By: Ethan Rogers
Every conference these days features the same conversation: hire more apprentices, chase the grant funding, ride out the labour crunch until the pipeline fills back up. It’s an understandable instinct. But according to Manja Horner, recruitment alone will not save the trades industry. It’s too late for that to be the whole strategy.
The Math Isn’t Going to Add Up
Cultivating a journeyperson from scratch takes years of training, mentorship, and site hours. Turning that journeyperson into a foreman, supervisor, or project manager, someone who can actually run a job and lead people, is a five-to-ten-year investment, not a two-year runway. Most companies don’t have five to ten years of slack left to absorb that timeline. They need productive workers right now.
Meanwhile, every union local, contractor, and subcontractor is fishing from the same shrinking pond of skilled talent, and that pond is draining faster than it’s filling. By 2030, the industry is staring down hundreds of thousands of job openings as an entire generation retires out. No company can out-recruit a demographic cliff like the one we’re facing.
Competing With More Than the Contractor Down the Street
This is what makes the problem urgent rather than just concerning: the real competition isn’t only the contractor bidding on the next job in your city or town. It’s the data centre project offering premium wages to pull electricians off local sites. It’s the LNG build or the nuclear plant expansion that needs 1,500 workers and can pay rates a mid-size mechanical or electrical company simply cannot match. It’s shipbuilding and defence contracts backed by serious government and private capital investment, absorbing skilled trades workers faster than they can be recruited and trained.
Those mega-projects are only ramping up. They will keep pulling from the same limited talent pool for years to come, and when a project wraps, those workers won’t necessarily return to the trades and companies they left. A retention strategy built on “just hire more people” is competing against employers who can outspend on wages and benefits every time. That’s not a fight won only with pay. It has to be won in a different way.
The Real Lever: Become the Company People Refuse to Leave
If out-recruiting the shortage and out-paying the mega-projects aren’t options, there’s one lever left that actually moves the needle: becoming the kind of company workers are scrambling to get into, and terrified to leave. Being a sought-after employer comes down to three things.
Building a culture people can feel from day one. Workers, especially younger ones entering the trades right now, don’t stay somewhere out of loyalty to a paycheque alone. They stay where the onboarding was exciting, where they feel respected, where leadership communicates instead of barking orders, and where there’s a visible career path forward. Leadership teams still managing the way they were managed twenty years ago is a retention concern.
Training faster and more creatively. Without a relaxed decade to develop every worker from scratch, companies need structured, accelerated pathways to get people productive and confident faster, clear onboarding, mentorship pairing, and a skill-based plan for moving someone from apprentice to supervisor and beyond. Equipping supervisors with support to complete on-site training will boost apprenticeship completion rates and get people productive faster. Capturing knowledge from soon-to-be retirees and passing that to the next generation will be a competitive advantage.
Putting real structure behind retention. Retention is built through deliberate structure: clear leadership expectations, interesting career growth pathways, psychologically safe environments where people can raise problems without fear, and intergenerational communication that bridges the gap between senior workers and the next generation newly hired. Lack of attention to retention is costing companies their best people right now.
The Companies That Will Survive the Next 24 Months
The contractors and locals that make it through this disruption won’t be the ones with the biggest recruitment budget or the most government grant applications filed. They’ll be the ones who did the harder, less glamorous work of becoming genuinely good places to work, with leadership capable of navigating change, culture, and career paths strong enough to compete with big-money projects, and training systems fast enough to keep pace with a market shifting under everyone’s feet.
Grants can subsidize a hire. They can’t build a culture. That part is on the leader, and it’s the only part that actually determines whether a company’s best people stay.
