For years, the construction industry’s response to its workforce shortage has centered on a familiar prescription: find more people.
New research suggests contractors may also want to take a closer look at the people they already have.
A nationwide research initiative funded by Associated Builders and Contractors found that qualified multiskilled crews spent substantially more time performing direct construction work and substantially less time waiting or idle than those restricted to a single trade. In a separate controlled trial, reducing handoffs between trades cut completion time by approximately 30% for a defined, closely sequenced work scope.
The findings offer a new way to look at one of construction’s most persistent challenges. The workforce shortage may not be solely a question of how many workers are available, but also how effectively qualified workers can be deployed as project needs change.
That does not mean replacing specialists with generalists—or asking workers to perform tasks for which they are not qualified. Rather, the research examines what happens when workers retain a primary trade while developing certified capabilities that complement it.
Researchers from the University of Kansas, UNC Charlotte, Arizona State University and the Simplar Foundation examined multiskilling through nationwide jobsite observations, controlled workflow trials, project and payroll records, workforce-development systems, prior peer-reviewed research and contractor safety data.
Taken together, the findings suggest that multiskilling can help contractors get more production capacity from a constrained workforce—not by making individual craft professionals work faster, but by reducing waiting, handoffs and mismatches between the people available and the work that needs to be done.
More Time Actually Building
The scale of the field research is notable. Researchers conducted 40 site visits across 36 projects in 24 states, spanning 22 project types and projects ranging from approximately $500,000 to more than $1 billion. They observed 60 multiskilled crews comprising 644 workers from 30 contractors and collected 11,407 work-sampling observations.
The research found that context matters. The greatest opportunities occurred where work involved frequent handoffs, adjacent tasks, changing labor requirements and closely connected activities. More specialized or continuous work offered less opportunity to benefit.
Researchers compared the observed work sequence of multiskilled crews with a jobsite on which those same workers were restricted to work associated with their primary trades.
The difference was substantial.
Multiskilled crews spent about half of their crew time performing direct construction work, compared with roughly one-third under the one-trade comparison—a 39% increase in the share of crew time devoted to direct construction work. Put another way, multiskilling added approximately eight minutes of direct construction work during every crew-hour.
At the same time, idle and waiting time fell from approximately 45% to 15%, a reduction of roughly 68%, or about 19 minutes per crew-hour.
The implication is not that workers should work longer, skip breaks or simply move faster. Rather, the research points to time that can be lost when workers are waiting for another trade, access, equipment, materials, information or coordination.
Joel Dutton, a multiskilled construction professional currently employed as preconstruction manager at Evans General Contractors, has seen that dynamic firsthand.
“Anytime you are limited to just one task, then it kind of wraps your mindset around ‘this is what you do and only what you do,’” he says. “I found, in this industry, there’s a lot more opportunity and a lot more room for growth when your mindset is wrapped around the idea of, ‘What can I learn next? What can I do now?’”
That flexibility can translate directly into utilization. “When you think like that, you’re adding value because you don’t have all that downtime,” Dutton says.
The Handoff Problem
The field observations help explain why multiskilling can create that effect.
In controlled trials at the Cianbro Institute, researchers examined a closely sequenced construction assembly involving 11 activities, seven trade functions and 10 potential handoffs.
One workflow used a multiskilled crew that could keep closely connected activities within the same team. The conventional workflow repeatedly transferred responsibility from one trade function to another. For this defined, closely sequenced work, reducing the handoffs cut completion time by approximately 30%.
A Workforce-Capacity Strategy
For contractors confronting a shortage of qualified labor, perhaps the most consequential finding is not about productivity at all. It is about capacity.
The field analysis found that restricting observed workers to a single trade would have required approximately 45% to 72% more worker-equivalent capacity to accomplish the same work sequence.
This is particularly relevant when the problem is not a lack of people overall, but a lack of the right qualified capacity at the exact moment it is needed.
