When Brad Young was a high school student in the Meadville R-4 School District in Linn County, he attended Grand River Vocational Technical School in Chillicothe.
The program allowed students to build a variety of skills, including plumbing, electrical, framing and more. Those experiences prepared him to embark on a career path for which the foundation already was set.
While in the technical school, he went through the building trades program.
“Each year we built a house from the ground up,” recalled Young, now the owner of TigerTown Home Improvement and president of the Columbia Home Builders Association, during an interview with the Tribune. “There would be some classroom time and then we were out on the job site.”
In recent years, there has been a shift in priorities back to the kind of education that benefited Young, who graduated from Meadville in 1996. No longer is a four-year college degree the end-all-be-all. There now is a greater emphasis on students choosing a trade or technical school as a means of workforce development.
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Young is encouraged by this trend.
“It’s a positive thing we are starting to pay attention to (trade and technical schools) again,” Young said. “Mike Rowe from ‘Dirty Jobs’ has been a big advocate of this. He saw the writing on the wall earlier than everybody else did.”
More high schoolers going through a technical or trade program provides a nice shortcut for employers to have workers who already have gone through training, Young said.
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“I don’t think the push to get kids to go to those is as hard as it was whenever I was in school in the ’90s. It’s coming back into focus,” Young said. “Parents are now saying, ‘I don’t have a problem if my son or daughter wants to go to a trade school.'”
The more people who know about job opportunities in the housing industry, the better, Young added.
The National Association of Home Builders recently put out a Careers in Construction Month toolkit. The career month will be celebrated in October, with a workforce development champions forum Oct. 4, Careers in Construction Day on Oct. 10 and Build Across America Day on Oct. 29.
The toolkit includes a variety of team-building activities and other materials home builder groups can do with students of all ages, those aged 6 to 12 and those 13 and older, along with other promotional materials.
Columbia Home Builders Association is working on “some plans to create some buzz” about the special month, Young wrote in a follow-up message.
Gov. Mike Parson has significantly backed technical and trade school education, State Sen. Caleb Rowden, R-Columbia, said during a recent gathering of the Columbia Home Builders Association at the ACA Business Club.
“The two things he’s focused on are infrastructure and workforce development,” Rowden said, referencing Parson’s priorities. “He really has tried to lead the charge as it relates to honing in on specific things that make those things not just political talking points.”
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This includes the Fast Track Workforce Incentive Grant, a program for those 25 or older to gain the education for a career in high-demand workforce fields, according to the program website.
Rowden agrees a shift happened in post-secondary education priorities.
“This is a different world than we were living in three or four years ago,” Rowden said. “I think you’re going to see more and more kids going (the technical school) route, because in a lot of cases you’re making the most money right out of the chute.”
A few of Young’s former trade school classmates now own their own electrical installation and repair company; work in IT security; or work as a lineman for Kansas City Power and Light, known as Evergy.
“Everyone I know who went through that trade program today has a really good job and is doing really well for themselves,” Young said.
“It really set them up for the future,” he added.
During the last two years of his high school career, Young also worked for his neighbor, who was a homebuilder.
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Young’s first post-secondary career was as a carpenter for the Illinois-based Morton Buildings. After four years there, he started to see the toll the work took on his fellow employees who were about the age he is now, in his mid-40s.
“So I started looking into college and knew I could get my associate’s degree for free,” Young said. Following that, he attended the University of Missouri to get a business degree, graduating in 2004.
He then started working for the Virginia-based Ferguson Enterprises, a plumbing supplier, in St. Louis. He was in this career for 14 years, which eventually brought him back to Columbia with his wife and stepdaughter to open a local branch.
“I started to think more about starting my own business because I had the background in this and product knowledge,” Young said. “So I started a remodeling company, doing a lot of house-flipping and now doing remodeling for other people.”
A presentation last month by the Missouri Department of Secondary Education and Workforce Development to Regional Economic Development Inc. showcased occupation employment projections, including skilled labor careers, using data from the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center and Lightcast.
While there are a myriad of occupations that are expected to see growth over the next 10 years, some include:
Boone County job listings for general maintenance and repair increased 29% from July 2021 to June 2022. There was a slight drop of 7% in listings for construction laborers. However, construction-related skills noted in job ads increased 70% during the same period. Mentions of machinery skills in ads increased 36%, and HVAC increased 5%.
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Since these career fields are growing, it’s going to take building interest in them even at the elementary-school level, Young said.
“The National Association of Home Builders has booklets they give out to elementary schools to start encouraging kids to think about if they would want to be in our industry,” he said. “It might not be something that is talked about at home or maybe even parents haven’t thought about it.”
There needs to be more people willing to work in these career fields, Young said.
A construction job is hard and tiring but satisfying because you can help the community, he said.
Charles Dunlap covers local government, community stories and other general subjects for the Tribune. You can reach him at cdunlap@columbiatribune.com or @CD_CDT on Twitter. Please consider subscribing to support vital local journalism.
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