The 2025 NAWIC Construction Congress convened senior construction executives, educators, workforce strategists, and policy influencers to assess the structural forces shaping the industry’s future. The Congress findings are clear:

CONGRESS FINDINGS

While demographic pressures—including accelerated retirement rates, equity in opportunity and constrained apprenticeship capacity—pose immediate operational risk, the long term viability of the industry depends on coordinated executive leadership, cultural accountability, and aligned education-to-employment systems.

1.Workforce Sustainability Requires Executive Ownership Workforce development must be elevated from operational function to board-level accountability. Retention, safety culture, leadership continuity, and productivity are directly correlated with executive behavior, cultural integrity, and lifecycle talent strategy.

2. Fragmented Pipelines Limit Industry Capacity Education systems, training programs, employers, and workforce agencies operate in silos. Without formal regional compacts and measurable placement capacity, workforce development efforts will remain constrained and reactive.

3. Culture Is a Business Variable Harassment, intimidation, and inequitable advancement structures erode retention and increase risk exposure. Psychological safety and mental health must be integrated into enterprise safety frameworks with enforcement parity and measurable standards.

4. Innovation Adoption Is Leadership-Dependent Technology constraints are less about tools and more about readiness, training, and adaptive leadership. Innovation must be embedded into leadership development structures.

• Elevate workforce and culture metrics to executive dashboards
• Tie leadership advancement to measurable safety and retention outcomes.
• Formalize education/industry alignment agreements.
• Integrate mental health and cultural health into safety performance frameworks.

Board-Level Implication
The industry’s resilience over the next decade will be determined not by labor supply, but by:

• Leadership accountability – the imperative is to design and implement reason-based transparency in working through challenges. Arbitrary and historically bias influenced decision-making is a significant challenge to progress.
• Cultural integrity – universal application of agreed upon guardrails that reflect authenticity and intent.
• Systems coherence – review and articulate congruent processes and systems placed into application.
• Measurable executive ownership – creation of hard benchmarks.

The Congress concludes that sustainable workforce performance is a governance issue. The mandate is clear: Level up leadership. Align systems. Institutionalize accountability.

1. Industry Context and Problem Statement

Defining key issues.
The construction industry faces a convergence of pressures:

A. A demographic cliff driven by an aging work force, [about 41 % of the current U.S. construction workforce is projected to retire by 2031 according to the National Center for Construction Education and Research (NCCER).], punctuated by insufficient replacement rates.

B. Additionally, fragmented education, leadership and apprenticeship pipelines that fail to scale with demand were also voiced as a concern.

C. Persistent cultural barriers—harassment, intimidation, and inequitable advancement—that undermine retention and leadership continuity. Slow and uneven adoption of technology and innovative delivery models due to skills gaps and change resistance.

2. Workforce and Talent: From Shortage to Sustainability

2.1. The Workforce Cliff

Think tank participants highlighted that labor shortages are not temporary. Apprenticeship capacity (union and non‑union) is constrained, and employers frequently under‑invest in long‑term talent development. This applies to both workforce and management positions.

As an example, noting significant retirement trends, the average age of craft construction workers increased 1.2 percent from 41.6 to 42.1 from 2011 to 2023, according to CPWR’s released “Aging and Retirement Trends in the Construction Industry” report; with the reduction in trained and ready staff and general work force, these two stressors converge to exacerbate an already less than optimum sustainability dilemma in workforce development and retention. Without intentional activation of strategies to mitigate the impact, the escalation of an aging workforce without the benefit of reinforcement will critically retard the ability of the industry to universally meet demand for services.

2.2. Talent as a Leadership Issue

The group reframed workforce strategy as a leadership responsibility and imperative:

A. The assembled collective resolved that employers must move from transactional hiring to lifecycle talent stewardship.

B. Retention hinges on culture, mentorship, and visible career pathways.

C. Leadership behaviors directly influence safety, engagement, and productivity.

FORWARD DIRECTION

3. Workforce and Talent: From Shortage to Sustainability

3.1. Structural Gaps

Participants noted that K‑12 and post‑secondary systems continue to default to four‑year college narratives, leaving construction underrepresented and misunderstood. There has been a shift with more youth valuing and choosing craft careers.

However, the younger generations have pivoted the trend with a surge in training facilities enrollments over traditional academic pathways. Some of this is cost/ROI driven. CNBC recently reported: The annual cost of attending a four-year, in-state public college increased by about 30 percent between 2011 and 2023, according to Make It calculations based on data from the Education Data Initiative, and went up by “42 percent at private, nonprofit four-year colleges.”

