Home improvement | Oxford Hills manufactured home makers and contractors band together to tackle skilled workforce deficits

In Oxford Hills, it isn't quantity that's the problem when it comes to finding trade workers for the manufactured housing construction business and other housing- and construction-related areas. It's the quality.

According to Peter Connell, president and chief executive officer of modular home manufacturer Oxford Homes, that quality is becoming frighteningly low. "It's not so much a problem with headcounts, because people come in plenty to fill out applications," he says, "but we find that the people coming to us do not have the skills or experience necessary for this type of work, particularly in trades-related jobs like electrician, plumber, finish carpenters and that kind of thing."

The situation is similar across Maine: Companies are pulling from an increasingly shallow pool of skilled trade workers, and home builders and contractors complain that they have fewer candidates to promote to supervisory positions and no real training for such promotions. What's more, they say, no immediate relief is in sight for either situation, locally or nationally. According to the National Center for Construction Education and Research, 30% more people will leave the skilled-labor workforce than enter it every year through 2013.

The situation is felt particularly hard in the Oxford Hills area, which is home to five manufactured home builders and various manufactured home installers and other contractors, mostly clustered along Route 26. Having a high concentration of manufactured home companies in such a small area is a point of pride for the region, says Barb Olson, vice president of the Growth Council of Oxford Hills. But in working to find new ways to grow that industry and the economy of Oxford Hills in general ˆ— which consists of Oxford, Norway, South Paris, West Paris, Waterford, Hebron and Harrison ˆ— the skilled trade workforce issue has become a potential stumbling block.

The problem is big enough to draw Oxford Hills' five manufactured home competitors together ˆ— along with other building and development organizations in the region ˆ— to start the Building Trades Training Collaborative, a new effort headed by the Growth Council of Oxford Hills and includes nearly 20 key industry, education and development stakeholders as core partners. Many aspects of the effort are still developing, but the collaborative has recently completed meeting with human resources professionals from various housing-related companies in Oxford Hills to develop some benchmarks for workforce needs. The group will next be working to organize meetings with chief financial officers and other decision-makers at the companies to cover funding issues and related topics.

The goal, says Connell, whose company is on the steering committee, is to help identify the skills, knowledge and training needed to create and sustain a vital, professional and available labor force for the building trades industry in western Maine.

According to Olson, the effort goes beyond construction and trade-related companies' interest in productivity and profitability to the larger issue of community development. "One of the overall goals with the Growth Council's development plans is to improve housing options in the region, because the housing stock is old and the median home prices are rising," she says. "Until now, we've done minimal work with the housing cluster. It's also important to help these companies expand even without the local concerns of Oxford Hills, though. The modular homes companies here don't just do work in Maine; they frequently ship out to places like Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard."

Vanishing breed
How bad are the skill sets of those applying to work at manufactured home builders, modular home installers and other housing-related companies? So bad that some of them cannot even meet the first half of the construction mantra "measure twice, cut once."

"A lot of people come in looking for a job and don't even know how to read a tape measure," laments Stacy Hott, general manager of Oxford-based Setwright General Contractors, which installs manufactured homes and is on the steering committee of the Building Trades Training Collaborative. "We need to get them the basic skills up front and even possibly post-training once they have jobs with us to make sure they can use the tools and do the work. This has been a problem for a long time, I'd say. I guess we just didn't feel the pain enough until now to gather together and deal with the issue."

In a state with such a large rural area and a history of physical labor, from paper mills to fishing to construction, a shortage of skilled trade workers might seem odd, particularly since efforts to build a more "professional" workforce geared toward the information economy are still relatively new. But it's no surprise to Marc Gosselin, director of the Western Maine University and Community College Center, an educational facility and career center that is helping to develop a skilled trades curriculum in Oxford Hills.

"The frustration for the industry is that there are people who have been working in the trades around here for 10 or 15 years or longer who have the skills partly because they were tinkering with their cars or building porches with their parents when they were kids," Gosselin says. "You don't see that as much anymore. Instead, you see young men and women playing Nintendo."

Connell agrees, describing the baby boom generation as more "self-sufficient" and adding that they learned the basic trade skills around their own homes growing up, were exposed to them in high school and worked with those skills in summer jobs on construction sites.

"We all do a certain amount of on-the-job training, and one of the advantages of the manufactured homes business is that we're in a controlled environment where we can do some of our own training, more often than you can out in construction sites, for example," Connell says. "But we cannot do it all. It's a social issue. And the solutions need to start way earlier than even graduation from high school."

