Help People See—and Build—Their Future
BuildingXperience is being developed as a national applied-learning system for Construction, Infrastructure and Engineering. It combines immersive education about the industry—its history, projects, systems, innovations, leaders, careers, and working environments—with project-derived virtual training, industry mentorship, and practical next steps.
BuildingXperience Institute is the nonprofit educational organization developing the learning system for the Construction, Infrastructure and Engineering sector of Experience Careers. The system is designed for delivery through Experience Careers Centers and digital platforms, while qualified schools, apprenticeship programs, training centers, employers, and workforce partners can use the same learning assets to deepen their own classroom, laboratory, tool-based, field, and credential instruction.
It Takes an Industry to Build a Future
Every building begins with people who see a different part of the whole. Architects imagine it. Engineers make it work. Contractors, skilled trades professionals, manufacturers, and technology teams turn plans into the places where people live, learn, heal, work, and gather.
A career in this industry is built much the same way. People need more than titles and qualification lists; they need to see how the work unfolds, understand how roles connect, learn what daily responsibility looks like, and hear from people who know what success actually requires.
BuildingXperience brings together the people who do the work, the people who teach it, and the partners who can help make it accessible. Together, they can turn real projects and expertise into experiences that help people discover possibilities across the industry, understand how roles and systems connect, work through realistic project decisions in immersive environments, receive guidance from trusted professionals, and begin building practical next steps.
Within Experience Careers Centers, that collaboration will come to life through the Construction, Infrastructure and Engineering sector and its Learning Labs. Beyond the Centers, BuildingXperience Institute can extend the model through qualified education and training partners, including colleges, universities, apprenticeship programs, employer academies, and workforce organizations nationwide.
Together, we can make the building industry visible, believable, and reachable to people who may never have imagined a place within it.
THE NATIONAL NEED
America Needs More People Ready to Build
Meeting the industry’s long-term talent needs requires more than recruiting people into open roles. People need a realistic understanding of the working life behind the industry’s careers—the environments, responsibilities, relationships, pressures, and opportunities that define them—so they can make better-informed choices about what to explore or pursue.
A Workforce Gap With Visible Consequences
Professionals across construction, infrastructure, and engineering turn plans into the places and systems communities depend on—homes, schools, hospitals, transportation networks, energy systems, data centers, workplaces, and public spaces. Every project requires people with different forms of knowledge and responsibility, from architects, engineers, estimators, and project managers to superintendents, technicians, inspectors, and skilled craft professionals.
Yet employers continue to report that qualified people are difficult to find. In the 2026 national workforce survey from the Associated General Contractors of America and NCCER, 87% of responding firms reported openings for hourly craft positions and 82% reported salaried openings. Among firms with openings, 88% said craft positions were as hard or harder to fill than a year earlier, while 87% said the same of salaried positions. Half of respondents identified unqualified candidates as a reason positions were difficult to fill, and 42% reported project delays caused by shortages of their own workers or subcontractors.
The need extends well beyond a short-term hiring cycle. Associated Builders and Contractors estimates that the construction industry must attract approximately 349,000 workers in 2026 simply to keep labor supply aligned with anticipated demand. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects an average of approximately 587,000 openings each year in construction and extraction occupations from 2025 through 2035, together with another 174,800 annual openings across architecture and engineering occupations. These openings reflect both continued growth and the need to replace people who retire or leave their occupations.
One Visible Consequence: Slower Homebuilding
The consequences reach beyond individual employers. A 2025 study released by the National Association of Home Builders and the Home Builders Institute estimated that skilled-labor shortages added an average of 1.98 months to single-family construction schedules. The study associated those delays with approximately 19,000 fewer homes built in 2024 and an estimated $10.8 billion in annual economic impact.
Context: Labor availability is one of several factors affecting construction schedules, housing production, and cost. Financing, land, materials, permitting, regulation, and market conditions also matter; the study estimates the portion associated with skilled-labor constraints.
Nearly Two Additional Months
Estimated average addition to single-family construction schedules.