Workers in the observed multiskilled crews spent approximately 36% of observed crew time performing work outside their primary trade. Researchers documented 142 distinct combinations of primary trades and additional skills, demonstrating that multiskilling can take many forms depending on the work and capabilities available.
For Kaden Darbonne, multiskilled professional and project coordinator, at Triad Electric and Controls (a subsidiary of The Newtron Group), who developed from electrical work into instrumentation and eventually a coordinator role, that flexibility has had a direct impact on his ability to remain useful as project needs change.
“If you’re only subjected to one thing, then they may not need you,” he says. “But if you know how to do everything, they can keep you to the end of the project and you’re more essential to the company.”
He sees the same principle applying to career longevity.
“It gives you a more permanent position within the company too. If you learn additional things, you can grow into a management role and lead people. You can do more things than you think you can.”
What’s in It for the Worker?
Broader capability creates value for the employer—and it should create visible value for the worker, too.
Additional capabilities can potentially allow a craft professional to work more hours during the year, remain on a project longer, move into another scope, qualify for additional projects or stay productive when primary-trade work temporarily slows. They can also create pathways toward higher pay, leadership responsibilities, coaching, instruction and advancement.
Just as important, multiskilling does not require workers to abandon their primary trade. A worker can deepen craft mastery while adding a complementary capability.
Dutton’s career provides a real-world example. He entered construction as a welder and over time developed expertise in pipe fitting, welding inspection and other related areas. His primary trade today remains pipe fitting, with complementary skills that grew from that foundation.
“I would never have become a piping foreman had I not picked up that skill,” Dutton says. “So I never would have seen my wages grow the way that they did if I did not take that step to learn that next trade.”
Later, additional credentials and experience opened the door to estimating and preconstruction.
“Every step that I’ve taken in my career has provided a lot of financial benefit, a lot of growth, but it’s also required a lot of sacrificing time and energy and strength to go in to learn and to pick up more knowledge,” he says.
Flexibility Without Lowering the Bar
Multiskilling cannot mean informal task switching or putting an unqualified worker into unfamiliar work. Licensing, credentials, safety requirements, quality standards, employer authorization, supervision and other applicable controls still apply.
Dutton argues that broader trade knowledge can actually change the way workers perceive their surroundings.
“When you’re working with a crew that understands multiple trades, you’re working with a crew that understands multiple risks. So they can walk into a work area and identify more risk a lot faster because they actually know what they’re looking for.”
The safety data provides useful context. Among 15 participating contractors that supplied safety information, approximately 33.2 million employee-hours were represented. The sample reported a TRIR of 0.74, a DART rate of 0.35, an hours-weighted EMR of approximately 0.60 and no reported fatalities.
A Different Way to Think About the Workforce Shortage
Construction still needs to recruit and develop many more people. Multiskilling does not eliminate that challenge, nor does it diminish the value of deep specialization.
This research adds another dimension to the workforce conversation: How effectively is the industry using the qualified people it already has?
Across active jobsites and controlled work scopes, the research suggests that selected cross-trade capability can help crews absorb changing work requirements, reduce waiting, eliminate unnecessary handoffs and extend available workforce capacity.
The broader implication is that construction’s workforce challenge is not purely a headcount problem. It is also a capability, deployment and workflow problem.
For contractors, that means looking beyond how many people are available and asking whether the right qualified capabilities are available at the right time.
For workers, it means viewing additional skills not simply as credentials, but as potential pathways to more hours, broader assignments, greater earning potential and career advancement.
And for owners and the broader industry, it means recognizing workforce strategy as part of project planning—not something that begins when the workforce arrives at the jobsite. Multiskilling can help the industry get more capacity from the workforce it has while building a workforce that is more capable of meeting the work ahead.
To read the Q&A and learn more, visit abc.org/multiskilling.
SEE ALSO: ABC’S NEWS RELEASE ON MULTISKILLING IN THE U.S. CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY
