America has become very good at announcing infrastructure, including data centers, transmission projects, semiconductor plants, nuclear facilities, manufacturing expansions, grid upgrades, water systems, hospitals, and building modernization programs. Eventually, nearly all of them need the same thing; people who know how to build and maintain complex physical systems, and that is where the just-in-time approach most U.S. companies take toward skilled labor begins to break down. Those workers are not supporting one infrastructure boom; they are supporting several at once, drawn from overlapping regional labor pools regardless of which sector's name is on the project. The question for infrastructure owners is therefore changing. It is no longer enough to determine whether a project has financing, permits, equipment, and electricity secured. Companies increasingly have to ask whether the workforce required to execute the project will actually exist when construction begins.
Switzerland Builds the Workforce Before the Vacancy Opens
Switzerland offers a useful counterexample to the idea that companies should simply recruit skilled workers when they need them. About two-thirds of Swiss young people leaving compulsory education enroll in vocational education and training, choosing from roughly 250 federally recognized occupations that combine paid workplace training with classroom instruction. Companies offered around 87,000 apprenticeship positions for the 2025 intake, according to the government's Nahtstellenbarometer survey, though roughly 13% went unfilled by the time most programs began in August, a gap driven partly by shortages in specific trades like electrical work. Roughly a third of Swiss companies train apprentices, and Brookings researchers who studied the system found that about 60% of those employers break even or turn a profit by the end of the apprenticeship itself, with an average return on investment near 8%.
The important difference is not simply that Switzerland has apprenticeships. It is that workforce development is integrated into how employers think about future capacity: a company that expects to need technicians several years from now does not have to rely exclusively on finding qualified workers in an increasingly competitive external labor market, because employers participate in developing some of those workers themselves.
Germany Measures Training Against the Cost of Recruiting Externally
Germany's dual vocational system operates on a similar principle. Roughly half of school leavers enter dual vocational training, working for companies while attending vocational school in one of more than 300 recognized occupations. Germany's Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training, known as BIBB, has analyzed data from more than 3,000 companies that provide apprenticeships and nearly 1,000 that do not, directly comparing the cost of training workers internally against the cost of recruiting already-qualified employees externally. The research explicitly frames apprenticeship investment as one company-level response to skilled-worker shortages, at a moment when Germany's own chamber of commerce reports more companies cutting apprenticeship slots than expanding them amid economic headwinds. That comparison deserves more attention in the United States. Businesses routinely calculate whether to own or outsource equipment, generation, transportation, and other critical capacity; skilled labor increasingly belongs in the same conversation, particularly as transformer and equipment lead times already stretch well past two years for large infrastructure components.
The U.S. Is Not Starting From Zero
The United States already has infrastructure to build on. More than 480,000 apprentices participated in Registered Apprenticeship programs in construction during 2025, a 28% increase over five years, and the federal system counted roughly 702,000 active apprentices across all industries as of fiscal 2025, according to an analysis of Department of Labor enrollment data. The federal government is now trying to accelerate that growth. In July, the Department of Labor awarded nearly $162 million through five performance-based cooperative agreements targeting shipbuilding and defense manufacturing, telecommunications, information technology, automotive service, and infrastructure supporting artificial intelligence, semiconductor manufacturing and nuclear energy. One $40 million award, to Jobs for the Future, specifically targets workers needed to build and maintain AI, semiconductor and nuclear infrastructure, a workforce gap already visible in how chipmakers have started building their own apprenticeship pipelines rather than waiting for the external labor market to catch up. The Labor Department has also set a goal of surpassing 1 million active apprentices and moved this year to streamline apprenticeship registration, including a target of deciding on program registrations within 30 days.
Workforce Capacity Is Becoming Infrastructure Capacity
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects roughly 81,000 electrician openings a year through 2034, plus about 40,100 for HVAC-R technicians and 44,000 for plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters, and those figures do not isolate demand tied specifically to data centers, grid upgrades, and new generation capacity, all of which BLS now cites explicitly as contributors to future electrician demand. Approving more infrastructure does not automatically create more people capable of building it, which makes workforce planning an upstream issue rather than a downstream one. Companies deciding where to locate facilities may need to assess regional training pipelines alongside electricity availability and equipment lead times. Infrastructure owners may need deeper partnerships with unions, community colleges, technical schools, apprenticeship sponsors, and procurement teams may need to evaluate contractors partly on their ability to develop and retain workers rather than merely supply them for the next project.
Public incentives supporting factories, energy projects, and infrastructure may increasingly have to consider whether they are also expanding the labor capacity those investments depend on. America does not lack a skilled-workforce system, and apprenticeship participation is growing with new federal money moving toward exactly the industries facing the greatest infrastructure demand. The larger opportunity is to stop treating workforce development as something that happens after the project pipeline is already established. If labor is becoming one of the constraints determining which projects actually get built, developing skilled workers is itself an infrastructure investment.
