The $1.2T infrastructure bill marks one of the most significant investments in the country’s infrastructure since Congress responded to the Great Recession.

The bill, signed into law on Monday, November 15, will send billions of dollars to states and local jurisdictions, over the next five years. More than $110 billion will be directed to replace and repair roads, bridges, and highways, and $66 billion to boost rail, making it the most substantial such investment in the country’s passenger and commercial network since the creation of Amtrak. In addition, lawmakers provided $55 billion to improve the nation’s water supply and replace lead pipes, $60 billion to modernize the power grid and expand broadband and other public works projects.

This means the biggest impacts of this bill will be felt by those in the construction industry and the communities where the resources will be spent.  Some reports are estimating that this could create 1 million jobs over the course of five years.

Clearly, this is an incredible opportunity for those contractors who typically bid on projects with public-funding, and given the scale, this represents a new market for those firms who haven’t.  So, what does that mean for the industry’s that will be charged with putting this money to work?

Here’s What We Know

The ability to demonstrate the economic impact of this funding and the specific individual projects is going to be paramount for both the funders and the contractors.  There is a continuation of the existing disadvantaged business enterprise (DBE) program to address race and gender discrimination in surface transportation related business.  Funded projects must have at least  10 percent of the work provided to small business concerns owned and controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals.  Additionally, there are requirements to ensure prompt payments to DBE contractors.  Finally, projects receiving any funds must ensure they are paying prevailing wages to those workers on the project.

To ensure that the funds are both building the infrastructure, as well as having the desired economic impact across the country, it will be important for projects to capture information about business participation, labor demographics, and prevailing wages in order to demonstrate these positive benefits.

Three Things to Consider (and how SkillSmart can Help)

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. The key to ensuring full access to the benefits of this bill is data tracking and reporting. This shouldn’t sound new, as it is a refrain that projects owners, both public and private, have been saying for some time, but the demands of the Infrastructure Bill are absolutely amplifying the importance of data collection, monitoring, and reporting to ensure equitable and inclusive projects.

This is an opportunity that shouldn’t be missed. Here are three things to consider before this funding starts flowing into your project pursuit pipeline:

1. The requirements outlined in the law can be straightforward and inexpensive to track so don’t let it keep your company from bidding on this new work.
2. It’s a simple and straightforward process to track, manage and report on the key elements contained within the law and meet any reporting requirements that may arise.
3. The ability to proactively demonstrate the economic benefits of a project can provide you a competitive advantage when bidding on new work.

SkillSmart will be digging into this bill over the next few months, providing a deeper dive into:

• Specific construction sectors where funding is being allocated.
• Where our team is currently supporting contractors and owners on projects like the ones anticipated within the infrastructure bill.
• How technology will play a key role in executing these projects into the future.

If you are interested in discussing any of the information above or how SkillSmart can support your team with tracking, managing, and reporting your project data, please contact Joshua Lowery (jlowery@skillsmart.us).

Technology is supposed to make your construction projects faster, easier and cheaper – Right? Except that every task has its own technology application. So, now you and your subcontractors have to log on to multiple systems, learn different programs that don’t talk to each other, and end up spending more time than you did before all this technology made your life easier! For example, when it comes to tracking, managing and reporting on business expenditures and workforce efforts, you can often use multiple software applications, at least one internal compliance manager on your staff, and an external consultant to pull it all together for your monthly reports.

SkillSmart’s InSight platform can help connect the dots, and begin to make life a whole lot easier. InSight combines your ability to capture business and workforce data for all of your projects in a single platform. It also pushes the data entry process down to each of the subcontractors on every tier so that all the data rolls up to the GC to track, manage and report – providing much greater transparency and accuracy into the entire process… and make it easier to manage. It also provides dynamic reporting so that you can easily check your dashboard for any and all projects to see how much progress is being made. The InSight platform can also pull in data from your other internal applications reducing time and errors. Finally, it can generate the reports you need with one click.

We believe that doing the right thing shouldn’t make your life and job more difficult – so we’re working hard to making things simpler for you where we can.

