
The development business faces a stark scarcity of employees, however applications and folks throughout the nation are working on the native stage to unravel the issue. This sequence highlights these efforts serving to to recruit the following era of building professionals. Read previous entries here.
Are you aware of a gaggle that’s serving to to draw employees to the development business? Tell us.
Sean Kilcrease is transferring up the depth chart at Nissan Stadium. However he’s not a member of the house crew Tennessee Titans — he’s a high quality management inspector.
Kilcrease, 24, is a Nashville native and an worker of Baker Building, a Monroe, Ohio, agency that payments itself because the nation’s largest concrete contractor. Six months after beginning as a laborer, he was promoted to the QC crew.
Earlier than building, Kilcrease labored at Starbucks. He’d hardly thought of a profession on the jobsite earlier than somebody near him steered him in a brand new route.
“My fiancee, she put me on to building. She had her connections, and she or he thought I ought to check out the category.”
That class was a part of the Titans Construction Training Camp, or TC2. This system takes folks with zero building expertise and will get them on the jobsite for one of the crucial outstanding sports activities builds within the nation.

Courtesy of Turner Building
The Tennessee Builders Alliance, the three way partnership constructing the $2.1 billion stadium, facilitated the coaching. The venture crew is made up of New York Metropolis-based Turner Building; Indianapolis-based AECOM Hunt; Brentwood, Tennessee-headquartered Polk & Associates Building; and Nashville-based ICF Builders & Consultants.
Coaching camp
The five-week TC2 makes use of the Nationwide Heart for Building Schooling & Analysis’s Craft Labor curriculum, in response to the JV’s web site. A number of the included trades are mechanical, electrical, plumbing, hearth safety, drywall and portray.
There are some fundamental necessities to affix this system, in response to the TBA. Individuals have to be residents of Northern Center Tennessee, for instance, and have a highschool diploma or highschool equivalency. They have to additionally cross a drug take a look at and a fundamental evaluation talent examination.
TC2 affords a number of certifications, reminiscent of OSHA 30. Although initially certifying in simply OSHA 10, the crew listened to suggestions from commerce companions and expanded the providing, mentioned Jessica Start, neighborhood and citizenship specialist for Turner.
“Now we have such an amazing collaboration with our commerce companions on the positioning, they’re actually seeing the worth of those people coming via this system,” Start mentioned.
9 cohorts and 112 graduates have accomplished this system, Herbert Brown, neighborhood and citizenship director for Turner, instructed Building Dive by way of e-mail. The ninth cohort graduated on Feb. 13, in response to a Tennessee Titans Fb put up, and the initiative is accepting functions via 2026. The Titans plan to open the stadium in 2027.
About 60 building commerce companions interact with individuals on a day-to-day foundation, Start mentioned. The initiative additionally has a job truthful midway via, the place individuals can interact with commerce companions and get extra details about engaged on the jobsite.
Start mentioned it was widespread for a participant to enter with one commerce in thoughts, then select to pursue one other commerce primarily based on their expertise.
“The publicity that these people get to the completely different alternatives that they’ve may be very life altering,” she mentioned.
A thinning workforce
Brown instructed Building Dive in an interview that the purpose of TC2 was to put money into the way forward for the development workforce.
“TBA, and extra particularly, Turner, we take workforce growth very severely and simply partaking in that area, as a result of we all know that [in] our business, numerous people are retiring and getting older now, so it is actually vital for us to assist practice, develop, present sources and help to that subsequent era,” Brown mentioned.
Certainly, the labor scarcity has lengthy saved contractors in an uncomfortable place — the constructing business will need to attract 349,000 new workers to maintain up with demand this 12 months, in response to information from Related Builders and Contractors.
Packages like TC2 may symbolize a step in the correct route. Of the 112 graduates via the 9 cohorts, 78% of them — about three in 4 — acquired job affords post-graduation within the Nashville building Business, Brown wrote.
Kilcrease is certainly one of them. Now, he’s purchased into the development career at Nissan Stadium and all that comes with it — even when he’s a Dallas Cowboys fan.
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