Construction courses scramble to keep pace with booming industry.

A four-year carpenter apprenticeship got Trevor Eggleston in the door. He then spent another four years working day-to-day in his trade. But he says he realized he was never going to ascend to the level of project manager unless he went back to school.

"When you are a carpenter, you pretty much max out at that job," Eggleston, 31, said. "At best, you may someday become a foreman or a superintendent. But to get into project management, which was where I really wanted to go, you need some sort of formal education. And that's how I ended up back in the classroom."

The classroom in this case was a series of popular construction management courses offered by Albuquerque Technical Vocational Institute. The courses cover both the muscle aspect of the business--learning about and understanding construction materials--and the mental aspect--learning how to plan and schedule a job and how to produce reliable time estimates.

"The student base for these kinds of classes is incredibly diverse," said David Ruff, chairman of the construction management technology program at Albuquerque TVI. "We have students who are college age and really just want to get into the construction industry for the first time" Ruff said, "and those who are already working in a trade or craft position and are in their 30s and middle age and want to advance to the management level."

Such courses, offering a wide range of construction education, are proving to be increasingly popular across the country, reflecting the simple dynamics of the industry itself.

"Business is booming," said Stephen E. Sandherr, chief executive officer with the Associated General Contractors of America, headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia. "In fact we are the only goods-producing sector in the U.S. right now that is projected to grow over the course of the next decade, which means that we need to recruit over a quarter of a million new workers into our industry in that same period of time just to keep pace."

And that is on top of an already record-high level of construction employment in the country, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, which counts the nation's total construction labor force at more than 6.9 million as of 2004, including the 200,000 new workers who were brought into the industry that year alone.

"I think you could definitely say that the employment opportunities in the nation's construction industry are extremely positive right now," said Jaki Faircloth, a custom services manager with the National Center for Construction Education and Research in Gainesville, Florida. "In fact it's so positive that there are many jobs that are going unfilled--good-paying jobs--because there really aren't enough skilled people to fill them."

It is for that reason, continued Faircloth, that more and more two-year schools are offering a wide array of both basic construction education and management programs, many of which are then accredited by organizations like the NCCER or local building and trade associations.

"Our programs emphasize trades like carpentry and electrical work," Faircloth said, "basically anything that is connected with the construction industry." Additional NCCER-accredited communitycollege course offerings include pipefitting, plumbing, masonry, industrial maintenance and construction technology.

Similarly, community-college course offerings accredited by the American Council for Construction Education offer programs in construction science, construction management and construction technology.

"Right now we are working with 10 community colleges that offer construction education programs," said Billye Hall, executive assistant with the ACCE. "We have more and more accredited programs all of the time, which I think really reflects a growing interest not only on the part of students who want to become involved in the construction industry, but also the community colleges themselves, who see that these programs are satisfying a growing demand on the part of their students."

But a major challenge for both the construction industry and the nation's community colleges that offer construction education centers is increasing the percentage of minority and female workers in the field. "The numbers are still lower than we would like them to be," said Sandherr, "and by that I mean both in the industry and the classroom."

According to industry leaders, minority employment in construction is less than their percentage of the national population, with blacks, Hispanics and Asian Americans making up a combined quarter to a third of the workforce. The percentage of women, both in industry and in the classroom, however, remains much lower than the percentage of the U.S. population they represent.

The construction management technology program at Albuquerque TVI may be a good case in point. In a city where Hispanics make up more than 40 percent of the population and blacks and Asian Americans together make up 3 percent, "our minority breakout pretty much follows the general population," said Ruff. "But if women really do represent about 50 percent of the population, we do not have near that much in the classroom."

Sandherr believes that the only way to improve such statistics is through recruitment: "I really believe that diversity is just a byproduct of an industry that is in dire need for new entrants. But the word has to get out to the minority community through our industry and the schools that are offering construction education that these opportunities are available in a way that they never have been before."

Those opportunities may well expand in the future, if a separate set of statistics from the Department of Labor is on the mark. They indicate that the average age of the nation's construction work force in 2004 was 47 years old, and that retirements in the next decade are expected to exceed the 3 million mark.

"I think one of the hopeful signs is the growing diversity on the campuses of the different community colleges," said Hall of the ACCE, "because that is the same student body that we are drawing off of and seeing in our classrooms.

"The numbers are getting better all of the time," Hall continued. "But, ironically, the real challenge is now even larger: Will we have enough young workers of any color or gender to take advantage of all of the hundreds of thousands of job openings that we expect to see come open in the near future? I don't think that we know the answer to that one yet."