Some people point out that the lack of people to work in construction is more a problem of finding people with the right skills at the right time than it is with finding people. I was talking with a vice president at a busy light commercial/residential builder who told me he can’t find people with the right skills matched to experience. Those he hires right out of college don’t have any real-world experience and most often aren’t interested in getting any. At the same time he has a legacy workforce of superintendents who rose through the ranks and have difficulty adopting technology and embracing the concept of managing. So, they resort to putting on their tool belts when problems crop up instead of managing the situations.

There’s no doubt in my mind that a superintendent, or anyone who manages day-to-day construction activities needs to be steeped in building know-how. When I used to teach management to mid level supervisors the course work explained that knowing how to do something was unimportant from a managerial perspective and that a manager should be able to manage any type of activity, whether or not they have any experience at it. In an ideal world that should be true since the manager relies upon the skills and experience of the workers to ensure the details of the job are done appropriately. Where this seems to fall apart in construction is exactly at the worker level.

It’s not uncommon for a construction worker to have learned the skills informally from friends or relatives. You know this is true if you just do a mental survey of the crews who work with or for you. How many of them had any formal training in how to frame? How many had any formal training in building concrete form work?

Most likely, many, or most of your workforce fine-tuned their skills on-the-job and not necessarily on any of your jobs. Then too, how many learned things incorrectly, or learned incorrect things? On-the-job training in some ways is perhaps more valuable than formal training since it introduces the realities of the real world to the training session. However, if you want a standardized way of things being done, on-the-job training by itself only ensures a wide variety of standards.

The lack of standardization can make it very difficult for a manager with little or no real-world experience who now has to deal with managing crews that have multiple ways of doing the same thing. There are often many ways to correctly accomplish a particular building task so the person managing a construction job today at one site could very well see different techniques being employed at another site. Then, if you add in the differences in the sites, and the differences in the buildings you come to realize that a very large requirement for someone who manages construction is for them to have experience. But they also need to have modern world skills that extend beyond being able to use a stud finder and a cell phone.

To me, technical education seems like a rapid way to get people on the job who can manage a job. All skills, including management, could be taught in a technical environment, plus, real world experience could be a generous part of the overall curriculum.

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