| OTIA III State Bridge Delivery |
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| Web Brief (May 06) |
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PCC Cascades students practice their linesman skills
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Pre-apprentices ready for peak highway construction season
When eight candidates graduated from the Portland Community College Cascade Trades and Industry Division at the end of March, they were finishing six months of comprehensive training and looking forward to long-term careers in construction work, ideally on ODOT’s OTIA III State Bridge Delivery Program.
The students are the first group of Oregonians to take new classes that prepare them to apply as apprentice ironworkers, concrete masons and electricians, among other trades. Their training ranged from foundational skills such as interviewing for jobs and managing a paycheck to technical skills such as reading a blueprint and calculating the cubic feet of concrete needed to pour a bridge deck.
The program is funded in part by ODOT’s Workforce Development Plan. In 2005, the plan received matching funds of $1.8 million over two years from the Federal Highway Administration; ODOT contracted $150,000 of the matching funds to PCC Cascade to implement the pre-apprentice training program. The students are enthusiastic about the value of what they’ve learned.
“I’ll need these trigonometry skills when I’m running a backhoe,” said pre-apprentice operating engineer Josh Grove. “If I’m trying to fill a slope 20 feet up and 15 feet over, I’ll have to continually calculate the angles to know how much dirt I’ll need.”
“I’m learning what I need to do and what questions I need to ask to get to where I want to go,” said Hart Ferguson, another graduate of the program. “I don’t expect it’s going to be a cakewalk, but I definitely know what I’m getting into.”
Once hired as apprentices, the students will undergo four to five years of on-the-job training with a journey-level worker as they master their trade. Construction jobs pay well; an ironworker earns $29 per hour, and an apprentice’s wage begins at 65 percent of that amount.
“This training closes the gaps,” said PCC Instructor Dwight Page. “It brings motivated students together with those who can help them get well-paying jobs, and it gives them a greater understanding of what they’ll be expected to do once they’re hired.”
The students anticipate good prospects for employment, given the number of jobs the bridge program is expected to generate. In the Portland metro area, ODOT anticipates that bridge program work will sustain approximately 4,000 jobs through 2010, of which about 400 will be construction apprenticeships.
##ODOT##
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