A New Shade of Blue Collar

PUBLISHED MARCH 2025

Earlier this month, a career fair for technical-skill students drew 87 talent-starved employers to Kansas City Kansas Community College. If they were looking to hire, they came to the right place: Filling the main conference meeting space and an adjoining room, exhibitors still spilled into the hallways, competing with each other for the attention of more than 900 students.

The turnout, says Rich Piper, director of Career and Technical Education for the community college, was unprecedented. “I’ve been in CTE my entire career—42 years,” he would later observe, “and now we’re the cool kid on the block.”

As workforce metrics go, it’s a figure cited countless times since the nation began its recovery from the Great Recession: America’s construction sector, starving for new recruits, consistently checked in with 400,000 job openings every year.

In fact, though, the picture for employers was considerably darker by the end of 2023—at that point, nearly half-again higher at 586,000 vacant positions. The outlook wasn’t much better for the manufacturing sector, which itself was looking at 434,000 vacant positions at that same point. Combined, the two sectors were scrambling for talent to fill more than 1 million jobs across the country.

Then came the unexpected. Whether it’s continuing uncertainty over the direction of interest rates (key factors in construction and plant expansions or capital projects), wariness over the broader economic impact of the new administration’s tariffs policy, uneasiness over trends in consumer spending, the potential for contract cancellation by the Department of Government Efficiency or other factors, the hiring playing field has shifted.

Dramatically.

From a combined 1.02 million just 14 months ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most recent data show 728,000 vacancies—a plunge of nearly 29 percent. As of December, the agency says, the openings were nearly divided between two key sectors that have traditionally been considered blue-collar: 357,000 for manufacturing and 371,000 for construction.

While they’re down from previous estimates, those figures still represent a crying need for employers in those spaces. 

All of which is important context when tracking the next generation of employees in the trades and advanced manufacturing. And that is where the good news comes in—especially in the Kansas City region.

Tech-Savvy

The data on bistate tech-school training tells much of the story, and it’s a good one. In the two-state area, Kansas and Missouri are holding up their end of the bargain with the nation’s overall enrollment growth. Those figures weathered a gut punch during the pandemic, as the number of career and technical education certificates issued in the U.S. fell about 8 percent, from 1.2 million to 1.1 million, in the first pandemic year. The rebound, though, came quickly, and after two more school years, certificates topped 1.25 million, then jumped again in 2023 to 1.3 million. 

Piper is living that dynamic at KCKCC’s training center.

“We need more space; we are at capacity,” he says. The reasons by now are familiar to program administrators and four-year campus admissions officers on the flip side.

“From my viewpoint, it’s young adults finding out that they can make a good living and don’t have to go to a four-year college and incur significant debt,” Piper says. There’s also an appeal to those who, rather than being traditional learners, are more tactical in their learning, able to see in their heads things that they can make happen with their hands, he says. “This way, they can go to school for nine to 11 months, come out with fundamental skills that make them employable, and make a sustainable living.”

Evidence that compensation is near peak levels, even for many entry-level jobs within trades and manufacturing disciplines, was on full display at this month’s jam-packed jobs fair.

For the wide array of workforce training programs in this region, the crush of demand for instruction does not come without risk. For one, rapid advances in technology, especially with robotics and other workplace automation, means that training centers must constantly evaluate the tools of instruction—and budget for updated training equipment. 

“We can have equipment that is state of the art one day and obsolete the next,” Piper says.

The existing gap between available jobs and available talent carries a risk that goes beyond workforce dynamics. Many of the instructional programs in the region are supported by Defense Department grants, which adds national security and safety elements to the challenge. The gap will be exacerbated as the reshoring movement spawned by the pandemic creates more demand for qualified workers in advanced manufacturing, and the re-emergence of nuclear power as part of the nation’s energy matrix will also call for specialized workers in both construction and manufacturing.

Another is the need to secure more instructors who aren’t merely qualified but willing to accept compensation that is generally lower than they could find in those respective industries.

“The biggest challenge is an instructor,” Piper said. “We are blessed with instructors from various industries. Our automotive engineering tech instructor had 22 years in automation, five or six years of teaching experience, and he’s a unicorn—he could make 2-1/2 times what he’s making as an instructor, but wants to teach and give back.”

At the Blue Valley school district’s popular CAPS program, which attracts about 600 students each semester, director Chad Ralston said recent trends reflected increased interest in health care, construction and AI-facing careers.

Especially after the pandemic, he said, “young people seeing gaps in their community and rushing to fill them. This is especially true of health care our health-care courses. … The other space of growth is in our technology courses where students are quickly acclimating to the trends in building and using AI for projects.” 

While there have always been chal-lenges for education to stay current with industry trends, Ralston said, “we are lucky to have a school district that supports our work in having a close relationship with industry partners that take the form of advising, project support and even internship opportunities. We are also willing to look for instructors from the work force who can gain licensure through non-traditional pathways in Kansas who bring vital industry knowledge.”

Piper tells a story that speaks directly to broader growth constraints already being imposed in this region.

“Someone from a large contractor here in town—they build large hospitals and other large structures—told me that if they get the opportunity to bid on four projects, they’ll only submit on two of them. They don’t dare bid on all four; if they won even three of the four, they wouldn’t be able to meet construction deadlines as short-handed as they are on skilled labor.”