Photo: Jessica Rinaldi/Globe.
Apprentices learning how to plaster inside Forge, a trade school that helps students move right into a job.
The kinds of people I follow on social media are always saying that there is no shortage of labor right now, just a shortage of decent pay. So my next thought is, How do people qualify themselves for decent pay, especially young people who don’t go to college?
Investigating one approach, Scott Kirsner writes at the Boston Globe about a trade school that is hiring its graduates.
“In a building next to the Mass. Pike in Newton, two construction crews are at work. Enter the front door, labeled with a sheet of paper that says ‘Forge,’ and a crew is renovating a 1960s-era office space that will eventually house software developers, customer service staffers, and a finance department.
“But go through another door, and you’re in a high-ceilinged industrial space. Here, 10 apprentices are toting lumber, measuring walls, and hanging sheetrock. But this crew is part of a 12-week program that teaches the basics of construction and pays them $15 per hour as they learn.
“Founded in late 2020, Forge is a startup that runs a new kind of trade school but also seeks to employ the graduates. And the company has raised nearly $28 million, some of it from the Miami-based homebuilder Lennar Corp., to train more workers and expand to a second city, likely Tampa. Founder Mark Kasdorf says his goal is to employ 100,000 people in 10 years.
“Kasdorf thinks that can happen by creating a new kind of ‘on-ramp’ to the construction trades for so-called Generation Z workers just now entering their twenties.
“ ‘The types of employers in the trades today are incompatible with Gen Z, from big builders like Suffolk to the union to a 65-year-old operator of a plumbing general contracting company. They don’t like Gen Z, and Gen Z doesn’t like them.’ Kasdorf says nearly one-third of Forge’s graduates so far have been women. ‘They’ll tell you that there’s no on-ramps for them,’ he says. …
“Kasdorf sold a previous company, Intrepid Labs, to the consulting giant Accenture in 2017. … When Kasdorf left Accenture to start Forge, he raised money from Boston Seed Capital and was focusing on creating technology for ‘augmented reality’ glasses. … [But] he realized that ‘we’re running out of skilled tradespeople in the US,’ especially as an older generation begins to retire.
“The company changed its focus in February 2021, to ‘building a private trade school where we’re training the next generation of trades worker for America,’ he says, and surrounding them with technology like those augmented reality glasses. …
“One early student, Nick Claude, was managing a bar in Hingham when he heard about the opportunity from a customer who worked for Forge. Claude says he ‘had wanted to get into the trades. … He reached out to 30 or 40 tradespeople, but found ‘many weren’t willing to take on strangers they don’t know.’
“The 12-week program has students build their own workbench, and then they move on to working on simulated houses, learning how to frame a house, install roofing, and add flashing. They install tile and faux-wood flooring and learn to hang sheetrock, plaster walls, and add molding. Kasdorf says about 70 percent of the apprentices finish the program and move into paid positions with Forge, earning $21 an hour and health insurance. (Forge guarantees them 32 hours a week of work.)
“The company sends its alumni out on window replacement jobs, or one-day bathroom refits, typically subcontracting for a larger brand. … Forge also buys houses in the Boston area, dispatches crews to renovate them, and then flips them. The company seeks to buy $300,000 to $400,000 starter homes that it can resell for $600,000. He says that the worse shape a house is in, the better it is for Forge: ‘We want houses that need a lot of labor — it’s more training opportunities for our people.’ …
“Using technology is still part of the picture, Kasdorf says. Twice a day, at noon and 4 p.m., someone on each crew dons an augmented reality headset for a quality check. That allows a supervisor at the office in Newton to ‘see’ the work that has been done remotely, ask questions, and address any problems that have cropped up. …
“Forge has a long way to go to show that it can profitably train and employ thousands of tradespeople. (At present, the company has 90 employees.) But it is working on a major problem — there were more than 400,000 open jobs nationally in construction in September, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and a recent article from McKinsey & Co. highlighted ‘a persistent labor shortfall’ in the sector that could become even worse in the wake of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which will funnel billions into new transportation projects. …
“ ‘The demand is strong’ for people with skills in carpentry and other trades,” says Tom Fischer of the North Atlantic State’s Carpenters Training Fund, adding that he would never knock a training program just because it is small — every bit helps.
More at the Globe, here.
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Photo: Keith Bedford/Globe Staff
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