Peer-Reviewed Study Pins Down Why the Skilled-Trades Pipeline Broke After the Pandemic

Every shop owner who's left a truck parked for want of a tech has a theory about why nobody's applying. Now there's a peer-reviewed version. In a study published in ASCE's Journal of Legal Affairs and Dispute Resolution in Engineering and Construction, Ibrahim Osman and Hossein Ataei work through the post-pandemic skilled labor shortage in construction, and their diagnosis reads like a checklist of everything the appliance and HVAC trades have been living through since 2020.

The authors trace the shortage to causes that stacked on top of each other. The pandemic hit the existing workforce directly. Older tradespeople, looking at health risk and a hot retirement market, took early retirement in numbers the pipeline couldn't replace. Immigration, which had quietly supplied a large share of trade labor for decades, fell off. And underneath all of it sits the slow structural failure: vocational training programs that were defunded and dismantled over a generation while school counselors pointed every capable kid at a four-year degree.

None of those reversed when the masks came off. That's the study's uncomfortable core. This is a structural condition, not a hangover.

The consequences Osman and Ataei document in construction will sound familiar too: project delays, cost escalation, burnout among the workers left carrying the load, and rising safety concerns as thin crews stretch. They describe a persistent mismatch between open positions and workers qualified to fill them, which is a polite academic way of describing your last three Indeed postings.

What the Research Says About Fixes

The paper's solution set splits into two buckets, and the split matters for anyone running a service business.

Bucket one is policy. The authors argue for rebuilding vocational and career-technical education, and for rebalancing public investment that currently flows overwhelmingly toward four-year college pathways. They're right, and there's movement (California's recent apprenticeship funding push for HVAC and the trades is a live example). But education funding reform pays off on a 10-to-15-year horizon. It will not staff your truck by Q3.

Bucket two is training investment by employers, and that one is in your hands. The research treats workforce development as something firms do, not just something that happens to them. For a service shop, that means structured in-house apprenticeships, partnerships with the community college programs that survived, and paying for the certifications that turn a mechanically inclined hire into a billable tech. The shops with the lowest vacancy rates are the ones that stopped waiting for experienced techs to materialize and started manufacturing them — and the math behind that approach is stark: McKinsey projects roughly 20 job openings for every net new worker entering the skilled trades between 2022 and 2032, so the supply of "experienced techs" you can poach simply isn't coming.

There's supporting evidence that the apprenticeship route works for the workers as well as the shops. Research on earn-while-you-learn apprenticeship models has found durable wage gains for people who come up through them, which is exactly the recruiting pitch a shop can make against a four-year degree and its debt load.

A caveat worth stating plainly: this is a construction-industry study, published in a legal-affairs and dispute-resolution journal, and its data and framing come from that world. Appliance repair and HVAC aren't construction. But they fish in the same labor pool, lose retirees from the same generation, and got cut out of the same high school shop classes. The causal story transfers even where the project-delay statistics don't.

The takeaway for a shop owner is blunt. Two of the four causes (immigration policy, education funding) are above your pay grade. One (retirements) you can only slow with retention. The fourth, the training gap, is the one a five-truck shop can actually attack, and the peer-reviewed literature now says the same thing the best operators figured out by necessity: the shops that train are the shops that staff.

Source

Osman, I., Ataei, H. (2026). "Addressing the Skilled Labor Shortage: Impacts and Solutions in the Postpandemic Construction Industry." Journal of Legal Affairs and Dispute Resolution in Engineering and Construction, 18(1). https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/JLADAH.LADR-1299