Alok Chanani, BuildOps CEO and U.S. Army veteran, is reshaping how commercial contractors run their businesses and build what lasts.
Over the past several months, Meta, BlackRock and Google each did the same strange thing. They started paying to train electricians.
Meta committed $115 million to a trades academy that covers tuition, pays to attend and guarantees a job. BlackRock, the largest asset manager on earth, put up $100 million over five years to connect 50,000 workers with skilled trades training. Google added $50 million for union and trade association programs aimed at preparing more than 300,000 more.
Together, that is roughly $265 million, spread over several years, aimed at one problem. The size of the commitment says something about the problem: the shortage of people who can physically build things is becoming one of the hardest constraints on the American economy.
How The Shortage Predates AI
I run the software that more than 1,500 commercial contractors use to schedule and staff their crews, so I see the underside of these announcements every day.
Last year, we surveyed more than 600 contractors across the U.S. and Canada to take the pulse. Half the electricians told us demand from data centers is climbing, the exact buildings major tech companies are racing to put up. And nearly half of all the contractors said close to a quarter of their open positions are sitting empty right now.
The work is there. The financing is there. The people are not. That was true before anyone typed a prompt into a chatbot.
The people building AI keep warning it will hollow out office work. Anthropic’s CEO says half of all entry-level white-collar jobs could vanish (registration required) within five years. Seventy million Americans go to work in a professional or management role, and a lot of them are about to go looking for something a machine can’t do from a keyboard.
There is such a place: the trades. Someone still has to stand in the room and pull the wire. It’s the one large, growing part of the economy that AI makes more valuable, not less, and the obvious escape hatch for a generation about to be displaced.
Much of the new training capacity is coming from large companies, and each program is built differently. Meta’s academy is launching in four pilot states, Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana and Texas, and pairs free training with a guaranteed job and credentials designed to carry across employers. Google’s funding runs through unions and trade associations. BlackRock’s goes through nonprofit and workforce partners. These are meaningful steps. No single program reaches every local contractor or every worker looking for a way in.
This matters for employers who aren’t running one of these programs. The pool of people who can be trained quickly is not infinite, and programs of this size add demand for that pool as well as supply.
As more large programs recruit from the same applicants, the local contractor who wires your hospital and the shop that keeps your city’s air conditioning running can compete harder for the same people, and so will career changers looking for a first job in the trades. Training capacity has to grow alongside that demand.
The $265 million invested by those three companies sounds like a lot until you set it beside the $725 billion that Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon together plan to spend on capital projects this year, largely on AI infrastructure, or the millions of workers AI may put in motion.
What Employers And Career Changers Can Do Now
Policy can help address this issue. By one comparison of national data, the U.S. spends about 0.1% of GDP on programs that help workers move into new work, against roughly 2% in Denmark.
But the faster changes are the ones employers can make this year.
Contractors can start with their own pipeline. Join or register an apprenticeship program through a union training center, an ABC chapter or a community college, and give one person ownership of it. Meta’s academy is built with ABC and Google’s funding runs through unions and trade associations, so a local contractor can often reach this training by calling the chapter or training center it already works with.
Then keep the people you train. Pay that rises with credentials, a clear schedule and predictable work can do more for retention than a signing bonus.
Smaller shops don’t need their own academy. They can share an apprentice cohort with two or three nearby contractors, hire from a local program’s graduating class, offer a few paid ride-along slots to pre-apprentices or host a site day for a community college. Larger employers and building owners can hire from these programs where they build and favor portable credentials that let workers move between employers.
For people changing careers, the best entry points are paid ones: apprenticeships, pre-apprenticeship programs that lead into them and employer-sponsored training. Look for a credential other employers recognize and a union or employer partner committed to hiring. Office experience transfers, especially in scheduling, estimating and project coordination.
Meta, BlackRock and Google have shown that training at scale can be funded. The open question is how widely the benefit spreads: to the kid who doesn’t want the debt, the electrician a few years from retirement, the analyst whose job just got automated and needs somewhere real to go. That depends less on any one program than on how many employers, large and small, decide to train, hire from these programs and keep the people they bring in.
I watch this shortage every day across contractors who can’t staff the work already in front of them, and the line for skilled workers is forming fast. The employers who build their pipeline now will have crews when the work arrives.
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