Marcus Lee, Lead Instructor, Revolution Workshop: It’s a badge of honor for people to see me, coming from these same neighborhoods that you hear on the news, and to see me doing good things.
Isabel “Izzy” Gabriel, Alumni, Revolution Workshop: All you need is a chance. If someone gives you a chance, you can do anything with that.
Manny Rodriguez, Executive Director, Revolution Workshop: Let’s be honest, the west and south sides of our city are predominantly people of color live in those communities, and they’ve been disinvested for decades. Revolution Workshop, we’re a nonprofit organization, that the whole mission is really to get people of color into the field of construction. We need to open the doors up and really educate people on what the opportunities are out there.
Montrell Hurt, Alumni, Revolution Workshop: Revolution is important because the field has a lot of older men who are now kind of getting out of the trades. They’re retiring out. And so they need fresher people, learning the newer technologies.
Jeanette Perez-Sanchez, Professional Pathways Trainee, Revolution Workshop: Seeing someone like me also, you know, be in that role and inspire me to become that and motivate me to become that is very eye-opening. I can also go that route.
Bob Gallo, Owner, Former COO, Power Construction: The construction industry has so many opportunities from a career-path perspective, and Revolution Workshop does an awesome job understanding what each individual person’s needs are; what their challenges are; and then helping them out, giving people that desperately need opportunities a chance in our industry.
Sean Glowacz, Director of Community Development, Power Construction: It is immensely important for us to have our workforce represent the communities that we build in. And Revolution Workshop provides us with an opportunity to connect with more individuals from those communities that we’re building in.
Rodriguez: Really the sweet sauce of our program are the soft skills. A lot of what we’re doing is teaching them how to work. We do that through our financial capabilities where we’re doing counseling, literacy. What’s a credit score? Why is it important and how it affects your every day? Budgeting, saving, financial coaching—I want to buy a car; I want to buy a house; I want to start a business. Then, we have executive functioning. So that’s conflict resolution. That’s communication skills. That’s working with the team. How you deal with difficult people? How do you de-escalate situations? How do you walk away? Setting goals. And so we have to teach them about goal setting and what that is, making smart goals, realistic goals.
Gallo: They do a good job of understanding what our needs are, what our opportunities are, and then crafting their curriculum to help their folks be more successful with us. So their training really does a good job managing their expectation and helping them be job-ready.
Rodriguez: We have the Trades Pathway program. We also have the Professional Pathways program, which is a very new program we’re very excited about. They’re actually going through an apprenticeship like they would to be a carpenter or electrician or a plumber. But they’re doing it to be an engineer, an architect, a construction manager.
Perez-Sanchez: The Professional Pathways program gave me an alternative pathway where, you know, you don’t have the experience, you don’t have the education, but we’re going to help you learn all the skills that you need in order to succeed.
Lee: So the Professional Pathways program is a new program. What I do is teach AutoCAD, Construction Cloud, part of Revit.
Perez-Sanchez: You know, going into AutoCAD is a good, basic foundation to have. So it was basically, like, what employers want to see in someone that’s applying for their specific roles.
Rodriguez: When we looked at Autodesk Construction Cloud as an option, we vetted it with our employer partners to make sure that this is where we’re going, this is exactly what we need out of our entry-level people. This is a useful system.
Hurt: You put in the work. You go after what you want. Revolution will back you up because they foster relationships within networks. They have a huge network.
Rodriguez: We have to have a relationship with the end user, which of our system—of the workforce system—is the employer. So we have 20 to 25 contractors that come here and actually interview our participants. At the end of the day, if I’m not providing them with the entry-level talent that they need, I failed any job seeker that walked through this door anyway.
Gallo: They have the supply; you know, we have the demand, and we’re trying to marry those as much as possible.
Rodriguez: There’s a lot of work coming, right? We have major public investment into our infrastructure in a way that we haven’t had since the New Deal. This is the time where we have to kind of look and say, “Okay, how do we develop strategies to address the diversity issue and also help this sector be able to thrive with actual employees that can do the work?”
Gallo: If we can get the industry to focus more on this, then we can get more and more people into the trades and onto a career path.
