Building the K12 Talent Pipeline

We have great jobs to offer talented people. But we can’t hire new employees if they don’t have the skills we need. And we can’t hire people who don’t even consider construction as a possible career choice.

Skilled tradespeople are essential to our projects, but so are college-bound students trained in management and technology. To keep our workforce relevant and vital, we have needed a way to expose a wide variety of students to our industry and provide interested students with the training and connections they need to be successful.

As we considered the problem, it became clear that waiting until someone graduated from high school was too late. We needed to share our passion for building with kids as early as possible to develop their innate love of building things and foster their interest in construction as a career.

We believed the logical place to begin was by building strong high school programs. Once we had those in place, we could start to create “farm teams” for them by including a construction curriculum in middle schools. Once the middle school programs were off the ground, we could start age-appropriate after-school construction clubs in elementary schools.

We believed it would be a win-win. The kids would have fun learning new skills, and we could present a wide variety of career opportunities that kids and parents might not ordinarily consider, helping to recruit the talent we’re going to need in

Increasing Our Collaboration with CEFGA

AGC Georgia has partnered with the Construction Education Foundation of Georgia since 1997. The two organizations have supported each other in efforts to educate Georgia students interested in construction as a career. In this past year, AGC Georgia has hosted five Skills Challenges at the local level, feeding the winners into the SkillsUSA State Championships hosted by CEFGA. continued next page