Written By: Rick Wajda, CEO of Indiana Builders Association and David Dimmett, CEO of Project Lead The Way
The Associated Builders and Contractors puts a number on it: the U.S. construction industry needs 349,000 net new workers in 2026 alone. Add manufacturing and the broader trades, and the shortfall climbs into the millions before the decade is out. Meanwhile, the workers who know this work best are retiring out of it.
Nearly a third of the manufacturing workforce is over 55. Construction is on pace to lose roughly 40 percent of its current tradespeople to retirement by 2031. For every five workers who leave, roughly two are stepping in to replace them.
That gap isn’t widening because the jobs are bad. Wages in the trades have been climbing faster than the national average; in-demand roles regularly pay $80,000 to $100,000 or more, and workers get there without the six-figure student debt that’s become common on other paths. These are also the jobs that build and maintain the roads, plants, and infrastructure the country’s economy and security depend on.
The gap persists mainly because most students never get a real look at these careers before they’ve already ruled them out, often without realizing it.
Career exploration shouldn’t be a nice-to-have tacked on the end of high school. It shapes the decisions students make years before graduation in the classes they sign up for, the confidence they carry into a technical elective, and whether they see themselves as someone who could do this work.
Kids build an idea of “what people like me become” early, and mostly from what’s put in front of them. If construction, manufacturing, and engineering careers never show up in that picture, not in fifth grade, not in eighth grade, only maybe as a poster in a guidance counselor’s office junior year, students rule themselves out of paths they never actually considered. This is fundamentally an exposure problem, and one schools are uniquely positioned to fix.
That makes the challenge during hiring season as much about visibility as it is about filling open roles. By the time a student is at a job fair, a lot of the decisions have already been made, one way or another, years earlier. Waiting until high school to introduce students to what we do is waiting too long.
Part of what keeps students and even some parents at arm’s length is an outdated picture of what these careers actually require. The trades today run on technology as much as technique: reading digital plans, operating precision equipment, troubleshooting problems that don’t have a textbook answer.
And what employers in the trades are looking for in new hires has shifted. People still need to be able to do the physical work well, but just as much, they need to be able to communicate with a crew, adapt when a project changes mid-stream, and think through a problem instead of just executing a step. Those aren’t trade-specific skills. They’re the same skills—communication, collaboration, critical thinking, adaptability—that show up on every “what employers want” survey, regardless of the industry. Early career exploration simply expands a student’s toolkit, instilling universal skills that apply across every industry.
This is where hands-on, project-based learning earns its keep. Students don’t discover an aptitude for problem-solving by reading about it or hearing a teacher talk about it. They discover it by tackling a problem that doesn’t have an obvious answer, working through it, and building something that works.
We’ve watched students walk into a project with no idea what they’re capable of and walk out having redesigned something three times because their first two attempts failed and they wanted to get it right. This is the kind of confidence that comes from doing the work, struggling, and figuring out how to succeed.
That’s also why these experiences translate so directly to the workplace. A student who’s spent a semester testing, failing, and iterating on a real design problem is rehearsing the exact process employers describe when they talk about what a good hire looks like.
None of this works as a school-only or industry-only effort. Schools can build pathways and the classroom experiences. Industry can bring the real context: the job sites, the mentors, the proof that this work is current, skilled, and worth pursuing. Neither side gets the full result alone.
The employers who engage early, sending people into classrooms, hosting site visits, showing up before a student ever applies for a job are the ones building their own future workforce. Think of it as long-term workforce development, pure and simple.
Districts and communities that connect their schools and their employers deliberately, and early, end up with something stronger than a hiring pipeline. They end up with students who understand how their education connects to real life, and employers who have a hand in shaping the workforce they need.
The primary objective is giving students full visibility into every option before critical decisions are locked in. It’s making sure they get the chance to find out whether those paths fit them before the window for finding out has closed.
The earlier a student sees what’s possible, what these careers actually look like now, what skills they demand, and what kind of life they can build, the better positioned that student is to make an informed choice, whatever it turns out to be. That’s the opportunity in front of us: not to convince every kid to become a tradesperson, but to make sure none of them are ruling it out based on a picture of the industry that stopped being true a long time ago.
This article was originally published in the Quarter 3-2026 edition of Indiana Builder News.