Increased wages or training expenditures could, however, drive up prices
By Danielle Verbrigghe
Phoenix Business Journal
Contending with a shortage of skilled construction workers to power a recovering Phoenix building industry, companies may have to invest more in wages and training or ramp up their talent search.
“As the construction market heats up, we are going to find ourselves in a critical shortage of trained construction workers,” said Dennis Hoffman, an economics professor for the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.
As the industry rebounds from the recession, employers are finding that some skilled workers have left the business or moved to other states.
Mark Minter, executive director of the Arizona Builders’ Alliance, said part of the problem is that the industry is not attracting the same level of interest from younger generations.
“In the building trades it’s very difficult to convince, young people to go directly into those trades out of high school like they used to,” Minter said. “For the college route, even the schools of construction management are not graduating enough to meet our demands.”
