Peak demand (updated)

Ricky Gass was afraid of heights, and he’d never seen a scaffold so tall.

It was his first day at Solar Landscape. His boss motioned to the 75-foot scaffold, instructing Gass to walk up onto the roof to start the day. “I was like, what do you mean ‘walk up’? It’s not that simple. I’m nervous,” Gass said.

When he got onto the roof, it got easier. A recent graduate of trade training program GAF Roofing Academy, he was familiar and comfortable with the work. Solar Landscape threw him into the deep end on that first job—high on a flat roof, he and his team installed 11,000 solar panels.

A year later, the heights don’t bother him. And he’s passionate about what he does.

Restaurants, poultry processors, health care facilities, retailers—despite relatively high unemployment, workforce shortages abound in several industries nationwide. In the roofing industry, 90% of contractors have experienced some sort of labor shortage in the last year, according to the National Roofing Contractors Association.

As the largest roofing manufacturer in North America, Parsippany-based GAF can’t ignore the problem. “If we don’t have labor to install our product, our product will not get installed,” said Brian Cornelius, program director at GAF Roofing Academy.

The company launched its Roofing Academy in 2020, where young folks, formerly incarcerated individuals and transitioning military veterans can get two weeks of training, a full set of tools – worth a few hundred dollars – and job placement.

“The curriculum varies by market. Residential steep slope training is pretty much a core for every market. Depending on the market, we’ll do flat roof [commercial] training, we’ll do solar training. We also do sales training, and we just did one in Dallas. They’ve got plenty of labor but need sales,” Cornelius said. “Anything to do with roofing we can focus on.”

The program originated at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington in 2015 to help transitioning military members, but GAF opted to bring the program in-house and expand it in 2020. Even with class size limited due to the pandemic, GAF trains students in nearly 20 locations nationwide, including Downers Grove, Ill.; Escondido, Calif.; Lakewood, Wash.; and in Parsippany. In all, Cornelius’ team of 11 is set to train 1,000 people this year.

Gass found GAF in spring of last year nearing the end of his time as a student at Edison Job Corps, where he studied building construction technology. He’d always wanted a job in the trades, and at Job Corps, he got to learn a bit of everything—plumbing, electrical wiring, tiling, painting, landscaping. “My dad always reminded me, nothing in this world is free. I wanted a job to make sure I have enough to do more than make ends meet,” he said. Finding GAF pushed him to specialize in roofing, and the GAF training is what equipped him for Solar Landscape, a company he now says he can’t see himself without.

Cornelius said there’s just one requirement for the Roofing Academy: To work hard.

Roofing is not easy work. But those who want to work, will work. Following two weeks of classroom time and on-the-roof training, students are eligible for job placement assistance. GAF’s job placement goal for Roofing Academy graduates is 57%, and their results currently come in at 62%.

“There’s a certain percentage of people who come through our class that just don’t want to work that hard. The percentage we don’t find jobs for, it’s because they didn’t want to,” Cornelius said.

Opportunities exist. The industry is expected to add 19,000 new roofing jobs in the next 10 years. The average hourly rate of a roofing contractor is $23.26, according to Indeed.com.

Before his roofing career, Gass was going from warehouse job to warehouse job, “getting nowhere at all.”

Regarding his financial stability in the roofing industry, he said it’s “literally night and day” compared to his previous work.

“Not only do I take care of my family financially, two daughters and the beautiful woman I’m with, I do for my community – if people need help, and they don’t have that much but they’ve been doing good work, I can help them,” he said.

As of May 5, employment web site Indeed.com showed 180 roofing jobs available in New Jersey and thousands more are unfilled nationwide. That’s a tough hill to climb, but Cornelius believes the Academy is making “small dents here and there.” He has higher hopes for the future.

“This year alone, we’ve had over 100 people placed that’re now actively working on crews and making a better income than they were making before. It’s definitely working. We just need to continue to grow it,” he said.

Editor’s note: This ariticle was updated at 4:11 p.m. EST on May 18, 2021. A prervious version indicated that GAF is headquarterd in Wayne; the company headquarters is in Parsippany. It also indicated that the average hourly rate for a roofing contractor was $19.48, that figure has been updated to $23.26, according to Indeed.com.