Many new developments and construction projects are compelled to track how many small and diverse businesses are working on their project along with how many local and diverse residents are employed by the contractors working on the project. Much of the time, this tracking and reporting is done because the projects have some public participation – tax credits, public financing, land use approvals – but there are also projects that track and use this information because the recognize it increases the value of their project. Tracking these efforts are important because they can help to quantify the economic value that these projects have in their community. Unfortunately, this process has always been difficult and cumbersome. Often it has just been a compliance effort on the part of the projects and jurisdictions – a box that needs to be checked. The broader, very important, story is rarely told.

SkillSmart’s new InSight platform has been designed to achieve both of these functions – simply and dynamically meet the compliance requirements and provide usable data to tell the exciting story of the project impact.

As important, this data and associated tools help developers, GCs, and subs to make better decisions, hire stronger partners and employ better workers.

Now it’s easier for construction projects to get and stay compliant with their business and workforce requirements, and for all projects to demonstrate why they are beneficial for their communities by strengthening local businesses and residents.

Last year, Maryland’s General Contractor Liability for Unpaid Wages Act took effect providing an employee with the right to sue both their employer and the general contractor for the job on which they’re working for up to three times the wages owed to the employee, plus attorneys’ fees and costs. Perhaps even more significant is that this new law permits an employee to take such action as early as 2 weeks after the date on which the wage in question was to have been paid.

Failure to comply with Maryland’s prevailing wage and hour laws now exposes general contractors and subcontractors to significantly greater liability than before.

Now, more than ever, it is vitally important for both GCs and Subs to have the ability to track, validate and report, in real time, that each employee working on a project is being paid the appropriate wage.

Email and Excel spreadsheets are no longer sufficient. They do not provide the timely safeguards you need to preserve project margins from unnecessary risk and litigation.

At SkillSmart, we understand the difficulty in tracking the data necessary to prove compliance with this new law. We also recognize the need for a simple and cost-effective solution.

Working with contractors on large and small projects across the country,  we developed the InSight platform to allow subcontractors to submit their own payroll information and, in one-click, see if there are any compliance issues that require follow-up, and the audit trail to back it up. This provides everyone working on a job with a single, secure location to input employee and payroll data, ensuring data is being provided at the source and all parties are working on the same page.

SkillSmart InSight helps you focus on the project at hand by providing a simple, cost-effective solution to help you better manage potential liabilities in real-time and making it easier to stay compliant.

Learn more about how InSight can help you simplify your compliance efforts.

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Veterans and their spouses have the right skills.

On this Veteran’s Day, our thoughts turn to those who have served and are serving our nation in the military. There is often talk of sacrifice and service, but most of our population has very little understanding of what our Veterans have done or the commitment they’ve made.

In fact, only about 7% of the total U.S. population, or about 22 million people, have served or are serving in the military. When you consider that nearly two-thirds of these Veterans served prior to the Gulf wars, then it’s not surprising that most people in the workplace have very little opportunity to interact with someone who may have served and have any understanding of how much value a Veteran can bring to their organization.

At SkillSmart, we are honored to be supporting the Anne Arundel Workforce Development Corporation in implementing the Military Corps Career Connect (C3) program to assist transitioning military, military spouses and Veterans in finding employment opportunities in their community.

We know that those serving and supporting our military acquire numerous skills during their duties each day, but don’t know how those skills correlate to civilian jobs. Using our technology, we can help employers better communicate the skills they’re seeking and help Veterans better see how the skills they’ve gained in the military can land them a good job.

We hope that our contribution can help improve the lives of some of those who have chosen to defend ours.

More and more people are trying to better understand the future of work and why the U.S. has more open jobs – more than 6 million – than at any time in our history. In September, former VP Joe Biden hosted an event Choosing a Future of Quality Jobs, in order to discuss the opportunities and challenges posed by transformations in the U.S. economy and how quality jobs can be created to support a growing middle class.

At this event, Jim Murren, the Chairman of MGM Resorts International, discussed the hiring efforts that his firm undertook at MGM Resorts National Harbor. SkillSmart was honored to partner with MGM Resorts National Harbor to help the company focus on local hiring, reach out to vocational schools and local community colleges, and deliver a system that could quickly identify skilled talent and match them to the right positions. Applicants for a variety of jobs at the property could go online and identify the kinds of job that interested them, as well as their skills.

“They could immediately find the gaps that they have, certifications they need to get, training they needed to be provided, and we helped them get that,” Murren said. “Companies that say they can’t find qualified workers, they’re not trying hard enough.”

