Home improvement behemoth Lowe’s recently announced that they will be spending $250M to train 250K tradespeople, offering beleaguered American homeowners a glimmer of relief as they struggle with a critical shortage of plumbers, electricians, and carpenters. But that a retail company feels the need to spend a quarter billion dollars to fix a systemic workforce shortage is a condemnation of the system itself.
Lowe’s is just the latest company attempting to work around the U.S. education system to expand training for skilled tradespeople. Home Depot and even Black Rock have invested serious money into ensuring the United States has enough workers to fill a rapidly growing labor gap.
Our country is projected to be 6M workers short by 2032, including nearly two construction job openings for every unemployed worker. When the pipeline created by the education system doesn’t produce what the economy needs, businesses don’t wait. They build.
The problem, though, is that most of these employers are doing it alone. Left to their own devices, even well-intentioned employer solutions tend to solve for the short term.
A company that builds its own training program fills its own hiring queue; it creates a pathway to one job at one firm. Boeing and Toyota, for example, have created highly successful training programs for their manufacturing processes, but with limited portability outside of their plant floors. Companies have no incentive to build a holistic system—with credentials that travel across employers, stack into further education, or open doors beyond their immediate hiring needs. They instead build workarounds.
That’s the real risk at this moment. Not that employers are building pipelines, but that they’ll build them in isolation. If that becomes the norm, we end up with a patchwork of programs that are efficient for individual companies but confusing for learners, inaccessible for smaller employers, and ultimately too fragmented to meet the scale of the problem. What’s at risk is the overall health of communities and regional economies.
There’s another way to do this.
Systemic problems require systemic solutions, including rethinking the current process of employee training. When competitors come to the table and act as a sector, they send a clear signal about the scale and nature of demand. Rather than investing in one-off solutions designed to fill existing gaps in workforce readiness, employers can become part of the conversation to build scaled, future-looking solutions, allowing education and training providers to respond with programs that lead to real skills, recognized credentials, and durable careers.
We’ve seen this strategy work in Colorado, where 14 companies—including some of the largest construction and electrical companies—partnered with a local public technical college to build an upskilling pathway that moves experienced craft professionals into leadership roles.
Designed to help employers fill a projected 30K shortage of workers over the next four years, the curriculum was designed directly by employers to reflect the real demands of the job: cost estimating, budgeting, contract negotiation, and project management. Participants receive credit for prior work experience, and the program allows individuals to continue working while advancing through the 18-month program. Graduates finish with an associate degree in construction management, a credential that carries weight in the labor market, and can stack it into a bachelor’s degree.
Learners aren’t just trained for one company. They are prepared for a set of roles across an entire sector, with the potential to double their wages and continue advancing. Colorado will soon begin piloting a similar program in life sciences.
This is what happens when employer demand becomes the blueprint for a shared system rather than a workaround for one. By partnering with public education providers, businesses gain access to a foundation and the scale needed for long-term change. Public education, meanwhile, gains the ability to keep pace with changing labor-market demand, ensuring the next generation of workers have the skills they actually need.
Instead of isolated pipelines, businesses can invest in pathways that are shared, portable, and aligned across an industry.
Lowe’s investment should not be read as a challenge to public education. It should be read as a call to redesign the system so that this kind of investment strengthens a common pathway instead of creating another silo.
The blueprint exists. The question is whether we are willing to follow it together.
Scott Laband is the president and CEO of Colorado Succeeds, a nonprofit, nonpartisan coalition of business leaders committed to improving Colorado’s education and workforce system.