Report: Job growth in trades to outpace most industries

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With construction companies’ fortunes improving, federal officials are predicting that the industry will be one of the great job generators of the next decade.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics this week released employment projections for the next 10 years. In the construction industry, the number of people employed is projected to increase by 1.2 percent a year through 2024.

The industry will add an estimated 790,400 jobs by 2024, according to the BLS. Although that number will still fall below the industry’s peak, hit in 2006, the expected rate of increase is among the highest predicted for all industries.

The predictions came as little surprise to Jason Plante and Kevin Renley, both vice presidents at Eau Claire-based contractor Market & Johnson Inc. Plante said business has seen “tremendous growth” over the last couple of years.

“The industry has stabilized and dug itself out of the hole” created by the recession, he said. “I think construction in general is on the way up.”

During the recession, school projects and other public work helped keep construction companies going, he said. Recently, though, demand has been coming from owners providing everything from food service to health care.

Yet, even as the industry sees its prospects improve, many companies continue to grapple with a labor shortage. For contractors who are having trouble filling their ranks, the BLS’ figures might have them wondering just where all the new workers are supposed to come from.

Renley said the labor shortage has prompted him and his colleagues at Market & Johnson to try to think of new ways of going about their projects. Subcontractors likewise are struggling with recruitment.

The industry has responded in many cases by putting an even greater emphasis on apprenticeships.

Ken Kraemer, executive director of Building Advantage, a Milwaukee-based organization that promotes the hiring of union workers, said he has seen labor groups double down on their efforts to recruit apprentices. The queue of people waiting to enter the trades has accordingly grown longer at the tail end.

Kraemer said that in some of the training programs he knows of, new apprentices triple older ones by nearly three to one.

“What we’re seeing is pretty incredible right now,” Kraemer said, noting the trades associated with Building Advantage are on track to work 15 million man hours in southeast Wisconsin this year.

“It hasn’t been that good in a while,” he said. “We’ve seen that bounce back to levels we haven’t seen in the last five, six years.”

The recruitment efforts have the industry reaching out more and more to women, who continue to make up a greater and greater share of the domestic labor force, according to the BLS research. The bureau predicts women will account for 47.2 percent of all workers by 2024, compared with 46 percent in 1994 and 46.4 percent in 2004.

Additionally, the BLS estimates that women workers will see their own numbers increase by 5.8 percent a year; men are expected to go up only by 4.4 percent.

“I think there’s always been a desire to have a more diverse workforce … because most construction firms do foresee a labor shortage,” Plante said.

Kraemer said he believes women’s attitudes toward the building trades have changed. Instead of hearing people ask women why they’ve chosen to work in construction, he said, the question has become, “Why wouldn’t you?”

The change, he said, results in part from the fact that more and more people are attracted to thoughts of starting a career with no student debt and getting paid to go through training.

Among other industries, few have such an appealing future on the horizon. Although the BLS expects mining employment to increase by about 0.9 percent a year until 2024, manufacturing employment is expected to shrink 0.7 percent.

Things could be worse for manufacturing, though. The BLS is actually predicting that the decrease in the industry’s employment figures will be slower than it was in the previous decade, when the number went down by an average of 1.6 percent annually.

Agriculture is also expected to see a decline; the BLS predicts its employment figure will decrease by 0.5 percent a year. One of the few bright spots is in the health care and social assistance industries — taking into account jobs at hospitals, outpatient-care centers, nursing homes and the like. Those industries are expected to see their employment figures go up by 1.9 percent a year. Follow @alexzank