Tom Kriger, Director of Research and Education for the North America's Building Trades Unions (NABTU) and a member of Insulators Local 24, joined the America's Work Force Union Podcast, filling in for regular guest Pete Ielmini of the Mechanical Insulators LMCT, to discuss the state of building trades apprenticeship programs and the TradesFutures organization.
Kriger described NABTU’s Multi-Craft Core Curriculum (MC3), developed approximately 15 years ago to address three problems bubbling up through the building trades training system: a shortage of apprenticeship candidates, a need to diversify the pipeline and high first-year dropout rates. The curriculum grew from 10 programs into what is now the largest pre-apprenticeship program in any American industry, serving 7,500 students annually through more than 250 programs nationwide. Three years ago, the program was spun off as a separate organization, TradesFutures, to manage the administrative complexity of its scale.
Kriger also discussed the Jobs Machine, a new agentic AI tool developed with Microsoft Elevate that answers basic questions from parents and students about how union apprenticeships work. Finally, he addressed the applied math gap — the inability of many high school graduates to read a tape measure or multiply fractions — as a persistent barrier to first-year retention that requires a national conversation about how math is taught.
The building trades lose too many people in the first year of registered apprenticeship. The most common explanation candidates give for dropping out is simple: it was not what they expected.
Tom Kriger has spent the past 15 years working to change that. The solution he and the North America's Building Trades Unions (NABTU) developed is the Multi-Craft Core Curriculum — a boot camp designed to show prospective apprentices exactly what construction work looks and feels like before they commit to a three- to five-year apprenticeship program.
The problem driving first-year attrition is partly structural. Fewer young people grow up on farms where they work with tools and machinery. Fewer have parents in manufacturing who talk about mechanical systems at the dinner table. Shop class is gone from most American high schools. Many young people arrive on their first day in the trades with no frame of reference for what the work requires — early mornings, working outdoors in all seasons and weather, physical labor and a culture of commitment and accountability. The Multi-Craft Core Curriculum does not try to replace those missing experiences. It prepares candidates for them.
The curriculum teaches across all of the trades — electrical, painting, insulation, ironwork, carpentry and more. This helps candidates come away with a real understanding of the full range of career options so they can make an informed choice about which trade to enter. It also teaches applied math, tool use, health and safety, blueprint reading, green construction and respectful workplace practices. It is not craft-specific, but construction-specific.
Kriger identified applied math as one of the most persistent barriers to first-year apprentice success. American high schools teach math oriented toward college preparation and the SAT. They do not teach students how to read a tape measure or multiply fractions in a practical context. Yet both are foundational to construction work.
The building trades regularly receive candidates from the best high schools in the country who cannot do either. It is not a failure of intelligence or work ethic. It is a failure of the curriculum. The same gap shows up in agriculture, manufacturing and culinary arts — fields where measurement, proportion and applied calculation are essential daily skills that the college-prep math sequence does not develop.
NABTU has been in conversations with partners, including Microsoft and nonprofits, about how to address this at scale. Khan Academy offers more than 20,000 math videos and is widely used, but its focus is college prep and SAT preparation rather than applied trades math. Kriger said expanding the national conversation about how and why applied math should be taught is a necessary next step, but the conversations are still scattered, and the path to a systemic solution is not yet clear.
The Multi-Craft Core Curriculum launched around 2008 — impeccably timed, as Kriger noted with some irony, to coincide with the Great Recession, when many apprenticeship programs stopped accepting new candidates. The recovery was slow. But since 2013, the program has seen largely uninterrupted growth.
What began with 10 programs and approximately 200 graduates became progressively larger. When enrollment reached 2,000, Kriger told NABTU's officers they were now running something the size of Gonzaga — a university with a registrar, a financial aid office and a bursar. When it reached 4,000, the comparison was Georgetown. The program had grown beyond what could be managed as a side operation within NABTU.
Three years ago, NABTU spun off the operation into a separate organization called TradesFutures, staffed by about people dedicated entirely to administering the program. Today, TradesFutures supports more than 250 apprenticeship readiness programs across the United States. Last year, those programs served approximately 7,500 students. Kriger said it is now the largest pre-apprenticeship program in any industry in the country. By his comparison, if you count all campuses and all spending, the building trades’ registered apprenticeship system as a whole is approximately five times the size of the Ohio State University.
Kriger described a persistent information gap that the building trades have struggled to close. If you bring 100 parents and students into a high school auditorium and ask them how to get into college, they can fill a blackboard. Financial aid forms, community colleges, four-year universities, private schools — they know the pathway even if they have not navigated it personally.
Erase the board and ask how to get into the Insulators Union, and you'll get nothing but silence. They do not know where the training center is. They do not know when applications open, what the requirements are, how long the program runs or what the career looks like on the other side. The pathway into a union apprenticeship is simply not part of the common knowledge that parents and students carry around.
TradesFutures and NABTU developed The Jobs Machine to help address that gap. It is an agentic AI tool built in partnership with Microsoft Elevate and available on the TradesFutures website. It answers basic questions from parents and students about union apprenticeships. Questions like, what are the building trades? How do you apply? What does the training involve? What can you earn? The tool is designed to make the pathway as navigable for a first-generation trades family as the college pathway is for a family with a college-going tradition.
Kriger closed by returning to the fundamental case. A young person who enters a union apprenticeship program today will spend three to five years earning a full-time wage, with full benefits and retirement contributions, while their college-going peers accumulate student debt. Three to five years out of high school, a journeyman in the building trades can earn $80,000 to $100,000 annually anywhere in the country, with no student loans.
But the case is not only financial. NABTU President Sean McGarvey’s version of it goes further. Put a young person into a union apprenticeship program, and you change not just their life but the trajectory of their family for generations. Their children will have more options than they did. That is what a solid financial foundation, good healthcare and a real retirement make possible.
More information on NABTU is available at nabtu.org. More information on TradesFutures is available at tradesfutures.org. More information on the Mechanical Insulators LMCT is available at mechanicalinsulatorslmct.com.
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