The Heavy Metal Summer Experience Helps Industry Introduce Students To The Skilled Trades

Students at one of the Heavy Metal Summer Experience camps learn to weld.

Image courtesy Heavy Metal Summer Camp

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that industry itself will have to do the heavy lifting of solving the skilled trades shortage. The Heavy Metal Summer Experience sets a very good example of just how that’s done.

As much as some of us might wish otherwise, HMSE is not a rock festival featuring the likes of Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Metallica and Disturbed. Instead, it celebrates the other kind of heavy metal, such as welding, plumbing, and electrical and sheet metal work, offering a series of unique summer camps across the U.S. to introduce young people to the building trades. And as it’s now sponsored by heavy hitters like Dewalt, Trane, and Milwaukee Tool, it also provides a primer in how industry can help itself by doing good.

The whole concept, in fact, originally arose from industry players and their realization of the need. In 2021, two west coast mechanical contracting companies—Western Allied Mechanical of Menlo Park, California and Hermanson Company of Kent, Washington—partnered with the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors’ National Association to establish a pilot program to introduce high school students and recent graduates to potential building trades careers.

“I started talking about it, and a friend of mine, Rick Hermanson, in Seattle, said, ‘Can I do one with you?’” said Angie Simon, co-founder and executive director of HMSE. “And we just basically said, ‘What projects are going to do? What releases do we need? How do we recruit the kids?’ And so the summer of ‘21 he had a camp with 12 kids in Seattle, and I had a camp in Menlo Park with 16 kids.”

From those modest beginnings arose an annual program that today spans 30 states and four locations in Canada. Last year, the camps hosted over 500 students. It’s that success, coupled with the very real need that all of industry is facing, that has helped bring the larger sponsors into the mix.

Maria Ford, president of commercial/industrial at Stanley Black & Decker, explained why the company’s Dewalt brand has signed up for a multi-year commitment. “We have manufacturing plants here, and we face that same challenge, getting skilled trade workers into our own plants. We also recognize that for our partners, both our end-user partners as well as our distributor partners, truthfully, it is the number one pain point that they ask us to help assist them with.”

For the students, one of the program’s biggest advantages is its real-world, non-classroom environment. “It was great, because we were learning, and they made it interesting,” said James Pagliughi, a student who recently participated in a camp in Waterbury, Connecticut. “It wasn’t like we were in a classroom taking notes or anything the whole day, like a school shop class would be. We were there getting a hands-on experience, talking to people that do it all day—just incredible people. It was a great way to stay busy and feel productive with your time. We did a lot of small projects throughout that were based around things that we would see in the field, like art projects, kind of, but using skills that we would use on an actual job.”

While Pagliughi has a background in the trades, many students today don’t, after decades of schools discontinuing their shop classes and with far fewer young people today having jobs or home projects of that nature. And as Ford pointed out, the need for education goes beyond the students, which is part of what HMSE tackles as well. “What I learned that they need is just an understanding, and it’s actually not even just the students,” she said. “It’s their parents, and at the camp I was at, we had a guidance counselor from a high school out of DC—he needed to understand, which I felt was really interesting. In some ways, I bet it’s not even as much the students as it is educating kids’ parents, and then as I mentioned, that ecosystem that supports those students, that this is a really good opportunity, right? There can be a good living made here.”

Pagliughi was impressed with how effective HMSE was with students new to the trades. “Although I entered the program with a background in a lot of what we were doing, I feel that the program could teach you and motivate you to if you didn’t know what you wanted to do, but just wanted to dabble,” he shared. “There were people there who had no experience. We showed them a drill, a driver and a blowtorch. They were ready. They were working just as well as the rest of us. It was incredible.”

Dewalt and its parent company Stanley Black & Decker are clearly believers, as they recently announced a renewed commitment to the program amounting to $60 million by 2030. That kind of support will allow Simon and her team to continue their efforts to change the culture around trades careers. “Some of our states are ahead of other states, and we need to continue to work on that,” she said. “The biggest challenge, I think, is continuing to change the perception of what a job in the trades is and how if you want to have a family and coach your kids and stuff, a job in the trades is awesome. You’re home by three o’clock and you can be the coach and that kind of thing. So I hope that three to five years from now, that I’m finding that states and counties and cities have a lot more shops in their high schools so that they understand that along the way.”

“I think it’s a problem that regardless of what industry you’re in, in our country, we all need to be invested in it, right?” Ford added. “These skilled trade workers, they’re building our data centers, they’re building our EV plants. They are building our country and without them, and without the appreciation of what they do and the environment that they do it in, we’re going to continue to face challenges as a country. I don’t care what industry you’re in—it’s a problem for all of us. We just happen to be a company that makes the tools for these folks. But I believe that every company that is traded here in this country should be invested in this and be behind it, because they are going to make us more capable as a country,”