Traditional academia recognizes the challenge and the pivot. There is a surge in the academic world that is incorporating greater access and assimilation of training programs into existing academic post-secondary systems.

3.2. Capacity and Placement

Even where exposure programs exist, placement capacity within these programs lags. Long wait lists for the most sought-after seats in craft training deflate the hopes of potential craft entrants to the industry. Differences in union versus open shop create a dynamic and sometimes confusing landscape. Clarity, collaboration, and targeted, strategic outreach is a segment of the solution, as the market shifts to build a more sustainable workforce.

Schools, employers, and workforce agencies often operate in silos. Optimization of collaborative systems requires stewardship and intentionality.

FORWARD DIRECTION

4. Workforce and Talent: From Shortage to Sustainability

4.1. Culture as Risk Management

Participants drew direct parallels between cultural reform and historical industry transformations.

The conversation and subsequent policy surrounding general safety guidelines followed a path that had placed it firmly as a leading consideration for responsible industry players. Expanding that to include significant accountability requirements in relation to an expanded landscape of behaviors is warranted. Bullying, harassment, and intimidation—especially toward women—remain systemic risks. Crafting a safety culture onsite is critical to a productive, sustainable workforce. According to Forbes.com, “ …bullying, harassment and sexual abuse impact upwards of 30% or about 49 million workers across industries at any given time in America –and over a career, 75 percent of people are impacted.”

Additionally, according to the Sexual Harassment in the Workplace Statistics and Trends – American Judicial System “In the U.S., approximately 1 in 3 women and 1 in 6 men have experienced some form of sexual harassment in the workplace. The data shows that sexual harassment charges are on the rise, particularly following the global #MeToo movement, which brought significant attention to the issue.”

The American Society of Safety Professionals provides a number of strategies, identifiers, and guidelines that can greatly assist organizations as they reflect core values into tangible, impactful safe spaces policy. In the rapidly evaporating federal oversight, and circumstances of recent priorities, the imperative to self-regulate as an industry is critical to protecting the future success of healthy and sustainable jobsites and workspaces.

4.2. Mental Health Imperative

High suicide and substance abuse rates underscore the need to normalize mental health support as a core safety metric. The construction industry has one of the highest suicide rates among professions, with an estimated 6,000 construction workers dying by suicide in 2022. These statistics exceed the general population data by 75 percent. Office and management rates are less severe but also of concern. The mental health imperative punctuates the universal need for prioritizing and normalizing the seeking of mental health assistance and reducing the stigma traditionally attached to self care and mental health.

FORWARD DIRECTION

5. Workforce and Talent: From Shortage to Sustainability

5.1. Women in Construction: Equity as a Performance Issue

The think tank emphasized that women’s experiences are not a “women’s issue” but an industry performance issue. Data prove that prioritizing equitable workspaces leads to increased talent acquisition and retention, long-term. Evolving definitions of acceptable work structures are critical in the evolution of the day model. 78 percent of millennials consider workplace quality a key factor in job selection. (Source:Spaceworks Interior Architecture.) JLL’s 2023 report found that 87 percent of employees value a well-designed workspace, which supports engagement and loyalty.

Key Findings:

• Women face disproportionate scrutiny and pressure to conform to male‑enculturated norms.
• Assertive leadership behaviors are often mischaracterized.

The mischaracterization is not restricted to gender origins. The cultural foundation of gender based bias is deep and seeded in a disingenuous point of origin. Correction requires intentionality.

Responsibility for change rests with systems and leaders—not individuals adapting to bias.

FORWARD DIRECTION

6. Innovation and Future Skills

6.1. Technology Adoption Barriers

Innovation is constrained less by tools and more by skills, training, and culture. Comprehensive incorporation of new and emerging technologies requires targeted industry activation to mitigate consequences of reduced capacity, directly related to tech innovation driven employment. This investment is another example of proactive planning and engagement leading to better outcomes for future workforce and projects. The data availability is currently limited. However, as an example Integrated Project Delivery (IPD): 30 percent of projects have used IPD with digital tools in 2025, up from 12 percent in 2020, according to zipdo.com

7. Leadership Framework for the Next Decade

The think tank converged on a leadership model anchored in:

1. Accountability:
   Clear ownership of workforce, culture, and safety outcomes.
2. Alignment:
   Integrated strategies across education, employers, and policy.
3. Respect:
   Zero tolerance for behaviors that erode trust and performance
4. Adaptability:
   Continuous learning as a core leadership expectation.

8. Strategic Recommendations

1. Tie public funding in project and general incentives to measurable talent and culture outcomes.
2. Require leadership and culture training as part of credentialing and advancement.
3. Publish industry benchmarks on workforce health, inclusion, and retention.