Enough ink has spilled over construction’s skilled workforce crisis to make

Source: US News & World Report
  • A systemic shift in livelihoods as evidenced in the Great Resignation phenomenon, impacting all industries simultaneously.
  • Pandemic-era labor force participation rate declines among older adults hits particularly hard in the construction fields, as its the older, more jobsite-experienced skilled workers who account for greater productivity, quality, and velocity on the jobs, and also impact the output of more junior, less-experience, less skilled workers around them.
  • By the end of 2022, infrastructure projects that get green-lighted under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act could begin siphoning skilled and semi-skilled laborers from residential construction sites to better-paying opportunities on government-backed projects.

Fact is, builders need immediate tactics to shore up capability to produce homes while longer-term solutions to the talent crisis – cultural, technological, training, cultivation, and career-pathing – find their respective fast-tracks of support and development.

Industrialized factory-based manufacturing processes, innovations in installation and building materials, kit-of-parts component and panel assembly, together with an all-out blitz to reintroduce livelihoods in construction as a pathway to career satisfaction, engagement, and fulfillment … these are the bigger-picture solutions a growing community of business stakeholders have committed to and invested in.

Meanwhile, there’s now. A no-huddle offense period for operators working on an audibles-basis to adapt to the conditions of the day and progress their projects at full-day measures of productivity.

Against that backdrop, new technology and a new approach to unpacking big challenges a detail at a time, emerges as something of a tactical lifeline, one homebuilding enterprises can adapt and customize to product lines, design and engineering details, and day-to-day installation variations that may occur as supply chain disruptions alter product and materials specs through the building cycle.

The On3 team has a deep knowledge of the end-to-end construction process,” says Paul Cardis, On3 ceo and cofounder. “To make these modules valuable, we had to make them retrievable without friction, as easy as a Google or YouTube search, and cater to the specific competence level of the user, which we do through our machine learning algorithms to match the content to the skillset, and lastly, we had to be capable of delivering the app whatever the location despite wifi signal variances, to make it resilient for all job sites.”

What’s more, paired with a smart headset partner – like the one On3 has engaged as a certified development partner and reseller of the Vuzix Smart Glasses hardhats – modules and two-way supervisor-team member quality assurance can run as extension of the On3 Capture application which runs on standard mobile devices, says Cardis.

Already, D.R. Horton, the DRB Group, Epcon Communities, Challenger Homes, Red Door Homes, and Woodside Homes are among homebuilding organizations that have partnered with On3 to deploy the On3 app among contractor teams, and to generate their own field guide content for their product lines.

With our courseware and its in-field applications, we’re cutting down onboarding time by half, and we’re also tracking material improvements in warranty and repair and redos,” says Cardis. “We’re shooting to get onboarding down to eight or nine months, and continue to secure better metrics on the first-time quality front as we prove the model out in 2022.”

For builders, who’ll continue to battle supply chain disruptions and other schedule elongation risks at every turn this year, it’s one way out of the echochamber of talking about capacity constraint.

Join the conversation

More: