This month, editor Marcy Marro digs into certification programs for metal building erectors, starting on page 30. There are lots of ways contractors and their crews can educate themselves on everything from techniques to safety. It’s essential that they take advantage of these opportunities for a lot of reasons.
Continuing education is as important for contractors as it is for designers
Strong training programs attract the best workers, improve the overall quality of the work product and help contractors differentiate themselves from their quality competition. Those are the benefits of continuing education for contractors, but there are few requirements, and they vary widely by geography and industry.
Florida has relatively strict continuing education requirements, but few states require them and many only require them for certain trades, such as electrical or HVAC, or just for residential contractors.
Consider architects and engineers by contrast. Almost all states require continuing education in order to be licensed in those professions, and membership in certain organizations, such as AIA, carry its own continuing education obligations.
It has always surprised me that we require so little continuing education for contractors. After all, the world is changing quickly and new materials and techniques are implemented almost daily.
When I hang around contractor associations such as the Metal Building Contractors & Erectors Association (MBCEA), I am always awed by how dedicated to training those members are. The MBCEA is, in many ways, devoted to improving the quality of its members through continuing education.
You hang around good contractors, though, and you also invariably hear about the not-so-good contractors. Often, the best at their trades are brought in to clean up the messes made by the less than stellar. For some, it’s actually a fairly lucrative arm of the business.
But it is so inefficient and wasteful, as well as alienating to building owners. Productivity in construction lags far behind that of other industries, and some reports argue that since the mid-’60s, productivity has actually decreased. There are a lot of reasons for that, but one of them has to be that our industry doesn’t require continuing education.
I also worry that the barriers to entry in our industry are already low, so continuing education is even more essential. I used to joke that a person could be licensed as a contractor in some states within a day of deciding he wanted to do it. Certainly, most states require commercial contractors to put forth more devotion and effort than that, but it usually isn’t that hard to get licensed. If we want contracting to be treated more as a profession, having higher professional requirements would be a good first step.
After all, the codes now require a very sophisticated understanding of energy consumption in buildings and how to achieve certain energy use requirements. It would be nice if we also required people to educate themselves in those areas.
