The measure of a pre-apprenticeship program isn’t enrollment. It’s whether the last day has employers in the room.
Construction Ready and the Home Builders Institute are running an eight-week, fully funded pre-apprenticeship at Augusta Technical College in Georgia. Classes started July 20 and run through Sept. 9. A hiring fair on Sept. 8 comes the day before graduation, with job placements announced at the ceremony itself.
How it’s structured
Students train in carpentry and other trade skills, and the cohort builds a tiny house as its practical project. That’s a deliberate choice: a tiny house touches framing, sheathing, roofing, basic electrical and finish work in a package small enough to finish inside eight weeks and real enough that mistakes show.
The Home Builders Institute is the National Association of Home Builders’ workforce training arm. Construction Ready is a regional nonprofit that reports training more than 2,000 workers across Georgia, Alabama and Florida since 2014.
The numbers, with a caveat
Construction Ready reports a 97 percent job placement rate, average starting wages of $13 to $19 an hour, and 70 percent retention with the same employer after one year. Those figures are self-reported and haven’t been independently audited, which is worth stating plainly because placement statistics in this sector often are.
The wage range is the honest part of the story. Thirteen dollars an hour is an entry number, and a pre-apprenticeship is designed to get someone to the starting line of a registered apprenticeship rather than to a career wage.
What’s missing
No employer or general contractor is named as a program partner in the announcement. For a program whose stated endpoint is a hiring fair, that’s a real gap, and it’s the difference between a pipeline with committed demand behind it and a training program hoping employers show up.
Eight-week pre-apprenticeships won’t close the trades gap on their own. What they do is lower the cost of finding out whether someone wants the work, which is where most of the attrition actually happens.
Source: Augusta CEO, Aug. 19, 2026.