Labor shortages in the skilled trades discussion

[AKDoug]

Roger that.

I miss those 20 million dollar construction projects. It's like a Normandy beach invasion without the people actually being killed. Just hundreds of thousands of dollars riding on your performance every week. We used to have a meeting every Monday morning and the contractor would lay out the weeks work schedule. Critical path was a thing and everyone needs to be committed to schedules. You didn't want to that guy in a contractor claim for a completion date penalty. A little different than an unemployment check that didn't arrive on time.

That's about the only thing I miss about the surveying world. The big projects with hundreds of 40 acre lots scattered across the Alaska wilderness. Or big giant helicopter jobs where we established township boundaries and broke them down into sections. The pressure of the boss telling you that if you didn't perform they were sending you home.. and loosing 10's of thousands of dollars.

I oddly miss the 12 hour days for 5 to 6 months with no days off and my HP41CV running a program I wrote that calculated how much money I was making by the second.

[Borderland]

Once that was done and the design was completed the union construction surveying guys rolled in.

Here in WA they all belong to the operators union and they work out of the union hall like heavy equipment operators. $44/hr. for a party chief.

I never made that much but my job was a guaranteed income with benefits and pension. There were a few times where I almost lost my head, bought a trailer and followed the big money. I had some decent offers.

Your ability to run the numbers paid off in your business, no doubt.

[Joe in PNG]

I’m wondering if this depends on if you are a stem graduate staying in a stem field or not…
I have 11 direct reports; all with at least a BS. 9 of them bust their ass consistently delivering more than I have a right to ask. The other 2 do ok, and just have different priorities it is hard to argue with.

It's not so much those rare few who graduate HS knowing what they want to do, realistically know how to get there, and have the drive to get it done- not just in college, but when they get to where they're going.
STEM people, future doctors, and so on can fit this category easily- if they do the work needed.

The College Cargo Cult is more about the average kid (with the average youthful congenital rectal-cranial inversion) who's rather vague on what they want to do, have no clue on how to get there, and really don't have any drive at all. But, they just graduated from 12 mandatory years of having people yap at them, and figure they got to go on to college as if it was an inevitable step like they had to move up from elementary school to middle school. Underneath this is the unspoken assumption that by going to Highschool Pt II (now with drinking!), they can exempt themselves form actually working for a living, that they will be instantly given a corner office & six figure salary.

A lot of millenial kevtching I've seen is disappointment that their degree didn't give them that. In a way, it's their fault for getting into massive debt for a useless degree- then working minimum wage at Starbucks after all that. But, in some ways, they do have a right to complain. Their trusted teachers and others are pushing them in that direction. Who's telling kids to maybe take a couple of years off first... maybe enlist, or get a job doing scut work in a field you think might be interesting- or dump the idea of college all together and get into trades? Take a few years to grow up a bit, shed the harmful work midset foisted by the public education system, and really 'find yourself' without the debt?
Plus, there's nothing like hard work at a bad job to provide true motivation to buckle down and study for a degree.

[hickrev]

Roger that.

I miss those 20 million dollar construction projects. It's like a Normandy beach invasion without the people actually being killed. Just hundreds of thousands of dollars riding on your performance every week. We used to have a meeting every Monday morning and the contractor would lay out the weeks work schedule. Critical path was a thing and everyone needs to be committed to schedules. You didn't want to that guy in a contractor claim for a completion date penalty. A little different than an unemployment check that didn't arrive on time.

This goes back to the original complaint of “loss of knowledge”, but the prime contractors on half of my construction projects this year have submitted schedules without a critical path identified. The common denominator is contractor PMs that have fewer years in the field than certain pairs of boots that I own (and I’m on the younger side myself), and the typical excuse is that quirks in contractual holidays or suspension times make it impossible to get Project or P6 to spit out a critical path.

Strangely enough, the problem goes away once they need to show a critical path to request additional working days. Still, I worry about what will happen when the older generation of PMs retires and is no longer available to troubleshoot.

As far as skilled labor goes, I have found it nearly impossible to hire entry-level engineering technicians, mostly due to a lack of qualified candidates. The local community college used to have a Civil Eng Tech 2-year program that was an excellent feeder to our agency, but they canned it a few years back, and now our applicant pool is mostly 4-year Civil Eng graduates that weren’t able to lock down a traditional engineering gig. That’s great and all, but they’ll typically leave the technician track at the first opportunity, and I foresee us having problems finding qualified lab foremen and supervisors 5-10 years down the road.

[JodyH]

Thats some damn good money. Im assuming 24/7 operation. Do they rotate days night or its straight shift?

standard schedule is:
14 x 12hr days
14 days off
14 x 12hr nights
14 days off
repeat

I'm currently 4 nights into a 22 night hitch covering a shorthanded shift.
I'm basically working the entire month of July (mostly nights, which is awesome temperature wise).
Not much spare time right now, but the retirement fund is getting better every day.

[farscott]

The interesting thing about the labor market now is that almost every job type has unfilled openings. I cannot watch the local news without seeing commercials asking for manufacturing workers, warehouse workers, and STEM people. I cannot even get my regular general contractor, who has done multiple projects for me, to commit to a schedule for my next project due to labor issues. He just does not know who is not going to show up on a job site on any given day except for Friday which is pay day.

