I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve noticed something very positive that has occurred in this recession and for the past few years.  Nearly every where I look, from the Discovery Channel to PBS, I see a movement that embraces blue collar work.  It doesn’t take much effort to find sites such as MikeRoweWorks.com that celebrates “…all aspects of hard work”.  It takes even less effort to sense that our manufacturing base – long forsaken to cheaper currencies and labor, is beginning to understand the virtues of building things at home.  In my home state, the Construction Education Foundation of Georgia (www.CEFGA.org) is developing curriculum to help teach our future builders outside of a standard apprenticeship program.  Indeed, building things is becoming cool again.

What does this mean for the construction industry?  It means that our craft is slowly, perhaps painfully, becoming a hip place for people to work.  We may be on the precipice of a movement that embraces Builders and Tradespeople as those who have sought meaningful work – not those left out of the movement towards professional services.  It wasn’t long ago I cringed in reading that America would become the accountants of the world.  That may yet indeed be the case, indeed I hope it does.  But that doesn’t mean we also shouldn’t make it a goal to become the designers, builders and tradespeople of the world, either.

But with this sea change must come the understanding of responsibility that we share as business owners and managers.  In order to capitalize on this movement we must provide opportunity for people to grow and prosper, not just earn a paycheck.  We must develop and promote our industry as a viable alternative to professional services and white collar work.  We need to accentuate the positive and fix the negative connotations that our industry has long been saddled with.  We need to reach those kids who want to become the Green technology innovators; the building scientists and the affordable housing problem-solvers of their generation.  I have written about this on several occasions and will say it again here – Ours is an industry that can know no limit for a bright, ambitious, imaginative mind.  But we have a long way to go for the hype of the moment to match the reality.  We don’t have to be the job of last resort for the broken set – but our tent should be large enough to provide anyone with ambition and talent an opportunity to grow. 

In this era of 40% revenue reduction and staff cuts it may be difficult to project out 3-5 years and see this coming.  But there will be more work someday.  And we have every opportunity to get quality people that we never thought would choose our industry, and allow our current crop of over-achievers to light the way and provide guidance.  Hard work has always been rewarding  and, in many case, enjoyable.  It is about darn time that the conventional wisdom of the era is catching up with what we already know – building things is just plain cool.