It’s great that these efforts and the SkillSmart platform were highlighted in such a significant forum, and as more and more organizations are recognizing that they can take a new approach to building a skilled workforce and increase economic opportunity for both employees and themselves. We’re committed to this goal and to helping people and organizations make it a reality.

Why is it that each day we see a story about a company that can’t find workers, communities without jobs, and graduates not finding work?

It’s not that we don’t have jobs. 
We have 6.2 million unfilled jobs in the U.S., more than at any time in our history.

It’s not that we don’t have training. 
We have more capacity and more students enrolled in our community colleges, training programs and universities than at any point in history.

It’s not that we don’t have good people willing to work.
We have more high school graduates, vocational school and community college graduates, and university graduates than any time in our history. We have thousands of experienced, underemployed Veterans transitioning from the military.

All the same, more people are struggling to find good jobs than at any time in our history – and this is a problem that we can tackle right now in every community in the U.S. Let’s start with what’s broken and then address how to fix it.

First, job boards don’t work. Simply matching job descriptions to resumes does not lead to good outcomes and job descriptions don’t do a good job of telling an applicant what they need to do to be successful. Ask any employer, all you get is a time-wasting list of unqualified candidates to sort through.

Second, when an individual is not well qualified for a job, there is no clear path of how to get there.

Third, just because a course is offered at a local college doesn’t mean that it will help you get a job.

Finally, most people, employers, or schools don’t want to do anything differently, even thought the current process doesn’t work.

Let’s resolve this Labor Day to fix this mess. Here’s what to do:

First, employers must identify the skills they need and use this in their job postings – not just entry-level.  This will make it clearer within their organization and to applicants what they must do to be successful.

Second, job seekers must use the specific experiences they’ve had in their life (school, work, volunteer, etc.) to demonstrate how they can do the skills the employer is seeking.

Third, local colleges and training programs must look at the skills the employers are seeking to ensure their courses provide students with what they need to get hired.

These three simple steps will help align the interests of the three key stakeholders in a community – employers, job seekers, and educators – and train better employees, improve education outcomes and make stronger employers.

In the words of Home Depot – Let’s Do This… and we can help.

Over the past weeks, we have seen Made in America Week, Infrastructure Week, and the Democrats’ Deal for the American Worker. There seems to be agreement that many Americans are trapped in jobs that don’t pay desirable wages while other, higher-earning jobs remain unfilled and that developing skills and training for jobs for the future is critically important. But the “how” is just as important.

As companies continue to invest in America, we still are seeing a shortage of skilled workers – and this holds everyone back, no matter which side of the aisle you’re on.

We at SkillSmart are focused on the “how.” How do employers more effectively identify the skilled workers they need? How do job seekers better convey that they have skills and that they are more than just a resume? How do we develop education programs that deliver in-demand skills?

Watch the recent TEDx talk to hear more.

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We are excited to see the emergence of a national conversation on the importance of using skills to build the workforce, improve hiring outcomes, and increase opportunities for success. In the past few months we have seen a focus on rebuilding America’s infrastructure, products Made In America, and helping workers rebuild their skills to increase opportunities for success in the workplace.

There have also been recent efforts on behalf of some foundations to direct tens of millions of dollars to see if philanthropy can build a system to create a stronger workforce.

In just two years, the SkillSmart platform has been used by more than 20,000 job seekers, to assist more than 30 employers to hire more than 1,000 people for jobs paying between $35,000 and $80,000 annually. 

By using a skills-based model for hiring, SkillSmart increases transparency in the hiring process, improves hiring outcomes for job seekers and increases employee retention. We have demonstrated that a skills-based focus on hiring is not just a good idea, it’s good business.

We have real data from working with employers and communities to focus on skills to build stronger workers, increase job retention, and improve efficiency in hiring. Most important, we’ve found this can be done with a scalable technology solution with the market paying for these outcomes and without relying on philanthropic dollars.

Skills-based hiring is not a charitable activity; it’s a real-world, market-based solution to close the skills gap and grow our economy. And we’re supporting the movement by continuing to identify new clients, in new communities, and new industries.

