Building Bridges

AGC and University of Alaska forge new paths in construction education

By Victoria Petersen

n a new initiative aimed at addressing critical workforce shortages and creating job opportunities for Alaskans in a rapidly growing industry, the Associated General Contractors, or AGC, of Alaska has partnered with University of Alaska, or UA, leadership to establish an endowment. This collaborative effort is focused on bolstering industry training and providing essential support to fill gaps in the state’s construction workforce.

“Alaska is a unique place to live, and we do very well retaining our home-grown talent,” says Marcus Trivette, president of Brice, Inc. and AGC president. “It’s an important part of our workforce to have people who are committed to sticking around in Alaska and want to live here, and it’s nice to have the ability to get relevant training here for people who might want to join the industry.”

In April, the full AGC board of directors voted to contribute $200,000 toward an endowment supporting construction industry training. The endowment will continue to grow and support the university system’s construction-related programs. Over the course of two years, nearly $900,000 was invested to support this initiative. Industry and individual donors contributed $492,000, including the $200,000 from AGC—the largest single gift to the initiative—while UA President Pat Pitney directly committed $400,000 in university funds.

“The Construction Management Workforce Initiative highlights the power of philanthropy and partnership in post-secondary education,” Pitney says. “Thanks to Meg [Nordale’s] vision and the generosity of AGC and other private donors, this initiative is helping build the construction workforce our state needs. I’m grateful for each and every supporter; their investment in UA allows us to empower Alaska, and improve the lives of our students.”

AGC has supported engineering and construction programs at UA for twenty years, giving more than half a million dollars to programs at UAA, UAF, and UAS. The new endowment ensures support that will extend in perpetuity.

The new endowment will be officially announced at AGC of Alaska’s annual conference in November, representing a strategic effort to ensure sustained support and industry relevance for the university’s construction programs.

Efforts to establish the endowment go back more than fifteen years and were a massive team effort, says UA Foundation Board Chair Meg Nordale, who is also president of GHEMM Company, a Fairbanks-based general contractor in commercial construction. Nordale is an AGC past president, life board member, and recipient of the association’s prestigious Hard Hat award. She helped shape the initiative.

“There were a lot of meetings with a lot of people around the table, and we all worked together,” Nordale says. “And I think our hope is that what we have done, our endowment, will continue to grow and see more support.”

She says the endowment highlights the critical need for more skilled labor in Alaska’s construction industry, and that the investment comes at a critical time, when similar programs at the university were experiencing shrinking enrollment. Growing enrollment is crucial right now; in Alaska, jobs in the construction trade are expected to grow nearly 10 percent by 2030.

“As a business owner, I noticed that there was a lack of skilled labor in construction project management,” Nordale says. “I was able to get some ideas and a sense from [UA’s] leadership on how maybe through financial support of those programs—dollars raised through the foundation—we could affect some change at the university level. So rather than just go to the program and say, ‘Gosh, we’d love to give you money,’ we circled back around and went through the University of Alaska Foundation, which then will provide sustained support paid for by industry.”

Randy Johnson, the area manager for Spenard Builders Supply and an AGC board member, says SBS donated to the initiative to help support home-grown talent.

“The construction industry is facing a near-crisis level worker shortage,” he says. “Spenard Builders Supply supports the University of Alaska, believing that students who attend are more likely to stay in the state for work. AGC of Alaska shares this goal of education, benefiting member companies by recruiting local talent into their businesses.”

When it comes to the specific needs in Alaska’s construction industry, Nordale says she sees plenty of training emphasis on craft labor, such as carpenters, laborers, and electricians. However, she’s seeing less emphasis on the skills that sit between the high-level skills of an engineer and the high-level skills of a carpenter or other craft laborer.

“Construction management—it’s a combination of understanding the techniques of construction, having drawings, understanding how to put estimates together, but then also having some English classes, accounting classes, you know, general studies, so that you come out of this as a well-rounded project manager,” Nordale says. “We were seeing that there was a lack of that. And while some of my company’s project managers are engineers by education, several of them are not, so this degree offers them a place in the industry that we were really feeling a void.”

AGC of Alaska Life Board member and past president Tony Johansen, partner in Fairbanks-based construction company Great Northwest, Inc., says he can easily see the value of investing in the future of UA. Four of the engineers currently employed at Great Northwest came from the UA system, he says, along with two junior engineers.

“The university provides us with a large part of our management workforce,” he says. “The endowment process helps to ensure that the school has the funding and support necessary to continue generating young engineers.”

The endowment program offers an opportunity for skilled labor on the craft side as well, allowing students to get credit for what they are learning in the field. The endowment will also hopefully address some of Alaska’s “brain drain” problem through retention of current construction employees.

“The skills that those folks learned in the field—when they’re 55 and their back hurts, they can transition to more of an office or job site trailer office position where those skills, combined with a construction management degree, are incredibly valuable,” Nordale says. “It offers them the opportunity to continue their career in construction. We saw it as a way to not only attract new employees but to retain them.”

The endowment ensures ongoing communication will continue via regular committee meetings with representatives from the UA system’s main campuses in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Southeast; the university’s associate vice president for workforce development; and three industry representatives from AGC. One of the major benefits of the endowment structure is allowing industry to have a seat at the table, Trivette says.

“We’ll always be able to bring forward what industry sees as the current needs, and that’s going to evolve,” he says. “That’s where it’s important that the seats that we get on the board, the committee that’s going to make those decisions, is to stay in touch not only with the programs on the university side but to provide the perspective of the industry and to make sure the training is meeting the needs of the industry.”

AGC and the university have had a long, ongoing partnership over the years. AGC has been supportive of the university’s engineering programs, offering scholarships at UAF and UAA. The association has also provided seed money for the four-year construction management degree at UAA.

“I would say that the relationship [between UA and AGC] has been ongoing, continuous, and this is just yet another means that a) AGC recognizes the value of the university in multiple ways and b) is just continuing our relationship. Nothing’s changed. We’ve added one more way for all of us to collaborate,” Nordale says.

University construction programs are already being revamped, Nordale says. At UAF, classes were not being offered online. But post-pandemic, the program is now available online, making it possible for construction professionals to work while taking courses in their off time.

The endowment will be used for a variety of efforts to boost the university’s construction programs, including marketing, teaching positions, and travel assistance for outreach in harder-to-reach Southeast communities. Efforts to drive up involvement in construction programs are already paying off: according to information from UA, between fall 2022 and fall 2023, enrollment for construction management and similar programs is up across the UA system and additional faculty have been hired to increase course capacity. To see videos of students in action, please visit the Empower Alaska site.

“We recognized that the pipeline into the programs needed to be filled and we were able to steer the university into spending the funds in that way,” Trivette says. “It’s going to be an ongoing process to make sure that what the programs are requesting are aligned with what industry needs and what we need to make sure the program will be well attended.”

Nordale says she hopes this endowment can become a model for other industries around the state who rely on two and four-year degree programs, along with shorter certificate programs.

“I’m super hopeful that other folks will look at it and say, ‘Oh, wow, we could do something like that. We can raise that kind of money. We can make that happen.’ And it will shine a light on the value of the university and shine a light on how collaboration is critical to achieving great things,” Nordale says.

The contributions from industry partners that made this endowment possible were part of a comprehensive fundraising campaign “For Alaska” that focused on four key areas of support for the University of Alaska including access to education, critical research, strengthening Alaska’s economy, and training and preparing the workforce. More information can be found at universityforalaska.com.