In August, the National Center for Construction Education and Research published CraftPro, an online tool designed to help employees with on-the-job training for their tradesworker crews.
Using self-paced courses primarily on mobile devices, NCCER hopes CraftPro will enable individuals to train regardless of their location. The app contains instructional videos across craft skills in English and Spanish delivered by industry experts.
Here, Construction Dive talks with Lisa Strite, chief learning officer at NCCER, about the launch of CraftPro, the goal of the tool and what she’s garnered from the first weeks of client feedback.
Editor’s note: The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
CONSTRUCTION DIVE: How did CraftPro come about? What’s the idea behind it?
LISA STRITE: CraftPro was a very specific response to a problem that we saw in the market. Really, two things: workforce development and being able to grow the talent that you have.
Recruiting is important. We need to get more people into this workforce pipeline, but you can't solve every workforce challenge by hiring alone. The thought behind CraftPro was that this platform makes it easier to deliver structured training to jobsites and work around the schedules that you have.
The goal is better access to training, stronger workforce development and ultimately better business outcomes.
We do that by allowing companies to create custom learning paths that are specifically tied to the work that you need that individual to do, rather than putting them through a program that may be teaching them skills that are valuable but don't get put into practice for another six months to even a year. By then, that technical skill has probably faded, and their knowledge and comfort level has also probably faded with it.
This is very much about training on location, literally in the hands of employees by bringing the instructor to life through rich training videos on their phones. That builds a learning pathway that hits the thing you need to know on the job tomorrow or three days from now.
What does it look like on the builder side of things? How do they use the tool?
We know that contractors want to train, but instructors' classroom schedules mean time away from projects, and that makes it difficult. The idea is CraftPro gives you structured training that's easier to deliver.
We built it for contractors of any size. If you are a five-person organization, it’s hard to train because you don't have the infrastructure to do it.
The idea is with CraftPro, you work with NCCER using a subscription-based model based on your company's size. That allows you access to a library, a catalog of courses across a range of crafts.
It is not intended to replace valuable apprenticeship training programs. It's never going to replace hands-on training in a classroom or on the job. But what it does do is literally put world-class instructors in the hands of that learner through our mobile app and give them a chance to start doing that learning or refresh that learning at any time.
NCCER is known for our credentials. Those credentials have value. CraftPro is an employer credential. In this case, the credential that I'm earning is coming from my employer who's saying, "Yes, this is the thing that makes you a pipefitter-1 at Turner.” Or “This is the learning pathway that sets you up to be an electrical safety manager at Clayco.”
How important was it to have the platform available in English and Spanish?
I mean, it's an absolute must have. Access to training in a language that you understand should not become a barrier to your career advancement. We felt that was incredibly important. If we're going to build a workforce development ecosystem, we have to be able to meet those learners where they are.
What has the feedback from clients been to this point?
It's very interesting. We have customers using it in a lot of creative ways. The simplest way I would describe it is we have one customer who probably put a thousand hours of learning in it. They’ve got 2,000 craft workers they're planning to put through it.
And their model is, these individuals are going through an apprenticeship program, but they're doing a lot of that learning on CraftPro. They're getting the instruction and the knowledge-based learning demonstrated through the video instructors and interactive learning.
It’s allowing them to turn their apprenticeship program into a sort of hybrid model.
We have another contractor that's oversubscribed in their formal training program. And so this is a way for them to keep those individuals training and actually advancing their career path while they wait to get them in the other courses.
The reverse is also true. We have a number of contractors who use our NCCER assessments to evaluate sort of preexisting knowledge. So if you show up on my jobsite and you say, “I’m a pipefitter. I have 18 years of experience.” Our assessments allow that contractor to evaluate what you do and don't know and what you can and can't do.
CraftPro launched in August. What have you learned in that time?
The initial problem we set out to solve was, how do we help companies that are not training? How do we help them train? That was our hypothesis going in.
What's happening instead is we're finding they're signing up and people who already train are like, “Oh, this is a piece that was missing in my toolkit of training and workforce development. This is a thing that solves a gap that I had.”
