us: The National Association of Home Builders, the National Heavy and Highway Alliance and its affiliated unions, and of course, the Construction Industry Round Table.
