This is the first in a series of five reported briefs about Opportunity Now Colorado, a $90M competitive grant program that used federal pandemic recovery funds to invest in employer-led workforce partnerships across every county in the state. In each piece, Alison Griffin, principal consultant at FutureRise, profiles a model that emerged from the program, with analysis of what other states could apply to their own industries and workforce needs.
Karla Nugent spent 12 years trying to get Colorado’s construction industry to stop cannibalizing itself. Companies poached each other’s workers. Associations guarded their turf. Union and non-union training programs ran in parallel and rarely spoke.
Then, in 2022, the state put $2.8M on the table through Opportunity Now, a competitive grant program with an unusual condition: employers had to lead the work, not just advise on it. The grant became the catalyst Nugent had waited a decade for. She used it to pull a fractured industry to one table and build Project SCALE—Scaling Construction Access for Learners and Earners.
“Opportunity Now was the catalyst for us to say, let’s all come together to the table,” says Nugent, a founding partner of Weifield Group—now Loenbro, a 5K-employee multi-craft contractor working in 15 states. “Without it, I don’t think we would have united to do all of this.”
Opportunity Now spread $90M in federal pandemic-recovery dollars, supplemented with state funds, across 96 grants in all 64 counties. The program exists because of House Bill 22-1350, the statute that turned one-time federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) money into a competitive, employer-led grant—the part another state could actually copy. It pushed applicants toward innovation and scale rather than business as usual.
“We built Opportunity Now to transform talent development by supporting employers to directly develop skilled talent with education partners,” says Eve Lieberman, executive director of the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT). “This innovative approach helps workers develop the skills for positions that companies need to fill. Project SCALE is an example of what that looks like when it works: an entire industry deciding to build its pipeline together, and building it to last.”
The 30K Gap
According to the Associated General Contractors of Colorado (AGC), Colorado will be short about 30K skilled trades workers by 2030. Jeff Barratt, president and CEO of the AGC, rattles off the jobs going unfilled: electricians, plumbers, pipefitters, construction superintendents, project managers, and estimators. A contractor cannot take on new work without the people to run it and do the building, and by AGC’s own business outlook, the state has $5B in project starts forecast for 2026 alone.
Then there is what Barratt calls the silver tsunami: senior workers retiring with no one behind them, because the pipeline was left to atrophy for a generation.
Getting Everyone in the Room
Project SCALE ran on a clear division of labor. AGC, the state’s largest construction trade association and the grant’s fiscal agent, convened a core Talent Acquisition Task Force of 20 employers that met 18 times over two years—part of the more than 100 employers the project has engaged over two and a half years. Colorado Succeeds, the state’s business-led education nonprofit, ran the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Talent Pipeline Management process with them, treating employers as the end customer and mapping backward from what they need to where those skills are, or are not, being produced. The Chamber Foundation counts roughly 90 active TPM collaboratives across the country.
Jason Tyszko, senior vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and a creator of its Talent Pipeline Management framework, says Colorado did what most of those collaboratives do not. “Colorado stands out because employers moved beyond participating in workforce discussions and took ownership of the workforce supply chain itself,” he says. In most sector partnerships, employers are asked to react to programs others design; in Colorado, he says, “they were not simply advising the system; they were acting as the end customer of that system.”
The choice of who ran that process mattered as much as the process itself. A trade association convening competitors to compare wages and retention carries antitrust exposure; a neutral intermediary is built to manage it. Colorado Succeeds, the state’s business-led nonprofit that serves as a workforce intermediary, could hold that ground.
“Employers have the microphone. We hold the process, not the agenda,” says Ben Gerig, director of workforce pathways at Colorado Succeeds, who facilitated the collaborative. That is why union and non-union training programs sat in the same room for the first time.
Barratt, who has spent decades in the industry, was blunt about the old model: “Advisory boards aren’t effective in their current format, as they aren’t employer centered.”
Colorado Succeeds expected the alignment work to take three meetings. Construction did it in one. “Construction doesn’t mess around,” Nugent says. “We’ve got schedules, we know when we want to start and when we want to finish.”
What the Data Said
The bigger surprise was where the data pointed. Everyone had come to the table assuming the shortage was at the top—more project managers and superintendents. Gerig’s employer questionnaire said otherwise. “One project manager can have a thousand craft workers working for them,” Nugent says. “That’s the pipeline we don’t have.” In the room, one contractor put it bluntly: construction superintendents matter, but if you cannot find the plumbers, pipefitters, and electricians, none of it matters. Volume, in this case, was the tipping point.
Nugent calls Project SCALE a construct: not another association, not a separate entity, but a framework that gives construction a single voice—to the state, to the schools, and to employers—about what a career in the industry actually looks like.
Getting there meant pushing through the resistance that comes with organizing any fragmented industry. The unions initially declined. Associations were territorial. Some companies wanted to apply for the grant on their own. “Then we look like a divided industry,” Nugent told them. “How is that helpful?”
Starting in the Classroom
The pipeline Project SCALE built runs from seventh grade to a bachelor’s degree, all of it inside the construction industry and inside the state of Colorado.
The entry point is Careers in Construction Colorado (CICC), which its president, Renee Zentz, grew from a single Colorado Springs pilot to more than 100 school sites and 5,500 students. Industry pays for curriculum, certifications, materials, and a career navigator embedded in the classroom for up to four years; the school provides the building and the teacher. At first, districts couldn’t even hire industrial-arts teachers, so CICC offered stipends of as much as $10K to attract them to schools.
Zentz tells her career navigators to treat the classroom like the students’ dinner table, the place where career conversations should happen but usually don’t. “Nothing happens without the feeder schools,” she says. “Unless students know about the opportunities in the industry when they’re younger, and they’re inspired, you’re not getting them.”
