Building a Better
Building a Better
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AGC organized the first-ever National Construction Industry Workforce Development Summit in October. During the event, which took place in St. Louis, over 150 construction professionals, AGC chapter staff and construction educators and trainers gathered to share workforce development success stories. They also crafted a series of recommendations for contractors to overcome the recruiting, training and retention challenges that are at the heart of workforce shortages.
AGC of America joined on as a signature supporter of the first-ever Construction Industry Inclusion Week. This event, which was designed to encourage construction firms to create even more inclusive work environments, challenged member firms to hold inclusion events along the lines of a safety stand down. As part of our involvement, we worked with AGC chapters and members to encourage the broadest possible participation in the event and promote AGC’s Culture of Care program.
Download the report Inclusion AGC 2021 Annual ReportAGC worked to significantly expand the number of construction firms committed to use our Culture of Care program. This program offers training and education materials to help construction job sites create more welcoming and inclusive environments. The intent is to increase the retention of new and more diverse workers, and to create a work environment that nurtures positive mental health for all workers. In 2021 the number of firms participating in Culture of Care nearly doubled, with 323 firms signing on, bringing the total number of Culture of Care pledges to 687.
AGC created and launched, in cooperation with three different chapters, a first-of-its-kind targeted digital advertising campaign to recruit new workers into the construction industry. The campaign, called “Construction is Essential,” is designed to highlight the many benefits of working in the industry. It uses the same technology many online retailers use to target shoppers to find and reach potential construction workers and their influencers. They are then showered with a range of online ads encouraging them to consider careers in construction. Those ads then direct them to the chapters’ local workforce recruiting website and encourage them to apply to start their career track.
We created a template workforce recruiting website that all AGC of America chapters can use, free of charge, as the online basis for their local workforce recruiting campaigns. The template site is an easy to use, easy to adapt site that can be customized to look and function to each chapter’s specific needs. Released in mid-November, by the end of the year 14 AGC chapters had already signed up to use the template site.
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The AGC Education & Research Foundation launched, thanks to a generous challenge gift from Procore, a new scholarship that will support minority students studying construction at any of the nation’s Historically Black Colleges & Universities, or HBCUs for short. The Foundation is raising money to meet and exceed Procore’s initial $250,000 challenge gift and will begin awarding the new scholarships as early as 2022.
The AGC Education and Research Foundation awarded 133 scholarships in 2021totaling $440,000. These scholarships support students studying constructionmanagement or related fields at 4-year as well as two-year community and careercolleges. The Foundation also sponsored four new faculty internships at memberfirms. These internships allow construction educators to learn, hands on, about thelatest construction practices and needs.
AGC of America organized a first-of-its-kind vaccine awareness week for the construction industry in April. As part of that week, we worked with AGC chapters and member firms to encourage construction workers to get vaccinated. Member firms and chapters organized vaccine education stand-downs, hosted vaccination clinics and distributed information to employees about the safety and effectiveness of coronavirus vaccines.
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In addition to organizing the vaccine awareness week, AGC also executed a year-long campaign designed to encourage and educate construction workers about the coronavirus vaccine. This includes creating a series of dramatic public service ads featuring construction workers who refused to be vaccinated, contracted the virus and nearly died. They are now urging construction workers to get vaccinated. We also invested in a targeted digital advertising campaign to make sure vaccine-hesitant construction workers saw the ads. We also created a separate public service ad with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention specifically for the construction industry. And we created a special Coronavirus Vaccine toolkit on the AGC website.
AGC also continued to serve as a signature supporter of the two primary nationwide safety campaigns in 2021: Construction Safety Week and the Occupational Safety & Health Administration’s National Safety Stand-Down to Prevent Falls in Construction. As part of our support for both events, we worked to encourage chapters and member firms across the country to hold special safety stand-downs and take other steps to educate construction workers about safety and health practices.
Download the report Safety Week AGC 2021 Annual ReportAGC worked with HCSS to conduct its 2021 Highway Work Zone Safety Survey in the spring. We used the results of this survey to educate public officials across the country about the need to improve laws and enforcement of work zone safety. Among the results of this education campaign – we successfully worked with the AGC of New York State to use the survey data to get the state legislature to pass legislation allowing the use of speed cameras in highway work zones.
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