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In August, the National Center for Education and Research in Construction published CraftPro, an online tool designed to help employees with on-the-job training for their teams of commercial workers.
Using self-paced courses primarily on mobile devices, NCCER hopes CraftPro will enable people to train regardless of their location. The app contains instructional videos on craft skills in English and Spanish delivered by industry experts.
Here, Construction Dive talks to Lisa Strite, NCCER’s Director of Learning, about the launch of CraftPro, the goal of the tool, and what she’s gleaned from the first few weeks of customer feedback.
Editor’s Note: The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Immersion in CONSTRUCTION: How did CraftPro come about? What’s the idea behind it?
CARR LISA: CraftPro was a very specific answer to a problem we saw in the market. Really, two things: developing your staff and being able to grow the talent you have.
Recruiting is important. We need to bring more people into this labor pipeline, but you can’t solve all your workforce challenges by hiring alone. The thinking behind CraftPro was that this platform makes it easy to deliver structured training to workplaces and work around the schedules you have.
The goal is better access to training, stronger workforce development, and ultimately better business results.
Lisa Street
Permission granted by NCCER
We do this by enabling companies to create personalized learning pathways that are specifically tied to the job you need that person to do, rather than putting them in a program that may be teaching them skills that are valuable, but not put into practice for six months or even a year. By then, that technical skill has probably faded, and their knowledge and comfort level has probably faded with it as well.
It’s very much about on-site training, literally in the hands of employees, bringing the instructor to life through rich training videos on their phones. This creates a learning path that gets you what you need to know at work tomorrow or three days from now.
How does it look on the builder side of things? How do they use the tool?
We know contractors want to be trained, but instructors’ class schedules mean time away from projects, and that makes it difficult. The idea is that CraftPro gives you structured training that is easier to deliver.
We built it for contractors of any size. If you’re an organization of five people, it’s hard to train because you don’t have the infrastructure to do it.
The idea is that with CraftPro you work with NCCER through a subscription-based model based on the size of your business. This gives you access to a library, a catalog of courses on a variety of crafts.
It is not intended to replace valuable apprenticeship training programs. It will never replace hands-on training in the classroom or on the job. But what it does is it literally puts world-class instructors in the hands of that learner through our mobile app and gives them the opportunity to start doing that learning or update it at any time.
NCCER is known for our credentials. These credentials have value. CraftPro is an employer credential. In this case, the credential I’m earning comes from my employer, who says, “Yes, that’s what makes you a pipefitter-1 at Turner.” Or “This is the learning path that sets you up as an electrical safety manager at Clayco.”
How important was it to have the platform available in English and Spanish?
I mean, it’s a must. Access to training in a language you understand should not become a barrier to your career. We felt it was incredibly important. If we’re going to build a workforce development ecosystem, we need to be able to know those learners where they are.
What has been the customer feedback so far?
It is very interesting. We have customers who use it in many creative ways. The simplest way to describe it is that we have a customer who probably put a thousand hours of learning into it. They have 2,000 artisans who are planning to do it.
And their model is that these people are going through an apprenticeship program, but they’re doing a lot of that apprenticeship in CraftPro. They receive instruction and learning based on demonstrated knowledge through video instructors and interactive learning.
It allows them to turn their learning program into a kind of hybrid model.
We have another contractor who is oversubscribed in their formal training program. And so this is a way for these people to continue to train and advance their careers while they wait to get them into the other courses.
The opposite is also true. We have a number of contractors who use our NCCER assessments to assess types of pre-existing knowledge. So if you show up at my workplace and say, “I’m a plumber. I have 18 years of experience.” Our assessments allow that contractor to assess what you know and don’t know and what you can and can’t do.
CraftPro was launched in August. What have you learned in that time?
The initial problem we set out to solve was, how do we help companies that don’t form? How do we help them train? This was our hypothesis.
Instead, what happens is we find that they’re signing up and people who are already training say to me, “Oh, this is a missing piece in my workforce training and development toolkit. This is something that fills a gap that I had.”
