The Lowe's Foundation launched the Building Futures Skilled Trades Coalition on September 1, bringing together more than 75 businesses, educators, workforce organizations, and industry groups around a goal of helping train and develop 1 million people for skilled-trade careers by 2035. Founding corporate participants include Nvidia, AT&T, Bank of America, Carrier, General Motors, DEWALT, and Duke Energy. Training will span industries that normally compete against each other for the same electricians, HVAC technicians, and controls specialists. This collaboration signals that industries that usually treat labor as a zero-sum competition are starting to acknowledge that the underlying labor pool itself needs investment, not just better recruiting.
Construction Employment Kept Growing Even as the Broader Labor Market Softened
Associated Builders and Contractors estimates the industry needs roughly 349,000 additional workers in 2026 just to balance labor supply with demand. Driven by ongoing data center investment, nonresidential specialty trades added 15,400 jobs in July, countering broader economic losses. The equipment side of that equation matters too, since ordering a transformer or piece of switchgear is not the same as having someone available to install it, a distinction that shows up in project timelines well after capital has already been committed.
The new coalition represents a different response to that same underlying problem: instead of competing harder over workers who already exist, employers are trying to expand the workforce itself.
Duke Energy, Carrier, and Nvidia Draw From the Same Labor Pool
The coalition plans to work across several stages of workforce development, including recruiting people into the trades, expanding training and credentialing programs, and improving the connection between training and actual employment. It also intends to develop common measurements for whether programs are producing workers who successfully move into skilled careers or whether qualified workers are actually available in the occupations, markets, and time frames where projects need them.
Duke Energy needs workers supporting power infrastructure. Carrier operates in a market dependent on HVAC technicians. General Motors needs skilled manufacturing talent. AT&T depends on technicians building and maintaining communications networks, and Nvidia's growth is tied to an AI infrastructure expansion requiring data centers, power systems, and sophisticated building infrastructure. Those companies operate in different markets, but they increasingly depend on overlapping pieces of the same skilled workforce, a dynamic already visible in how chipmakers have built their own apprenticeship pipelines rather than waiting on the external labor market.
Federal and Private Investment Are Now Pointing in the Same Direction
The private-sector initiative follows increased federal investment in apprenticeship programs tied directly to infrastructure, including the Department of Labor's nearly $162 million in performance-based Registered Apprenticeship grants awarded in July. For individual companies, participation in workforce development does not eliminate the near-term labor shortage. An apprentice starting training this year does not immediately become an experienced journeyman electrician, and the new coalition will need to demonstrate that its goal translates into completed training and sustained employment rather than simply enrollment.
But the strategic direction is notable. Companies deciding where to build facilities increasingly evaluate electricity, transportation, water, permitting, and supplier capacity before committing capital, and workforce pipelines may deserve similar scrutiny, whether that means deeper partnerships with community colleges and apprenticeship programs or evaluating contractors not only on the workers they can provide today but also on whether they are developing enough workers to support future projects.
The Lowe's Foundation says its existing Gable Grants network already includes 73 community colleges and nonprofit organizations across 30 states, and the foundation has separately committed $250 million toward developing 250,000 tradespeople by 2035. Whether the broader coalition reaches 1 million workers remains to be seen, but the structure reflects something that is significant for infrastructure executives. America's skilled-trade shortage cannot be solved entirely through recruitment since every company cannot simultaneously solve its problem by hiring someone else's electrician. Eventually the labor pool itself has to grow.