For motivated people, there are great opportunities to increase income and wealth. For the last decade plus, I have worked a full-time salaried job and ran my engineering consulting business on the side. In early 2020, most of my customers for my business cancelled my contracts. My customer base from 2016 to 2020 was heavily aerospace with a fair amount of the rest being ground transport customers, so that was no surprise. The business income dropped by more than 90% when 2020 was compared to 2019. For the first time, the business reported a loss.

This year I am having to pick and choose which projects the business can do as I have more applicants than time. There is not a day that I do not get approached with another opportunity. I am looking to expand, but that means I need to hire qualified people. And right now, that is not easy as everyone decent already has a decent job. Added to that, I see this bubble popping, making me reluctant to go all-in on the business and give up my salaried job. Right now, I am moving money to get ready for the Great Recession II. I have sold assets into the bubble to free up cash (sell when everyone else is buying) and delayed some other capital equipment expenses due to lack of inventory, crazy pricing, and quality concerns. I figure I will buy when everyone else is selling.

[rob_s]

And right now, that is not easy as everyone decent already has a decent job.

We have been on a hiring spree, and every time I get the new hire email, or here about this “stud” that we just landed, I think of the above.

We had a new hire/promote a few years ago (hiring as a project manager, when their current position with their current employer is assistant project manager. Always a bad idea IMO and has basically never played out) who was whining in his interview that his current employer just didn’t give him any opportunity. Most of the people in the room thought the guy was great. One of the principals in the form, after listening to everyone praises the kid, says “what do you know about him that we don’t? They’ve known him for 6 years. We’ve known him for two hours.”

Within two months his boss, who wasn’t part of the hiring, wanted to kill him. First, he didn’t have the basic skills he represented. Second, he had communicated certain blank spots in his skill set to the hiring group but said group didn’t communicate those gaps to the new boss (presumably because they didn’t want to admit they had hired bad). Third, even when told “do this, then that, then the other thing” the kid would come back having done half of the other thing, without bothering to do this or that, because he thought he had grasped the task but missed all of the nuance. For example, “take this electrical subcontract, review it against your project, edit it, and then get with me to review it” resulted in him taking the old contract, changing the names on it, and then asking for a meeting to review. There were items in there that had zero to do with the new project, showing that he hadn’t read the plans, or the contract, or both.

BTW, when the new boss tried to fire him, the hiring committee, presumably because firing him would mean they’d have to admit he was a turd, transferred him to another project… in assistant project manager capacity (while remaining at project manager pay!), under a guy that himself just got promoted to PM who couldn’t find his ass with two hands and a map. Great for mentoring!

[Welder]

Right now, I am moving money to get ready for the Great Recession II. I have sold assets into the bubble to free up cash (sell when everyone else is buying) and delayed some other capital equipment expenses due to lack of inventory, crazy pricing, and quality concerns. I figure I will buy when everyone else is selling.

This is how I am approaching these current times as well. Slimming and trimming while others are spending. Once you've seen the cycle repeat a few times, you realize that it's a *cycle*. The main thing, actually, is trusting that it will come back after it hits the bottom. Otherwise you don't invest during the times that you need to.

I've tried to anchor my business to types of customers who are virtually recession-proof, which has ended up with me working on inglorious crap like dumpsters for my county public works dept. But public works will be one of the last places in the world to run out of $$$$....

[Bio]

It's not so much those rare few who graduate HS knowing what they want to do, realistically know how to get there, and have the drive to get it done- not just in college, but when they get to where they're going.
STEM people, future doctors, and so on can fit this category easily- if they do the work needed.

The College Cargo Cult is more about the average kid (with the average youthful congenital rectal-cranial inversion) who's rather vague on what they want to do, have no clue on how to get there, and really don't have any drive at all. But, they just graduated from 12 mandatory years of having people yap at them, and figure they got to go on to college as if it was an inevitable step like they had to move up from elementary school to middle school. Underneath this is the unspoken assumption that by going to Highschool Pt II (now with drinking!), they can exempt themselves form actually working for a living, that they will be instantly given a corner office & six figure salary.

A lot of millenial kevtching I've seen is disappointment that their degree didn't give them that. In a way, it's their fault for getting into massive debt for a useless degree- then working minimum wage at Starbucks after all that. But, in some ways, they do have a right to complain. Their trusted teachers and others are pushing them in that direction. Who's telling kids to maybe take a couple of years off first... maybe enlist, or get a job doing scut work in a field you think might be interesting- or dump the idea of college all together and get into trades? Take a few years to grow up a bit, shed the harmful work midset foisted by the public education system, and really 'find yourself' without the debt?
Plus, there's nothing like hard work at a bad job to provide true motivation to buckle down and study for a degree.

It's weird, I'm someone with borderline excessive quantities of schooling, but I often council youths to only go to college if they know what they want to do. I've taught too many classes where the students are there only because their parents and/or school councilors told them they needed to go to college. It is too expensive and takes too much time to do casually.

[Kanye Wyoming]

I spoke at the annual conference of an industry group a few years ago. This is a niche, somewhat sophisticated manufacturing industry that pays very well, with top tier benefits.

In the morning, the head of each subgroup gave a report on developments, challenges, opportunities, etc. There were about seven of them. What struck me was that every single one said the most pressing challenge was finding and keeping semi-skilled and skilled employees. To summarize:

If they pass the math test they fail the drug test. If they pass the drug test they fail the math test. If they pass both, it becomes apparent rather quickly that they view working on Fridays and Mondays as optional.