Conversations with CEOs on the Future of America’s Skilled Trades Workforce

Hi, it's Kevin O'Connor from This Old House. Every home we've ever built starts the same way. Someone who knows how to do the work shows up. But America is short on those people: electricians, welders, plumbers, HVAC technicians, the people who build and maintain the things we all depend on. That's why we've partnered with the Business Roundtable, more than 200 of America's leading CEOs, for a series of conversations about the skilled trades, who's training the next generation, what's working, and what will it take to close the gap.

This is Work in Progress.

We begin with Ambassador Kristen Silverberg, Business Roundtable's president and COO She says when you ask 200 CEOs what keeps them up at night, one answer comes up again and again: finding the people with the skills to do the work. Let's begin. Kristen, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Kevin, thanks so much for having me.

I'm just thrilled to be on with you. Well, it's our pleasure as well. So I guess we should just start at the very beginning and help us understand what is the Business Roundtable, and then let's talk about your priorities right now. Business Roundtable, BRT, is an association of about 250 CEOs of leading US companies.

It's a lot of companies that your listeners know well, um, General Motors, Visa, Walmart. And the CEOs of those companies come together to advance policy that we think will grow the US economy over the long term and create more opportunity for Americans. Kristen, I think you and I would both agree that right now our country is at an inflection point.

There are too few jobs being filled by too few people who have the necessary skills, and all of those unfilled jobs are holding us back in terms of productivity, growth, maybe even national security. So what do you think is at stake at this moment? I agree with you completely. Um, look, we face fierce economic competition, including around manufacturing, competition from China.

When you ask our CEOs what are the factors that are gonna help determine whether you are going to succeed or fail as a company, they consistently come back with workforce issues. Are they able to find workers who have the skills they need to grow and innovate and compete? If our companies can't find workers to fill those jobs, we're gonna struggle in that competition, so there's an absolutely an economic imperative to do this work.

It's additionally important because of the pace of technological change these days. AI and other technologies are really changing the skills that employers need at a really rapid pace. That's giving lots of Americans anxiety about their futures, about what all this technological change is gonna mean for their families.

Workforce training not only meets the employer's need, it gives Americans confidence that they're gonna be able to navigate changes in the economy. How acute is the problem? How broad-based is it right now? I think there are some very big gaps. There's a big gap between where workforce training dollars go and what they're really needed.

In about half of the labor markets around the country, there's a substantial gap between what the programs are producing and what employers need. And if you look at the key federal workforce development program, which is called WIOA, there are about 75,000 programs that are eligible to participate. And 10,000 of those are set up to produce training for occupations that are expected to decline in demand We think we can do a much better job connecting the resources we have with the skills and the occupations that are gonna be in the highest demand for employers going forward.

It also, to my mind, brings sort of that great divide, this idea of do you work with your hands, do you go to college, this sort of path that is out there. How does the Business Roundtable see that in terms of the problem of getting kids to say, "I wanna work with my hands"? Look, to us, it's really about giving young people options.

There shouldn't be a single path to a well-compensated and rewarding career. We have, across the skilled trades, about 20 job openings for every qualified worker. If you're a person with the right skill set, that's a great stat because it means that you're gonna be in high demand, that you'll be employable and well-paid.

That's a big focus for us, is making the case for this as an alternative. Kristen, I can feel your passion for this subject. And, you know, I, I grew up on the job site with my dad, which is how I got into construction and why I'm doing what I'm doing. What is driving that passion for you? You know, my grandfather was a stonemason, as was his dad, and my Uncle Evan followed him into the business.

And what a physically taxing role. My grandfather could do one-armed pull-ups in his 70s, um, because he spent his whole life, you know, lugging heavy rocks. But he built some walls that you can still see standing. I can see things that my uncle carved on the side of buildings. So it's this sense of a very rewarding career that really you contribute a lot and build something that's enduring and lasting.

Kristen, I can remember back in June of 2025 when you guys invited me down to Washington, D.C., and you had the very big announcement over this new initiative. So why don't you tell us about that? We launched the Skilled Trades for America initiative, helping companies share best practices on how they're recruiting.

We put together playbooks and do case studies, and then circulate them to the broader membership. We've partnered with the Burning Glass Institute to create some common skill profiles, and this is gonna really help companies use what we call skill adjacencies. So for example, you could be a worker with experience in HVAC maintenance, and you might be able to move into industrial machine maintenance with just a little bit of training.

We're building partnerships with a lot of outside groups, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Goodwill Industries, SkillsUSA, to really help to change perceptions of young people about all of their available options. Tell us your guys' position on apprenticeship and the efforts that you're putting behind that idea.

Well, apprenticeships can help to address one of the biggest barriers to gaining a new skill, which is having to choose between Earning your paycheck and pursuing training. They really need to do both at the same time. For employers, apprenticeships are also fantastic because they really help you set up a pipeline of workers.

They help you develop talent for jobs you need to fill. One of the areas where we focused is on helping to streamline the registered apprenticeship program, and companies frequently have to re-register a program in multiple states. We think that's just an example of something you ought to be able to streamline.

You should be able to get a qualified program registered once, and then be able to use it across the country, which I think would really make this, uh, much easier for our companies to make this available to a broader set of Americans. Let's push into the future. You mentioned AI earlier. Let's talk about that.

Your members, the CEOs of these companies, are on the front lines. You're in communication with them all of the time. What are they seeing? What are they telling their people, and how do you, do they think that AI is gonna play into this whole situation that we're in? They all think it's gonna be a really consequential development for the US economy and for US workers.

Lots of our companies are investing heavily in training their own workers around AI skills, so you know, Accenture, which trained, I think, 600,000 employees in AI fundamentals. The Walmart Academy has partnered with OpenAI to give free access to custom AI training. The question really is, how do we take all of these individual initiatives and scale them in a way that's gonna help workers develop skills that are likely to be in high demand?

One of our real challenges, I think, for the federal government and for companies Is to figure out how demands for specific skills are developing and make sure that we're training for those skills and those occupations. I think companies often think about sort of what's the return on investment. Is that being measured?

Is that being thought about? Is it moving the needle, these initiatives? Well, they certainly measure return on investment for their own training programs, but we also lean in on measuring them in another way, which is, are they producing more economic mobility? So helping workers get promoted within the company, and we continue to do that work.

It's produced a lot of really interesting findings. One that I think important is that more than a million people move into the middle class every year employed at a large company like the ones that are members of Business Roundtable. People enjoy a wage premium over the course of their career if they start working at a large company like a Business Roundtable company, that it gives them some additional access to training and short-term credentials and other things.

To us, this is important as well. Can we say this is producing real value for America's workforce? If you had to describe what the American workforce look like if we were successful with the initiatives you're putting together and some of the broader ideas, what does it look like in ten years? What are your hopes?

I think it would be a workforce where people have real options, that companies are able to find workers who have the skillsets they need to grow and to innovate and compete, and that we have the sense that both businesses and workers are succeeding and thriving in a rapidly changing economy. Well, it sounds to me that fixing this really big and critical problem is a heavy lift.

You folks are really leaning into it by sharing what you learned from it. So thank you for that, Kristen. Thank you for joining us, and we look forward to following along and hearing more from all the BRT folks. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for everything you do and for your leadership in this space, um, and for engaging Business Roundtable members.

We're really excited, so thank you.

That was Ambassador Kristen Silverberg, and this has been Work in Progress: Conversations about Apprenticeship and Workforce Training in America's Skilled Trades, presented by the Business Roundtable and Stand Together.