Creating a path to success

By Emma Peterson. 

Learn about the Clemson University and Roofing Alliance college courses that are creating new roofing career opportunities. 

The constant struggle due to the labor shortage has become a norm in the roofing industry, but the Roofing Alliance is hoping to change that with their collaboration with Clemson University. The goal of this collaboration is to produce educational courses that help students see roofing as the viable and rewarding career path it is. In this episode of Roofing Road Trips®, Heidi J. Ellsworth talks to some of the people behind this incredible program, Alison LaValley of the Roofing Alliance, Piers Dormeyer of EagleView and Dhaval Gajjar from Clemson! 

Dhaval shared a bit about how these courses were developed to serve the industry specifically, “We have tried to understand what industry professionals needed to learn. How do people actually learn? How do we adapt this to professionals that are working eight to ten hours a day and they might not have time? How can we make it flexible, adaptable, but at the same time get all the information and knowledge that they need to understand about our industry?” The result is three self-paced courses focused on roofing, roofing fundamentals, roofing business, leadership and roofing management.  

Alison shared a bit about how these courses are getting integrated into business’s training, “Beacon has adopted it, and now it's now requiring for all outside sales, inside sales and new hires as part of their onboarding. That's how important they're embracing this and that they see this as it appears to a world-class curriculum. And we have a lot of other individuals too, who are feeling a sense of pride, not only whether they're affiliated with the Alliance or not.” And those that are coming through the program are loving it. Dhaval mentioned that they polled over 100 of the professionals who have finished the course and when they were asked to rate it on helpfulness, it got 4.7 out of 5.  

In addition to aiming to serve existing professionals in the industry, these courses are also aimed to help students who are looking for a career path that might not have considered roofing before. Piers explained, “It's so important to be interacting and showing these students that there's a career in the roofing industry... the industry has a little bit of an image problem. People don't think of the roofing industry as a viable career option for someone who's educated. And this is showing students that maybe that's not necessarily the case.” 

Read the transcript or Listen to the episode for more about the roofing courses at Clemson University!