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Dive brief:
- The Austin, Texas City Council approved launch of an “infrastructure academy” to help develop workers for the more than $25 billion in civil work underway in the region.
- The resolution approved earlier this month calls on the city manager to develop and implement an academic program that includes training, daycare and other comprehensive services, job placement and hiring to remove barriers to access to careers in infrastructure.
- “The academy will be the center of training that will ensure that the programs are aligned or in harmony with each other and with skills in demand and job sequencingbased on real-time needs identified by both job creators and job seekers,” Mayor Kirk Watson wrote in a newsletter about the initiative. “This will improve navigation from training to employment.”
Diving knowledge:
Among the top infrastructure jobs in the Austin region are the $5 billion expansion of I-35 near Sant Antoni and the Austin Airport Improvement Projectit is estimated to cost $6.5 billion over the next 20 years.
An October study indicated that the number of mobility and infrastructure projects near the capital would double in the near future, indicating a need for 10,000 more new jobs per year in these industries.
“The Infrastructure Academy offers a solution and a path to provide opportunities for Austinites to take pride in high-paying, long-term, and meaningful careers that will allow them to afford to live and work in their communities,” he said. say Scott Haywood, Central Division. president of the Kansas City, Missouri-based civil engineering firm HNTB and a member of the Watson Workforce Leadership Council.
The resolution does not contain dollar amounts or funding information, and a specific timeline for creating the program has not yet been announced.
Hiring obstacles
Among the the biggest recruitment struggles for contractors is the shallow pool of skilled and experienced workers, and as large projects compete for this limited number, contractors struggle to find workers with enough experience.
At the same time, the academy will seek to address concerns about transportation and child care, two major barriers to entry for workers, said Karen Campbell, vice president and executive vice president of AECOM’s Austin-based metro in Dallas, and another member of Watson’s Workforce Leadership Council.
“I think a lot of people have trouble getting into that workforce because of expensive child care,” Campbell said, adding that her testimony at the town hall contributed to the inclusion of daycare in the creation of the academy “I don’t know the specifics of what it will look like, but I know it was tweaked in the original resolution to include daycare.”
Creativity in education and outreach will be key to getting new people into the workforce, Campbell said, as Austin also has to compete with San Antonio, Dallas and many other nearby metro areas in dire need of trade workers. .
“Some things are just done because they’ve always been done, rather than to fit today’s workforce,” Campbell said.
