Really? Because it used to be you could walk through a subdivision going up with a toolbelt slung over your shoulder and you'd have a job by the 4th house site you stop at.

You can probably still do that in lots of places in the residential single family rapid copy-paste development space (there's a reason why so many of those new homes are terrible quality these days) but unless you have trade qualifications, you're probably going to start with basic and grueling 'unskilled' general laborer work.

Large or more technical construction projects (industrial, public infrastructure, roadways, government projects, warehouses, commercial, bespoke luxury homes, dense multi unit housing, office buildings, skyscrapers, sports arenas, etc) are a completely different ballgame - consider it the difference between college (or even high school) football and the NFL. Safety and liability are taken much more seriously because the stakes are higher, the scale larger. It is correct that you generally cannot even enter such a construction site without an offsite (although usually adjacent) training operated by the general contractor, (who manages site liability) in like an office trailer.

You can still walk into that office trailer (after knocking or ringing a doorbell, usually) and ask the general contractor if they know anyone hiring for role X or Y, etc. This is somewhat okay because during construction phase of a project, GCs usually operate on an interrupt-based process of various and numerous onsite folks walking into their trailer needing this or that. But odds are pretty good they'll quickly tell you to get lost if you're not showing them some sort of valued trade qualifications or know them personally in some way. If you have those qualifications, usually your phone is already ringing off the hook (see above article) and you don't have to walk into random construction sites, hence why so many of the people that do have no qualifications.

Another way to get your foot in the door is to go to a temporary staffing agency like PeopleReady and tell them you want such a construction site job. It will be grueling 'unskilled' general labor. Then you can get the training to get on the site, and possibly make a connection for future work. (Does not happen successfully often, except for the most exceptional and lucky temp workers)

And, I feel it should be said, that unless you are in a union-hostile environment you can generally in a similar way pick up a toolbelt, walk into a few union halls and ask for steady skilled work with good pay and benefits and they'll explain the path to get there with them which, at a good union, will be transparent and fair - one of the main potential benefits of trade unions is democratizing the trade skills qualification process.

Unions in many cases are 'a good old boys club' and will not always let's random people without connections in. Sexism and racism happen.

Not always and they are getting better, but there is still a problem there.

Unfortunately I don't really see much of a difference between that and the behavior of many incorporated business units in construction. Also - a good union is a foil to a bad business, but rarely the other way around.

It's a moldy part of the piece of bread that prospective workers have to eat around, whether they go union or non-union, until we can get rid of it completely. But we're making progress fast.

> It will be grueling 'unskilled' general labor. Then you can get the training to get on the site, and possibly make a connection for future work. (Does not happen successfully often, except for the most exceptional and lucky temp workers)

... and people wonder why there is a "labor shortage" for these jobs.

There is no labor shortage, there is a glut of roadblocks.

Trade qualifications?? Have you ever worked in construction? HVAC, Electrical, and Plumbing are the only three trades involved with making a house that have any form of credential available. Literally everything else is the wild west.

Thinking more intangibly outside those three - the qualification of previous experience, however you wanna try to evaluate that in yonder Wild West.

You won't pass inspection if you can't build to code. It isn't hard to learn that on the job. It also isn't hard for inspectors to tell who does a bad job. Even of the three you name, most (not all) of the qualification is just about doing time and isn't really needed for doing a good job.

One doesn't go to trade school to build to code, there's no cert for it, and I won't bore you with the number of times I've watched inspectors faceplant on code enforcement.