19,000 Fewer Homes
Estimated 2024 production impact
$10.8 billion annually
Estimated economic effect
Sources: AGC–NCCER 2026 Workforce Survey; Associated Builders and Contractors 2026 Workforce Shortage Model; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2025–2035 Occupational Outlook; NAHB/HBI 2025 Construction Labor Market Study.
The Industry Is Already Looking for Better Pathways
Construction firms are already responding. In the 2026 AGC–NCCER survey, 48% reported engaging with career-building programs in high schools, colleges, or career and technical education. The survey also found that a mismatch between expectations and job reality was the most frequently cited reason new field employees leave during their first 90 days. To strengthen that transition, 52% of firms used a structured onboarding process, 44% used regular check-ins or feedback sessions, and 30% assigned a mentor or buddy.
BuildingXperience Answers That Call
People need more than job titles, career lists, or training options. They need a clear, realistic picture of what life in a career will actually be like.
A role may sound appealing without revealing the environment, pace, schedule, responsibilities, collaboration, decisions, pressures, and opportunities for growth that shape everyday work. An engineer may spend much of the day coordinating people, budgets, schedules, and risk. Someone trained in HVAC may experience very different working lives in installation, service, controls, design, commissioning, energy management, technical sales, or facilities operations.
BuildingXperience makes that working life visible. Through the industry’s history, innovations, leaders, practitioner stories, real project records, and immersive virtual environments, participants can see how work unfolds, how roles connect, what people are accountable for, and how careers evolve over time.
Actual projects—including the facilities Experience Careers constructs—can become interactive digital models and role-based simulations. Participants can explore the same project from different professional perspectives, make realistic decisions, and see how those decisions affect the larger work.
The result is a more informed view of the future—not only what a career is called, but what it asks of the person living it.
HOW IT WORKS
BuildingXperience transforms real projects and practitioner knowledge into immersive industry education, role-based virtual training, and practical next steps.
Real Projects Become Learning Environments
BuildingXperience begins with real work. Approved plans, models, schedules, system information, video, and practitioner insight from actual projects—including the facilities Experience Careers constructs—form an expanding source library about how the industry operates.
That material is transformed into industry and career stories, interactive digital twins, immersive simulations, role demonstrations, and mentor-supported experiences. Participants can follow a project from concept through operation and explore it from the perspective of the people who plan, design, estimate, approve, build, inspect, commission, operate, and supply it.
By entering the same project through different roles, participants can understand not only what each professional does, but also the decisions, relationships, pace, accountability, working conditions, and opportunities for growth that shape the life of that career.
Experience Careers Centers and the digital platform provide comprehensive industry understanding and project-derived virtual training. Schools, apprenticeship programs, training centers, employers, and workforce organizations can pair those assets with their own classroom instruction, laboratories, tools, field experience, and credential programs.
BuildingXperience organizes that progression into five connected stages:
The BuildingXperience Journey
THE CRITICAL BRIDGE
From Industry Understanding
to Role-Based Practice
The five-stage journey provides the overall framework. A participant might follow an actual project from concept through operation and see how architects, engineers, estimators, contractors, craft professionals, manufacturers, inspectors, commissioning teams, and operators depend on one another. The participant could then enter a project-derived digital environment, assume one or more professional roles, make decisions, solve realistic problems, and see how those choices affect the larger project.
Each step turns observation into informed participation and gives the participant a stronger basis for deciding what to explore or pursue next.
BuildingXperience begins that journey through industry education, immersive sector experiences, and project-derived virtual training. Qualified schools, apprenticeship programs, training centers, employers, and other partners can pair that preparation with physical laboratories, tools, formal instruction, credential development, and supervised field experience. Participants move forward with a more realistic understanding of the work, clearer expectations, and practical next steps.
Through these experiences, participants begin to develop:
What Participants Begin to Develop
LEARNING ARCHITECTURE
Learning Built from Real Work
The process of constructing, renovating, and operating Experience Careers facilities can itself become part of the learning system.
As Experience Careers campuses move through development, construction, renovation, and operation, selected phases of the work can be documented—from planning and coordination through installation, inspection, commissioning, and future upgrades. With appropriate permissions, the people who design, approve, supply, build, inspect, commission, and operate the facilities can explain what is being done, why decisions are made, how systems interact, and how safety, quality, and performance are verified.
