The construction industry faces a stark shortage of workers, but programs and people across the country are working at the local level to solve the problem. This series highlights those efforts helping to recruit the next generation of construction pros. Read previous entries here.
Do you know of a group that is helping to attract workers to the construction industry? Let us know.
Sean Kilcrease is moving up the depth chart at Nissan Stadium. But he’s not a member of the home team Tennessee Titans — he’s a quality control inspector.
Kilcrease, 24, is a Nashville native and an employee of Baker Construction, a Monroe, Ohio, firm that bills itself as the nation’s largest concrete contractor. Six months after starting as a laborer, he was promoted to the QC team.
Before construction, Kilcrease worked at Starbucks. He’d hardly considered a career on the jobsite before someone close to him steered him in a new direction.
“My fiancee, she put me on to construction. She had her connections, and she thought I should try out the class.”
That class was part of the Titans Construction Training Camp, or TC2. The program takes people with zero construction experience and gets them on the jobsite for one of the most prominent sports builds in the nation.
Courtesy of Turner Construction
The Tennessee Builders Alliance, the joint venture constructing the $2.1 billion stadium, facilitated the training. The project team is made up of New York City-based Turner Construction; Indianapolis-based AECOM Hunt; Brentwood, Tennessee-headquartered Polk & Associates Construction; and Nashville-based ICF Builders & Consultants.
Training camp
The five-week TC2 uses the National Center for Construction Education & Research’s Craft Labor curriculum, according to the JV’s website. Some of the included trades are mechanical, electrical, plumbing, fire protection, drywall and painting.
There are some basic requirements to join the program, according to the TBA. Participants need to be residents of Northern Middle Tennessee, for example, and have a high school diploma or high school equivalency. They must also pass a drug test and a basic assessment skill exam.
TC2 offers multiple certifications, such as OSHA 30. Though originally certifying in just OSHA 10, the team listened to feedback from trade partners and expanded the offering, said Jessica Begin, community and citizenship specialist for Turner.
“We have such a great collaboration with our trade partners on the site, they’re really seeing the value of these individuals coming through the program,” Begin said.
Nine cohorts and 112 graduates have completed the program, Herbert Brown, community and citizenship director for Turner, told Construction Dive via email. The ninth cohort graduated on Feb. 13, according to a Tennessee Titans Facebook post, and the initiative is accepting applications through 2026. The Titans plan to open the stadium in 2027.
About 60 construction trade partners engage with participants on a day-to-day basis, Begin said. The initiative also has a job fair halfway through, where participants can engage with trade partners and get more information about working on the jobsite.
Begin said it was common for a participant to enter with one trade in mind, then choose to pursue another trade based on their experience.
“The exposure that these individuals get to the different opportunities that they have is very life changing,” she said.
A thinning workforce
Brown told Construction Dive in an interview that the goal of TC2 was to invest in the future of the construction workforce.
“TBA, and more specifically, Turner, we take workforce development very seriously and just engaging in that space, because we know that [in] our industry, a lot of individuals are retiring and aging now, so it’s really important for us to help train, develop, provide resources and support to that next generation,” Brown said.
Indeed, the labor shortage has long kept contractors in an uncomfortable position — the building industry will need to attract 349,000 new workers to keep up with demand this year, according to data from Associated Builders and Contractors.
Programs like TC2 could represent a step in the right direction. Of the 112 graduates through the nine cohorts, 78% of them — about three in four — received job offers post-graduation in the Nashville construction Industry, Brown wrote.
Kilcrease is one of them. Now, he’s bought into the construction profession at Nissan Stadium and all that comes with it — even if he is a Dallas Cowboys fan.