Students rate their readiness to enter the workforce at 1.4 on a four-point scale when they start, and 3.7 by the end of the year. Interest in construction roughly doubles over a single school year, and three years out, half of the students are still in the field or pursuing it.
Dylan’s story is what those numbers look like up close. A 2022 graduate of Widefield High School, he and his twin brother kept their grades up and played sports while facing adversity at home. In the CICC program at the MiLL, the Manufacturing Industry Learning Lab, a career and technical training center run by his school district, Dylan discovered the skilled trades, earned his certifications, and was mentored by instructor Mike Landis and his career navigator, Marlo Asher, now the program’s director of operations.
When he landed a job offer from Encore Electric, the roughly $1K cost of a first set of tools nearly stopped him, so CICC covered it, and he started at Encore in August 2022. “I wouldn’t be where I am today without the support and resources from Careers In Construction,” Dylan says.
Four years into his career, in April 2026, the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment’s apprenticeship office named him Apprentice of the Year, and he is on track to earn his journeyman’s license this summer. Today he works on major projects across Colorado and returns to career fairs to steer students toward the trades.
From Apprentice to Degree
From there, the pipeline feeds into registered apprenticeship. Colorado now has about 8K registered apprentices in the skilled trades, out of roughly 10K across all industries. AGC is developing a bridge program that would let high school seniors finish the first year of apprenticeship—144 hours of technical instruction and up to 500 hours on the job—before they graduate, carrying them past the point where most first-year apprentices quit. The program is still unfunded; AGC is targeting a fall 2027 launch if it can secure the funds to build it.
The credential that holds the pipeline together took an act of the Colorado General Assembly. Emily Griffith Technical College now offers an Associate of Applied Science Degree for Registered Apprenticeship, the first of its kind in Colorado, ensuring that all learning earns credit toward a college credential in registered apprenticeships at Emily Griffith.
A 2025 law, House Bill 25-1221, made Emily Griffith Technical College, the adult and postsecondary arm of the Denver Public Schools, the first technical college in the state’s K-12 system able to grant associate degrees. It transfers 45 credits of registered apprenticeship coursework and on-the-job learning in a block; the other 15 credits cover general education topics through courses valued and vetted by employers, so not typical math and English, but instead contextual concepts such as estimating and cost control in math and project scheduling, project management, and supervisory communication in English. The first cohort of Project SCALE launched in April with 39 students—about 28 pursuing the full degree, the rest earning a standalone leadership certificate—with industry deeply investing in the tuition.
“We now have apprentices earning an associate’s degree, paid for by industry. These are Coloradans who never thought they would hold a college degree,” Nugent says.
Articulation agreements with four-year institutions, now in development, would extend the path to a bachelor’s in construction management without a student leaving Colorado.
A Template for Other States
The pieces are not unique to Colorado. Every state has the same shortage, an AGC chapter, and access to the same Chamber framework. What is less common is a set of employers willing to assemble those pieces into one pipeline and lead it—and state leadership, through OEDIT and Gov. Jared Polis, willing to invest in a workforce that employers design and train.
Tyszko sees the same from the national vantage. “That shift from consultation to leadership is what distinguishes employer-led partnerships,” he says, “and is a major reason Project SCALE has become a strong model for the field.”
In July, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation named Colorado Succeeds as one of five grantees nationally, chosen from 181 applicants across 45 states, in its Pathways with Purpose Through Career-Connected Learning initiative. The Foundation awarded more than $1.5M in all, roughly $295K to each grantee, and Colorado Succeeds will put its award toward construction and skilled trades in metro Denver. The others focus on electrical work in North Carolina, advanced manufacturing and health sciences in Ohio, AI job skills in San Diego, and maritime and shipbuilding in Virginia.
“Colorado’s employers are ready to help build the next generation of talent, and that work must begin long before students graduate from high school,” says Scott Laband, president and CEO of Colorado Succeeds. “This grant will help connect students in the Denver metro area to employer-designed pathways in construction and the skilled trades, giving them earlier access to real-world learning, industry credentials, and clearer routes into good jobs.”
Colorado Succeeds is already running the same play in other industries, and an AI-focused collaborative will launch later this year. “Construction, life sciences, aerospace, manufacturing,” Gerig says. “We run the employer-led process every time, and it’s getting sharper with each one.”
The Test
Colorado also learned a few things the hard way. Letting apprenticeship count as college credit meant working around seat-time rules, instructor-credentialing requirements, and course-approval timelines—the accreditation machinery that slows higher education everywhere. Getting workers under 18 onto job sites is still unresolved, as the state has not clarified whether apprentices can log hours before they turn 18. And the state money meant to help schools sustain these programs is spread thinner by a 2029 rule requiring every district to offer career-and-technical education.
One company Barratt spoke with, representing about 250 apprentices, is spending $1.4M on its apprenticeship program this year—the kind of private investment that rarely surfaces in the workforce debate. Barratt points to figures like that as proof of the “skin in the game” employers now have.
The strength of Project SCALE is that the employers own it: they design the training, help pay for the degrees, and hire the graduates. That ownership is what carries it forward as the model scales to new industries and, its architects hope, new states.
Nugent spent 12 years getting to what Project SCALE became. “The hard knocks and some of the things we’re working on are going to benefit other industries,” she says.
The lessons are the point: what Colorado learns, the next state inherits.
Alison Griffin is principal consultant at FutureRise, a Colorado-based operating foundation. She works on sourcing stories about the impact of Opportunity Now Colorado, a workforce program of the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade.