By Associated Builders and Contractors
At current rates of participation and completion, federal and state Government-Registered Apprenticeship Programs, or GRAPs, are still failing to meet the construction industry’s short- and long-term skilled workforce development needs, according to an annual Associated Builders and Contractors analysis of recently released U.S. Department of Labor data.
ABC estimates that, in fiscal year 2024, the construction industry’s federal and state GRAPs had about 290,000 apprentice participants and yielded fewer than 40,000 completers.
Six states did not report complete GRAP data to the DOL, so ABC’s figure incorporates rough estimates to account for missing state data in order to paint a more complete picture.
“Unfortunately, America’s government-registered apprenticeship system isn’t keeping up with construction industry demand for skilled craft professionals, despite encouraging progress by many stakeholders to create new programs, attract new apprentices and graduate journeymen and women at the end of a rigorous four-to-five year apprenticeship program,” said Ben Brubeck, ABC VP of regulatory, labor and state affairs. “Despite the growth of nonunion GRAPs, this data is further evidence that an all-of-the-above approach to workforce development––in contrast to the Biden administration’s policy that only advanced government-registered apprenticeship programs––is the best way to address the construction industry’s chronic skilled labor shortage.”
On Jan. 24, ABC projected the construction industry workforce shortage to be 439,000 in 2025.
The DOL’s data presents five-year trend lines indicating there has been stronger proportional growth in the number of nonunion GRAPs, apprentice participants and apprentice completers compared to union-affiliated GRAPs since 2019.
- In FY 2024, 84% of the construction industry’s GRAPs were nonunion providers. The number of nonunion GRAPs has grown by 25% since 2019, compared to a 7% decrease in union-affiliated GRAPs since FY 2019.
- Participants in nonunion GRAPs increased by 43% from FY 2019 to FY 2024, compared to 11% for union programs.
- Completers of nonunion GRAPs increased by 31% from FY 2019 to FY 2024, compared to 11% for union programs.
- However, in FY 2024, 31% of all construction industry GRAP participants were in nonunion programs.
“With construction unions representing a record-low 10.3% of the workforce, the fact that 69% of all apprenticeship program participants are in union programs illustrates why the union lobby pushes for registered apprenticeship requirements on taxpayer-funded construction projects and advocates for federal grant money for GRAPs as a whole,” said Brubeck. “Workforce development solutions outside of the GRAP paradigm are a threat to union market share.
“ABC champions government-registered apprenticeships as part of a diverse, all-of-the-above solution to workforce development needs to solve the construction industry’s demand for skilled craft professionals, as well as engineers, estimators and project managers,” said Brubeck. “ABC’s 67 chapters are educating craft, safety and management professionals using innovative and flexible learning models like just-in-time task training, competency-based progression and work-based learning, in addition to more than 450 federal and state GRAPs in more than 20 different occupations across America, in order to develop a safe, skilled and productive workforce. ABC members invested an estimated $1.6B in construction industry workforce development to upskill 1.3 million course attendees in 2023, including hundreds of GRAPs administered independently by ABC member companies.”
According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the construction industry had 8.31 million employees as of February 2025, and experienced an unemployment rate between 3.2% and 4.2% during peak construction months in 2024.
According to DOL apprenticeship data, apprentices enrolled in construction industry GRAPs comprise 35.7% of the 679,105 apprentices enrolled in GRAPs across all industries in FY 2024.
Visit abc.org/workforce to learn how ABC is building the people who build America and abc.org/grapmap to find an ABC GRAP. (Source)