Indeed, the building and construction industries in Oxford Hills have a significant impact on the local economy, says Gerard Dennison, senior economic analyst for western and southern Maine for the Department of Labor.

The modular home manufacturers in the area ˆ— Keiser Industries, Burlington Homes and Oxford Homes of Oxford; KBS Building Systems of South Paris; and Waterford Homes in Waterford ˆ— employed 588 people and had a combined payroll of $3.5 million during the first quarter of 2005, accounting for 42% of the area's manufacturing jobs, according to Dennison.

And that's just the manufactured home builders. In the Bridgton-Paris Labor Market Area, which comprises Bridgton, Harrison, Norway, Otisfield, Oxford, Paris, Stoneham, Waterford and West Paris, the construction industry employed 672 people at 144 contracting firms in the third quarter of 2004. In addition, building construction contractors employed 332 people at 50 firms, and special trade contractors employed 332 at 91 firms.

"And we all share the same dwindling labor pool," Connell notes, "with people sometimes jumping from company to company several times a year, which doesn't help us build a consistent workforce."

Forward momentum
The actual solutions aren't here yet, though the participants in the Building Trades Training Collaborative hope to bring them to light soon. The collaborative is still in its very early stages, and is only now interviewing consultants to help give shape to its overall goals and develop better promotion, marketing and recruitment in the skilled trade arena, according to Olson.

She says, however, that a great deal of momentum has been generated in terms of beginning to formulate a plan for training people to enter into the industry. One of the biggest steps, she says, was the creation of the Western Maine University last year, which she points to as a prime example of collaboration and cooperation. A community-wide effort in Oxford Hills renovated a former building on the Oxford County Fairgrounds to serve as a career center, and to help bring in curricular programs and educational resources through Central Maine Community College and the University of Maine.

"So, we now have access to higher education sources that can help provide training in trades, as well as a center that can be used by local business to deliver their own training program," Olson says.

Currently, Gosselin is formulating a draft curriculum for skilled trades education that is split into three phases. Phase I concentrates on post-hire training for new employees and covers such areas as construction math, usage of power tools and basic safety issues. Phase II deals with training for incumbent workers to further develop their skills and is currently slated to cover plumbing, electrical, framing, finish carpentry, roofing and siding, and blueprint reading. Phase III deals with skills for supervisors and managers and would cover such areas as supervision and leadership, team building, communication skills and project management.

Although no final determination has been made, funding for the Phase I post-hire training may be provided by the Maine Quality Center, which is funded by the state to promote economic development by providing job specific training for new and expanding businesses in the state, according to Gosselin. Funding for Phase II is still undetermined. For Phase III, training would be carried out by Central Maine Community College trainers, and industries would most likely pool resources to help pay for the classes.

The curriculum is still somewhat in flux. "I'm in the process of putting together a ton of questions to pose to people in the industry around here to get feedback on what kind of skills training they think is needed, when we can schedule class times, and other things along those lines," Gosselin says.

Olson says the plan is for new worker and work readiness training programs to begin around January 2006 in order to meet May 2006 demands for workers.

Although the key issue is the workforce in general, she says the supervisory training issues loom large as well. "Often what happens is you have someone who is successful on the line or in the field, and he or she shows up to work every day, and based on work ethic and skills, this person is promoted to supervisor," Olson notes. "That doesn't mean that person has the skills to supervise anyone, but as an employer, particularly with competition for labor, you want to show appreciation for this person's honesty and skills."

It's not that companies lack the desire to provide supervisory training, but that they often lack the resources and time to do so, Olson says. She believes that by using the Western Maine University and perhaps putting potential supervisors from a number of industries in the same class, costs can be minimized and training time maximized.

Another critical issue of concern for Olson and the members of the collaborative is the image of the construction trades and trade work in general. It's a line of work that's gotten a bad rap with the increasing focus on white-collar skills and information technology and high-tech jobs. In this area, she thinks the collaborative may be able to help by opening up manufactured home plants to the public and to schoolchildren for tours, and finding other ways of promoting the industry to people who might later decide to enter it.

The collaborative may get a boost in these efforts from a recent promotional campaign by the Maine Construction Careers Alliance, which aired TV ads throughout Maine for six weeks in spring, and which will do so again in late summer or early fall.

"The ads have helped give people a different perspective on skilled trades as something attractive," says Scott Tompkins, deputy director of Associated Constructors of Maine, which is one of the MCCA partner organizations. (Tompkins also is a Mainebiz columnist.) "It's important for us to improve the image of the industry and help attract both younger and non-traditional applicants to the skilled trades in construction. We need to help build a framework so that people can recognize that there is long-term career potential in this area."