Invisible PPE: The Human Under the Hat
We've spent fifty years getting really good at protecting construction workers.
Better gloves, glasses, hard hats and boots. Better harnesses, vests and signage. Even better toolbox talks, incident reporting and stand-downs. We have stacked layer upon layer of PPE and processes in an effort to eliminate the ways someone can get hurt on a job site.
And yet construction loses five times more people to one particular cause than any other physical fatalities.
Suicide.
So either we're protecting the wrong thing, or we're simply pretending that physical PPE is enough.
The Opportunity is There, Explore the Trades
We don’t have a labor shortage problem in construction. We have a story problem.
We talk about demand, stability, earning potential and even long-term growth. But despite all of that, we still can’t attract enough people to fill the need. The opportunities alone aren’t compelling enough to make someone choose construction.
It’s a contradiction that’s hard to ignore.
And that’s where Explore the Trades steps in. Not to simply promote the trades, but to connect the next generation in a way that draws them in.
The Hardest Problems in Construction Have Nothing to Do with Tech
Many times, when something is wrong, we notice right away. Other times, it may take a friend pointing it out. But every so often, the most important lesson comes from a wakeup call. Literally.
That’s how it all started for Ian Gray, a long-time construction advisor and co-host of the Salty & Wired podcast. And while his first instinct was that he “must be the weird one,” he soon realized that the construction industry's hardest problems weren't living inside a process flow diagram or an RFI.
They were living inside the people building the projects.
The Trade Gap We Built Ourselves
Every so often a belief becomes so embedded in our culture that we stop questioning it entirely. Get good grades. Go to a good college. That’s the path to success.
It is a message that’s been repeated with such consistency that it feels less like advice and more like a rule.
But this story we’ve been telling ourselves might not be as solid as we thought. What do we do when the system we trusted suddenly stops working the way we were promised it would?
