How Technology Could Bring Younger Generations to Construction Work

An aging workforce and labor shortage are among the various challenges plaguing the construction industry right now, but emerging technologies could help address these issues.

The average age in the construction sector is currently 42.5 years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2017, about 70% of construction firms reported facing difficulties in hiring.

This may be due in part by a lack of interest from younger generations: only 3% of young adults expressed interest in construction trades in a National Association of Home Builders poll.

Roads & Bridges spoke with Cameron Clark, the earthmoving industry director at Trimble, about potential technology-driven solutions.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Roads & Bridges: There is a lack of younger generations entering the construction industry. Could you give us a high-level view of this problem and how it’s shifted in recent times?

Cameron Clark: Skilled labor shortages are a real problem out there. I call it part of the construction dilemma. We’ve got a lot of construction demands with new infrastructure and we are also working with servicing the existing infrastructure that’s aging.

We’ve got experienced workers retiring. The construction industry for a number of years hasn’t been something that people are pushed into. “You’ve got to go to college, don’t go into construction, it’s mundane, you’re standing outside.”

Technology is really changing that. With the journey to autonomy that I see, technology is at the forefront of changing construction totally. The construction worker of yesterday versus today and tomorrow is totally different. It’s very exciting, changing that whole mindset around construction and the opportunities and career development you can have.

RB: Could you give some examples of those technologies and how they could incentivize young people to enter the industry?

CC: There's a number of different types of technology out there. I think for me, from what I've seen firsthand, is really all the stuff that you can do in the reality capture side of things. Getting into the spatial awareness side of it, the use of scanning, lidar and radar, the use of drones, really all those things to capture the real world digitally.

A lot of the kids growing up, they're into the video games. Like in Minecraft, you've got these 3D worlds and that is transferable into construction. I heard a really cool example the other week where a person from the U.K. was brought into construction and really leveraged what they do with gaming and building simulated environments, transferring that into construction and building 3D models that don't stay in a game but actually make it into reality.

RB: How do you see safety being improved with new technology, which might also attract young workers?

CC: Safety is very important and construction can be a very dangerous place. Technology helps a lot with reducing the number of people needing to be around the machines, needing to be on the site. You don't need grade checkers or people down in the hole in an unsafe position. You don't need to travel a long way and go and update designs and even support operators. You can do all that remotely now.

There’s also a number of things where you can identify areas on the site where you don't want operators to go, so you'll get beeps and alerts. A lot of the problem with safety is the things that aren't reported. By having technology, you can create dashboards and capture hotspots of areas where maybe you've got to change a haul road or site access. You can look and really drive change by seeing the things that haven't been reported, down to restricting machine movement, like having areas where you can stop the slew of a machine.

Safety is a pretty hot topic at the moment. That's actually growing quite a lot with the limiting stuff and having the 3D spatial awareness of where you are in relation to other machines, where you are in relation to people.

RB: What technology are you specifically looking forward to that could be a big driver of autonomy?

CC: Exploring what you can do with artificial intelligence and machine learning is pretty key. Being able to understand what machines are doing and understand how expert operators are doing their work. It’s the journey of how you get there with operator assistance and safety, providing dashboards in a machine to help a person with lesser skill grow really fast with their productivity levels. For a contractor, having the confidence of knowing the different operators coming through that might not have skills, might be from completely different parts of the market, are consistent and you can get a level of performance that you can plan for.

Building from that is how you can automate the site. How you can optimize the machines, the workflows and the work groups, both manned and unmanned. Fully autonomous machines running on sites, that's a long way, away right? But the journey of how we get there is the key thing. We've been able to automate the blade of a of a bulldozer for twenty years. We can automate the bucket of an excavator, we can steer a machine today too.

If we can steer a machine to a line, think about if we can change that line dynamically to optimize how the machine operates. That's the really exciting thing for me, where we can go. When you can actually optimize the site, that’s when you’re really talking. Not just the machine. It's the ecosystem and how things can come along. You need that to be able to have a fully autonomous job site. All that value we can do now along the way is very exciting. It's pretty cool to be in this space for sure.