Arizona May Be Running Out of Construction Workers

On an early July morning just north of Scottsdale, a group of 10 or so men joined together in the backhouse schoolroom of a construction warehouse to learn the basics of excavation.

They are one of a small class of new apprentices, modern craftsmen on a path toward graduation three years from now, who hope to fill one of the many positions Arizona’s private industry leaders are desperately trying to fill in a state where labor demands appear to have outscaled its capacity to train critical staff.

“When I first started, we had probably close to 600 employees, but we are continuously growing. We are currently hiring for a variety of positions, and in the last few weeks, we have probably seen 65 new hires,” said Tiffany Andrade, a recruiter at Rummel Construction, a civil construction firm operating in the Southwest since 1996.

These new apprentices will be tasked with laying the foundation of Arizona’s economic future — literally. Rummel specializes in mass excavation, grading and asphalt paving. Its employees utilize big machines for even bigger jobs, moving dirt and preparing the ground for sports stadiums, mines, landfills, solar projects and more.

And in a state seeing massive investment in advanced manufacturing, the skillset has never been more in demand.

“If we don’t ramp up, and we lose our momentum in terms of advanced manufacturing semiconductors, we will fall off the list of states that businesses are considering, so it’s not just that we’re going to lose a little bit, you lose a lot — if you lose one of the major inputs into what it takes for an industry to grow,” said Jim Rounds, president and CEO of Rounds Consulting Group, an economic development and consulting firm.

The specter of interstate competition over chip manufacturing has fueled more than worry and economic speculation, it has ignited private and public officials, prompting new and renewed efforts to recruit, retain and train the skilled construction workers needed to lay the foundation for that new tech industry across Arizona.

“We saw double-digit-plus year-over-year growth within industrial construction in 2024 and leading into 2025, so we have been seeing employment activity and employment benefits from investments in those sectors,” said the Arizona Office of Economic Opportunity’s chief economist, Doug Walls. “More recently, we’ve seen an uptick and potential change in trends within fabricated metals manufacturing… Given the substantial announcement of investment into the state within manufacturing, and the expected build outs that are trying to come online in the next several years, there’s going to be quite a bit of opportunity for Arizonans to benefit.”

But to capitalize on that growth, Arizona’s construction industry has to grapple with a yet-unsolved issue.

“We have a significant (worker) shortage,” said Mike Greenawalt, the founder and Chief Visionary Officer of the Greenawalt Foundation, a 45-year veteran of the construction industry now working to address future labor shortages for the state. “However, it’s being masked right now by a lot of money, meaning overtime and over-scale pay. Every major project is paying some type of premium over what market costs (for labor) would be. So we’re not seeing major slowdowns, but we are wearing people out and people are retiring at an extremely rapid rate.”

That high retirement rate is just one catalyst facilitating Arizona’s new need for construction workers. More broadly, the state is evolving, and with that change has come new investment from businesses looking to take advantage of favorable tax policies. That’s a good problem to have for state economic officials, but a difficult challenge to overcome for those on the ground floor of workforce development.

“After the great recession, we kind of all got together and we reformed how we promote the economy,” Rounds said. “The public policy very much mattered, but now the problem is our economic momentum has become so strong that it has become difficult to continue to recruit at the same level we used to from out of state, and we have more people retiring than before, so there’s natural economic reasons we may end up short.”

The Arizona’s Office of Economic Opportunity’s most recent employment report shows Arizona’s construction industry added 2,700 jobs in May this year, a small but significant fraction of the 20,000 that the state needs to fill by 2030 and less than 1% of 349,000 that the country needs to attract, estimated by the Associated Builders and Contractors, a national trade association representing the construction industry. And while millions are being spent by the state of Arizona to develop the talent pipelines needed to fulfill the state’s economic goals, the truth is that a cavalcade of compounding factors have left the industry bleeding people faster than it can recruit.

“About 40% of them leave the industry in 24 months because it’s too hard. They didn’t have an understanding of it,” Greenawalt said. “For every four to six that leave, only two are coming in, and then we’re losing 40% of those in the first two years. That’s a long-term problem mathematically, and that’s what’s going to compound between 2030 and 2035 that we need to address now.”

But addressing the trends prohibiting recruitment in construction are not simple. Beyond the funding, communication, talent and institutions really required to beat this issue, the cultural stigma attached to a life of manual labor continues to prove a challenging issue for experts.

“When I was a young man in elementary school, the kids who had a dad that was a carpenter or a plumber were really proud. It was an acceptable profession by the late 70s. By the early 80s, it’s what you did when you couldn’t find another job,” Greenawalt said. “Culturally, construction is looked down upon. And when you take four generations of tradesmen…we’ve got over 30 to maybe 40 years of neglect on supplying the construction industry with educated, quality people. We met the need, but we didn’t really plan or look to the future.”

Apprenticeship operations like those at Rummel are not few and far between, public and private leaders have concocted a variety of workforce development programs aimed at addressing the issue.

One success story comes from BuildItAZ, a state program established by Hobbs under the office of Economic Opportunity in 2023 to double the number of construction and trade apprentices in Arizona by 2026. Its method? Mass communication, organization, networking and policy.

So far, BuildItAZ has connected 3,000 Arizonans to apprenticeships in a hungry pool of construction and contracting businesses — a strong start to its lofty goal of doubling the state’s total construction apprentices by 2026.