Stanley Black & Decker To Help Train 3M Skilled Workers

Building healthy brands and companies that last requires long-term vision from the leadership team. As brand managers look to the future, some of the problems that will be waiting for them begin to reveal themselves.

For instance, today there are 10 million manufacturing jobs around the world that remain unfulfilled due to a lack of skilled trade workers. The same is true for the construction industry where there is a projected gap of 430,000 jobs in the U.S. in 2021 alone. In addition, the shift to remote and hybrid learning significantly impacted career and technical education schools and classes which rely heavily on hands-on learning.

To fight that skilled worker shortage, Stanley Black & Decker is launching the “Empower Makers” Global Impact Challenge, a $25 million commitment to fund vocational skills training and reskilling in the construction and manufacturing sectors.

Over the next five years, Stanley Black & Decker will award up to $5 million in grants per year to organizations dedicated to providing economically viable jobs, empowering the world’s workforce with trade skillsets, and mitigating the talent shortage.

The program is expected to train more than three million skilled trade workers.

Trading Up To Business Ownership

The trades also offer a path to entrepreneurship. In her work, Maria Ford, president of commercial construction at Stanley Black & Decker said she frequently works with business owners who run their own successful contracting businesses. Some are second- and third-generation family-owned companies. Virtually all are seeing their businesses boom.

Commercial construction, particularly data centers, distribution centers, and power generation facilities, and infrastructure projects, such as roads, bridges, and tunnels, are driving the growth, she said. That opens up a wide range of opportunities for jobs and new businesses — for those who are open to seeing the potential.

“You don’t have too many kids saying, ‘I want to go into construction,’” she said. “But that’s because they don’t understand all the things that it really is about. We need to make sure people understand the great things that exist here.”

Stanley Black & Decker, one of the world’s largest tools and storage companies, has 56,000 employees in more than 60 countries who create tools, products, and enterprise solutions through a variety of brands, including DEWALT.