Carpenters Training Center Skills Competition

If you are curious about what skilled trades can do after training, visit the local Philadelphia Carpenters Training Center. To see the skilled apprentices in action, there’s an annual event that’s free to the public.

The Annual Skills Contest & Open House is a skills competition to showcase its facilities and skilled apprentices. Plus, they put those apprentice skills to a day-long challenge.

Free to the public, the annual contest is held at The Carpenters Training Facility. Judges reveal the challenges at 8am and the contests end at 5pm. Trades apprentices in carpentry, cabinetmaking, floor laying, and millwright will participate.

Why skilled trades matter?

With the rising costs of 4-year college degrees and growing demands from employers for skilled workers, it can make really smart financial sense to consider a career in a trade. 

While a BigRentz survey reported that 41 percent of 18- to 24-year-old Americans believe high pay and career potential would motivate them to attend a trade school, only 11 percent think the high pay is possible with a trade.

Trade school enrollment had risen to 16 million students in 2014 from 9.6 million students in 1999, according to National Center for Education Statistics. But, now education enrollment has dropped. The construction trades has seen a -18.3 percent decline in enrollment from 2020 to 2021.

With the slide in enrollment, and the demand from employers rising steadily, there has been a growing shortage of skilled workers. Between May 2020 and August 2020, unemployment in the construction field dropped from 12.7 percent to 7.6 percent. In addition, during that same time, the economy added more than 200,000 jobs. 

According to Forbes, there will be more than 3 million skilled trade jobs to fill by 2028. Trade school graduates will be in high demand for a long time.