Soft Skills Training: Next Step in Evolution of Project Culture

By Bruce Worcester

For many of us who have spent our careers in the field, there’s no place we’d rather be. Each time I’ve wrapped up a big project and spent a few weeks in the office starting up a new one, I always find myself eager to get back to the field. As we aim to attract more talent into the trades, never has there been a better time to invest in our people to provide them with the meaningful careers they desire—in the field or in the office.

In the trades, training tends to focus on technical building skills, safety leadership and other topics directly related to the ways we put work in place. This is valuable, and I am always amazed at the quality our workers desire to continuously improve and consistently deliver. However, we’ve missed the mark on preparing our field teams with soft skills: how to communicate with one another and mentor our peers. In office roles, soft skills training accounts for the bulk of professional development and, often, it’s what puts people on track for companywide leadership positions. In the field, we often only reward those who just naturally have a knack for relating.

Today’s construction boom is causing us to recruit more people into the trades to put work in place. Our industry is also one that offers people with a passion for the trades to have long, well-paying careers. Personally, I would imagine there are a lot of smart people graduating from high school who might prefer the trades to college debt. Taking that route, though, should not mean their career prospects are solely focused on the journey to foreman and superintendent roles.

By starting to train talented craft workers on softer skills, we stand to benefit in so many ways. On the jobsite, better communication and mentoring could lead to better production, increased safety and, ultimately, better results for our customers and our own businesses.

Consider how many conflicts on a jobsite are still handled by two people yelling at each other and one—usually more senior person—making the final decision. How many risky situations do people walk by, not wanting to speak up? How many times has someone noticed work not going in the right way the first time, but felt it was not their place to speak up? Those practices aren’t acceptable in the office; why do they still happen in the field?

Further, how many people in our crews have we ever thought had the potential to be a project manager or even run the company one day, but they haven’t been sure of the path to take to express their future career desires?

The next generation of workers entering into the trades will want the full array of career opportunities. DPR Construction is one such general contractor piloting ways to help develop craft employees to unlock all the possibilities.

In the Southwest, for example, we piloted a training program to help workers navigate and plan for tough conversations. We put 22 drywallers and concrete workers through the program and received feedback that it wasn’t just helping them with their crews and supervisors, but also with their partners at home.

In Texas, we’ve added factors like leadership and mentoring abilities to performance reviews, which also lets us help craft workers develop those skills. As a result, we’ve seen folks rise through the ranks of the trades and provided some workers the boost they needed to pivot into areas like virtual design and construction and project engineer roles. Having the soft skills and the technical knowledge gives them the ability to explore the areas of construction they are most passionate about.

In the Southeast, where I work, we have recently launched an initiative called “Building Your Future” that’s based on one of DPR’s central beliefs: respect for the individual. The tool provides resources for field crews to explore upward job mobility and introduces them to other DPR employees who have advanced their careers. For instance, employee Mark Whitson started his career with the company 18 years ago as a drywall hanger and framer, and is now serving on our national management committee and is leader of the company’s southeast region.

I expect we’ll see more of this focus and, in the superintendent corps, we need to see the big picture of what we can provide: Better results. More career prospects. Outcomes that entice talented people to consider construction as a career.

We all joke when we hear there’s more training to do, but when we know it can affect our work and change lives, it feels more like we’re investing rather than training.

That’s something we can all get behind.

Bruce Worcester is a superintendent with DPR Construction.