How to attract trainees? Consider them customers!

A SIMPLE ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT CAN HELP RECRUIT AND RETAIN WORKERS IN THE FLOORING TRADE

Academy Canada is a career college with three campuses in Newfoundland and Labrador, and it has created something rather unique in Canada: an independent floor-installer program. And, by most measures, it looks great. It was created to meet the demands of the local flooring industry, which helped develop the curriculum, which in turn has met strict government guidelines. There’s only one problem, however: there are no students; nobody is signing up for the program.

This situation probably doesn’t come as a surprise to most Canadian flooring-industry professionals, or anyone involved in the trades. The so-called skills gap, labour shortage, or whatever label they can think of next, has been much talked about, yet few working solutions seem to exist. Young people appear very reluctant to take up trades, including flooring, and nobody seems to know what to do about it.

Well, almost nobody. Dean Mattson is the director of a very unique training program at North Salem High School in Salem, Ore. He teaches cabinet making, which obviously isn’t floor installing, but the two trades have much in common: a decent but not overwhelmingly high wage offering, unglamorous working conditions, and lack of students/trainees. It’s the story of one of Mattson’s students that has drawn attention to the program.

According to Mattson, he helped one of his students, a Hispanic girl he calls Mary, finish a project, which was a very small table measuring 16 inches by 16 inches by 16 inches. She told him it was the perfect dining room table. He said, “For your dolls?” She said no; that it was for herself and her little brothers and sisters to eat on in the back seat of the car — where they were living. That moment has left an indelible impression on Mattson, but it also helped shaped the success of his program.

As Mattson describes it, “When I first came to the high school, students didn’t want to sign up for cabinet-making. So, out of necessity, since the program was in jeopardy, I started asking students like Mary what they wanted — not only out of school, but out of life. And they kept saying they wanted to get out of poverty and have a decent job. Well, that’s exactly what my program does.”

Although Mary didn’t become a cabinet maker, she did become a secretary who could afford an apartment for her family. Other students of Mattson’s have become professional cabinet makers and woodworkers highly sought by industry. Mattson says his graduates have a 100-person success rate. In other words, they all find meaningful work, and it’s often in the trade they’ve been taught.

How does Mattson do it? He says he turns the traditional approach to training on its head. Instead of having educators force-feed a curriculum students don’t want to learn, Mattson, a former successful business owner, has designed his training program to meet the demands of his clients: his students. He says, “I started treating my students like I would my customers. I instilled skills in them that were in demand in the workforce.”

Which brings us back to the floor-installer program at Academy Canada in Newfoundland, where the traditional approach was followed to a tee. In other words, the students were the last ones asked, and their answer was to stay away in droves. Pauline Maxwell, program development coordinator at Academy Canada, bemoans the situation. She says, “We even marketed the program extensively, including to high schools, and young people still don’t want to sign up.”

A common theme started to develop as we asked Canadian training experts what the problem was in attracting people to trades such as floor installation. Specifically, there was an acknowledgement that the target audience — or the customer, as Mattson calls it — was not being served. Whether it’s in the classroom, or on the job, trainees are not being treated well, so they’re either leaving, or just staying away.

Mike Plested is the installation manager at Cutting Edge Contract Flooring in Edmonton, Alta. He provides his own insight into the training woes in the flooring industry, and how his company has learned to address them. “I’ve seen it far too often where new trainees are just shouted at,” he says. “Unfortunately, too many companies in our industry just see the bottom line.

“So, if new trainees aren’t doing the work fast enough, the employers see it as losing money, so they get abusive. We don’t do that here. We genuinely treat our installers like we care about them, like they’re people. And they respond in kind. I’ve been doing this for 11 years now, and we keep our installers, or they keep coming back to us.”

Indeed, the model for training used at Cutting Edge appears to be a departure from what is common in the industry. Aimilios Tsagkalidis, a floor installer from Burlington, Ont., describes what he sees most often. He says, “You know, it’s hard to attract good people. Right now, contractors are finding people off the street, or hiring their relatives. It’s tough. But what are you going to do? An installer gets hired, he does what he can, and then he goes on to the next job. He sees a welder on the job site, or an electrician, and decides that’s what he wants to do, so he leaves. Rarely do I see people stay on as floor installers. It’s sad, but I think it’s true.”

