Building Alaska's workforce: multi-industry partnerships prevail with Alaska Construction Academies.

• Author: Swann, Kirsten
• Position: TRANSPORTATION & CONSTRUCTION

While state lawmakers and energy companies work to develop a multibillion-dollar natural gas pipeline, industry leaders and educators are building a different kind of pipeline. It's not made with steel, but it's designed to address a critical shortage--one that could impact Alaska business for years to come.

"It's a career cluster," says Daniel Domke, director of career and technical education (CTE) for the Fairbanks-North Star Borough School District. "It's a well-choreographed curriculum that starts in high school."

Workforce Training

With collaboration between local school districts, the Alaska Legislature, and Alaska Construction Academies, students have access to a pipeline of opportunity between high school, vocational training, and employment. In Fairbanks, Hutchison High School recently introduced a new Heavy Equipment Operator (HEO) program after about a year's worth of planning. The HEO pathway--complete with brand new, high-end, scenario-based, graphic simulators--is designed to introduce students to construction careers and help fill looming shortages in Alaska's workforce.

Hutcheson's simulator lab serves students from the local high school and the University of Alaska Fairbanks Community and Technical College. Domke says the simulators themselves are fully customizable: They can act as motor graders, bulldozers, and front-end loaders. In Alaska, the ability to operate heavy machinery like that can be a valuable skill--opening the door to jobs in some of the state's most lucrative businesses.

"That occupation goes across all industries. It's union, it's non-union; it's with construction, it's at the big mines," Domke says. "It's a demand that's across the board."

That demand is one of the main reasons Fairbanks-North Star Borough School District decided to pursue the heavy machinery program in cooperation with the Alaska Construction Academy (ACA). It's also one of the driving factors behind the Alaska Construction Academy, a statewide training program formed in 2006 by a coalition of local stakeholders.

Those stakeholders include the Association of General Contractors, Alaska Home Builders Association, the Anchorage School District, Cook Inlet Tribal Council, the Alaska Legislature Alaska Works Partnership, Inc., and the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development. The Construction Education Foundation--an Alaska nonprofit that aims to facilitate construction workforce training and development--also plays a major role in making ACA a reality.

Growing ACA Program

Eight years after ACA began it now operates in eleven communities statewide.

Kathleen Castle, ACA's executive director, says the first construction academy took place in Anchorage with a $1 million grant from the Alaska Legislature. In the second year, it spread to five additional sites, and in 2008 the academies received several million additional dollars in state funding.

These days, ACA operates in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau, Ketchikan, the Kenai Peninsula, the Matanuska Valley, Kodiak, Bethel, Nome, Kotzebue, and Dillingham. The latter five locations are regional programs, serving students from multiple surrounding communities including Kivalina, Buckland, Kiana, Noatak, Ambler, Kotzebue, Selawik, Tuntutuliak, Kongiganak, Akiak, and beyond.

The program has a wide reach, but Castle says it goes to meet a steep demand.

Labor market data shows Alaska needs approximately one thousand new construction employees annually in order to meet demand, she says.

According to the Department of Labor and Workforce Development, the construction...