Lydia Burns

If you work in construction, you know that we have a problem. We need more young people! Someone needs to connect the countless dots of classroom learning, workplace skills, career awareness, and student interests. Lydia Burns is that connector of dots. 

More formally, Lydia is known as a senior manager with Allied Construction Industries, a trade group that works on advocacy, networking, and solutions for anyone within the construction industry. Lydia’s specific focus is on the Construction Career Center, and even more specifically their K-12 programs, which work to familiarize students with various aspects of construction. The goal of these programs is to increase the number of young people heading into construction. 

Here is what the ACI program does:

• Takes a systemic, big-picture approach to increasing student awareness and working them toward actual jobs,

• Fosters relationships between companies and groups of students as early as 5th grade,

• Seeks to reduce the anxiety many students feel regarding the math skills that are foundational to jobs in engineering and construction,

• Helps schools develop and implement project-based learning curriculum focusing on connecting math lessons to the real-world applications,

• Engages students in an actual small-scale construction project within the school building,

• Coordinates sequential training: 7th-grade framing, 8th-grade pipefitting, 9th-grade electrical, and so on.

As you can imagine, there are challenges to this kind of work. Changing public school curriculum takes time. Putting a bunch of inexperienced high school kids in the middle of a mock construction project has risks. It’s difficult to coordinate the schedules and align the instruction of various educators and contractors.    

Here are some of the things ACI does to meet these challenges: 

• Becomes familiar with the entire public school administrative structure within a state and district;

• Facilitate communication and policy alignment among OSHA, insurance companies, attorneys, and schools regarding the presence of minors on work sites;

• Establishes and enforces GPA requirements and other eligibility requirements for participants;

• Equips classroom teachers with lesson plans that focus on hands-on-learning .

As a result of their work, ACI in the Cincinnati Public Schools has seen students receive industry-recognized credentials before they leave high school. 

Here are some other bits and pieces from this episode:

• Tyler and Lydia share their own frustrations with math back in the day.

• We explore how working in residential construction can lead to work in industrial construction.

• Lydia explains the message she communicates to school districts: “Hope is not a strategy.”

• We celebrate that most state departments of education have finally acknowledged that not everyone should be heading to college.

Learn more about Lydia, ACI, and their programs: Lydia’s LinkedIn -  ACI’s web page - Info about ACI’s k-12 Program