The President has been highlighting infrastructure and workforce development this week, which is exactly what we’ve been working on at SkillSmart for the past two years. For us this is not a theoretical exercise – we’re working with partners to construct real projects, hire real people and grow local economies. I wanted to share some observations from the communities in which we’ve been working.

Earlier this week, I listened from the back of a Detroit community room as city representatives and local developers gave updates to citizens on local projects. Wherever we travel, we try to find ways to connect with the local community, and I was fortunate to get word of this briefing where citizens heard updates on development projects, asked questions, and voiced concerns. Most of the meeting consisted of general city updates and questions about noise, cost, access, and benefits; but, the drama of one exchange made me perk up and put down my plate of chicken schwarma.

First, a bit of background, Detroit developers that engage in projects beyond a certain contract threshold are required to hire 51% of their workforce from Detroit. If they fail to meet this requirement they are assessed a substantial penalty. Well, one citizen didn’t think that the fact that developers were simply paying a penalty was sufficient.

She stood to voice her frustration that the developers that weren’t meeting the 51% requirement weren’t fulfilling their responsibility. Immediately, the developer’s representative responded that building the workforce wasn’t their responsibility. The exchange escalated from there – as the citizen couldn’t believe that the developer didn’t think it their responsibility to hire locally, particularly given the requirement.

To conclude the heated exchange, the developer clarified, that it was their responsibility to hire Detroiters, it just wasn’t their responsibility to ensure Detroiters had the skills to get hired.

The developer – and the citizen – was right. And wrong.

This conversation is representative of hundreds of conversations that are taking place all across America.

There is a lot of talk about the job market, and recently much more talk about infrastructure, but there is far too little conversation regarding the workforce and how to ensure workers actually have the right skills to be qualified today and successful tomorrow.

Late last year I gave a TEDx talk that put a spotlight on our broken talent development system. I argued that it’s broken because everyone points the finger at someone else.

Businesses, for the large part, expect the education system to deliver them a well-trained individual who’s able to step right into the job without any training or assistance from industry. You will be hard pressed to find a traditional four-year institution that considers preparing students for work as part of its mission. Somehow, the fact that 85% of students say that they went to college to get a job has been overlooked by our traditional four-year schools. We also face the dilemma of our society’s unfounded negative stigmas toward other, more blue-collar pathways such as community college, vocational training, and technical schools – even if they lead to good paying jobs.

And, we can’t overlook those job seekers who simply want to know where to get better information about what jobs require, how well qualified they are for those jobs, and where they can go if they need additional skills to be qualified. The current system is a black box that leaves everyone blaming others – just like what happened at the Detroit community meeting.

The only way this problem will actually be addressed is for all stakeholders to recognize the seriousness of the situation and their role in solving it. Simply, employers are the final consumers of the workforce, and must provide clarity around which skills and experiences are valued for a particular position.

Imagine how much more effective the job application process would if a person could see exactly which skills and experiences were necessary. Both the employer and job seeker could focus on the formal and informal experiences that demonstrate the qualifications for the position.

This would move the system away from the many substitutes used now like labels and assumptions from previously held jobs or schools attended – which are often not relevant to the job at hand.

The developer wasn’t wrong in saying that it wasn’t solely their responsibility to develop the local workforce. Nor was the citizen wrong to expect business to play a role in developing the workforce. We must recognize that it’s everyone’s responsibility and we all have a stake.

At SkillSmart, we’re implementing solutions to help the stakeholders work together to ensure local communities have the tools to thrive economically. In Springfield, Massachusetts we’re working with MGM Resorts to connect with local government, community colleges and businesses to skill-up and hire 3500 employees for a new hotel and casino. In Wisconsin, our work with the Milwaukee Bucks has started a broader conversation around how capital projects can stimulate workforce development activities and how a city can do more to align workforce development initiatives. In Washington DC, we’re helping the general contractor of the nation’s largest transit project communicate their hiring needs to the community, link job seekers to local training, and build a pipeline of qualified local employees.

Though the dynamics of every city are different, in everywhere we travel it is common to hear “at the end of the day it’s all about jobs.” We would argue, at the end of the day, it’s all about workforce. And if we are serious about making sure locals have the skills demanded by industry, building the on ramps to opportunity, and truly creating access, then the business, education, and social sector must realize the important role each must play in preparing the workforce of tomorrow today.