As Georgia’s “top” company, Home Depot holds a special place in the Georgia economy. Sitting at number 20 on the Fortune 500 – nestled in between Ford and General Motors, Home Depot boasts of more than 475,000 employees worldwide and 2022 revenue at $157 billion. This week, the Home Depot Foundation announced it was expanding its skilled trades training and strategic partnerships to the tune of a more than $6 million investment.
Currently, there are nearly 400,000 job openings across the construction industry. Not only does filling those jobs make the innumerable construction jobs across the country go a little faster, it also helps Home Depot sell some more inventory. A win win.
“We’re expanding our current training programs and creating new avenues to steadily fill the country’s skilled labor gap with in-demand talent,” said The Home Depot Foundation’s executive director, Shannon Gerber. “Diversifying our approach with additional entrepreneurship and scholarship programs helps ensure we’re reaching more communities with free training opportunities and creating sustainable change for the industry.”
The Foundation’s ‘Path to Pro’ program is launching a new entrepreneurship program and will provide free, skilled trades training and scholarships to veterans, military families and high school students. The foundation is also partnering with Bunker Labs to introduce an entrepreneurship program designed to help veterans and their families establish their own construction businesses. The program will be an intensive eight weeks, with industry mentors, market segmentation classes and lessons on crafting a business plan. Additionally, the program will be virtual, making it accessible to participants across the country.
The Foundation is also extending its grant to long-time partner the Home Builders Institute, broadening the Path to Pro high school and military programs. Thanks to the grant, more than 1,200 military members and 11th or 12th grade students are able to take advantage of the Institute’s Pre-Apprentice Certificate Training (PACT) at no cost.
Path to Pro launched in 2018 with a $50 million commitment to training the next generation of skilled tradespeople, diversification of the industry and address the labor shortage. More than 200,000 pope have been introduced to the skilled trades through the Foundation’s work, with more than 41,000 coming from youth, underserved communities and the U.S. military.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 2003 and 2020, the percent of construction workers age 55 and older nearly doubled from 12 to 23 percent. This was a trend across the economy in general, but it is more pronounced in the construction industry. Non-Hispanic whites are still the dominant demographic group in the industry, comprising more than 60 percent of the workforce, though Hispanics are now a majority of the construction laborers group, as well as a strong majority of painters and paperhangers. Despite a national GDP that is some $11 trillion higher than 2007, the total number of workers in the construction industry has still not reached the peak of nearly 12 million that year.