At Cutting Edge, they have established a regimen designed specifically to train and keep good installers. According to Plested, “We first take workers and, before teaching installation, we have them do the simple stuff like scraping floors. This way, we establish a good working relationship with our people before they move on to the more challenging stuff.”

After about a year, Plested says that’s when they send their trainees off to a Red Seal program as the start of an apprenticeship program. The trainees eventually come back, can finish their apprenticeship, and even start the journeyman process, too. He adds, “And, so far, it’s working for us. We have a staff that is well-trained, dedicated and loyal.”

Which raises another issue when it comes to training. Cutting Edge addresses the trainee side by treating and training their people well. However, Cutting Edge also addresses their own demands by making sure they first train the workers, and then send them off for more education. As Plested explains, “We prefer to have our workers get familiar with what we want from them, and then get them more formally trained.”

Training is a dilemma experienced across all trades. Employers of tradespeople are often unhappy with the training workers get from formal schooling. In fact, employers sometimes find themselves having to un-train the graduates before re-training them for the specific jobs at hand. The balance between what employers want and how workers are trained isn’t there, even though research shows it can be.

Rosemary Sparks is executive director of BuildForce Canada, an organization created to deal with the workforce situation in the construction industry. According to Sparks, her organization’s data shows a lot of potential within Canada’s flooring sector.

She explains, “There is balance in much of Canada in terms of the amount of flooring jobs out there, and the number of people who can fill these jobs. It’s obviously not a perfect situation, and some regions are tougher than others. However, there are people out there who can fill these flooring jobs. It’s just a matter of doing a better job of matching these potential workers with employers.”

Oregon’s Mattson was able to match a high-school population with a 20-percent homeless rate to an industry desperately in need of decently-trained workers. Canada is not lacking a similar pool of workers. For example, the Canadian aboriginal community is considered one of the poorest in the country, and its plight is often considered an international embarrassment for Canada.

BuildForce Canada has targeted this pool of young, underprivileged workers, but Sparks readily admits that the predictable challenges exist. She says, “Quite frankly, we just can’t generate enough interest among aboriginal youth in trades like flooring. And it isn’t for a lack of trying.”

For example, just like Academy Canada (www.academycanada.com/programs-and-courses/flooring-installer), BuildForce Canada has put together a terrific information package on flooring installation as a career. It can be found at www.aboriginalcontructioncareers.ca/explore/floor-covering-installer. It includes a description of the job, the duties, the work conditions, skills needed, apprenticeships available, and where further training can be found. Yet, so far, there just haven’t been enough takers.

So, is all hope lost for the flooring industry finding enough capable people to install its product? Probably not. For one thing, somebody out there might want to start thinking about adopting Mattson’s business-like approach to training. He certainly thinks they should. He says, “There is no reason why a program like ours can’t succeed anywhere in America or Canada. It’s simple, it can be tweaked, and it works.”

Alternatively, Canadian governments at various levels have been furiously trying to chip away the so-called skills gap, with varying levels of success. For example, Dennis Harlock, a coordinator of the wood industry program at Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ont., says “Currently we have 68 confirmed registrants as of May 17, 2013. This number is up about 12 students that were enrolled in September 2012. I would expect that we will have 72 to 78 students in the fall of 2013.”

Mark Forgeron, a professor at Conestoga’s Woodworking Centre, believes the message might be finally getting through to Canadians. He says, “I do think there has been a stigma against the trades in Canada, but we’ve been trying to push back against this for years. Governments seem to be on-side on this, too. It’s been a slow process, but I think we’re seeing some genuine progress.”

It will nonetheless take more than a few dozen more students at Conestoga or Academy Canada to turn the tide. It also raises some important questions. Although governments and educators continue to address the problem, and throw a lot of money at it, too, are they really hitting the mark? That is, are they listening to what potential workers across the country want in a job, and a career? Until that happens, there may never be enough willing participants in the Canadian flooring job market.