BuildingXperience Institute can transform that approved project record into connected forms of learning: industry and career stories, instructional videos, product and system demonstrations, interactive digital twins, immersive simulations, project-derived virtual training, educator resources, and modules for qualified education and training partners. Where appropriate, manufacturer technical specialists and experienced installers can help explain product requirements, installation methods, safety considerations, and quality checks in the context of an actual project and the wider system it must serve.
A participant might first see a system installed and commissioned by experienced professionals, then examine the plans and installation sequence, enter a project-derived immersive environment, and make decisions involving coordination, safety, quality, sequencing, cost, or performance. Qualified partners can then connect that virtual preparation to physical tools, laboratories, formal instruction, apprenticeships, credentials, and supervised field experience.
Because the learning is drawn from Experience Careers facilities, participants can explore digitally the same buildings and systems they encounter on campus, revisit them from different professional roles, and understand how one decision affects the broader project.
One real project can support many learning pathways—from discovery and understanding to guided practice, capability development, and advancement.
From Project to Learning System
01
Capture the Project
Real work becomes
source material for learning
02
Add Expert Context
Practitioners explain roles, methods, and decisions
03
Build the Learning
Source material becomes guided learning
04
Practice Through Immersive Simulation
Assume roles, make decisions, solve problems, and see consequences
05
Connect to the Next Step
Move forward with clarity and support
The learning does not end when construction does. Operations, maintenance, upgrades, renovations, and future projects can continue expanding and refreshing the learning system.
THE EXPERIENCE CAREERS MULTIPLIER
From Early Curiosity to Lifelong Capability
BuildingXperience is designed to be more than a one-time visit or stand-alone course. At full national scale, Experience Careers is designed to host millions of K–12 student visits each year while also serving career changers, veterans, educators, working professionals, and lifelong learners. With the Construction, Infrastructure and Engineering sector embedded in every Center, that reach can turn one-time exposure into repeated, age-appropriate engagement with the building industry.
A Relationship That Can
Deepen Over Time
A child might first discover why buildings need different systems and meet the people who make them work. Later, that participant could return to compare careers, explore actual Experience Careers projects in immersive virtual environments, assume different professional roles, work through increasingly complex decisions, continue online between visits, learn from mentors, and connect with qualified education, apprenticeship, employer-training, or field-based opportunities when ready. As the experience deepens, technical and project understanding can grow alongside teamwork, communication, leadership, strategic thinking, and ethical judgment.
A Learning System
That Can Keep Advancing
Every new Experience Careers facility, renovation, technology upgrade, and operational project can expand a living library of real projects and building knowledge. The same approved source material can support age-appropriate industry exploration, career stories, instructional videos, interactive digital twins, immersive virtual training, educator resources, partner-delivered programs, and continuing professional and technical development—allowing the learning to grow with the industry as well as the participant.
Schools, apprenticeship programs, training centers, employers, and other qualified partners can pair these assets with their own instructors, tools, laboratories, field experience, credentials, and locally relevant programming. Experience Careers provides scale, continuity, immersive infrastructure, mentoring, and a continuing stream of real projects; BuildingXperience transforms those projects and practitioner expertise into reusable learning and training assets.
COLLABORATE
Help Build the Learning System
BuildingXperience will be strongest when the people who do the work, teach it, supply the systems, and help participants move toward practical next steps shape how the industry is represented.
BuildingXperience Institute welcomes exploratory conversations with contractors; design and engineering firms; skilled trades professionals; manufacturers and suppliers; owners and operators; public agencies; educational, apprenticeship, workforce, and research organizations; creative and technology partners; and philanthropic supporters.
Contribute Real Work
Help identify projects, installations, systems, decisions, and milestones that can become approved learning source material.
Share Technical Expertise
Help explain roles, methods, coordination, safety, quality, product requirements, and system performance.
Build and Validate the Learning
Help translate source material into accurate industry and career stories, instructional videos, interactive digital twins, immersive simulations, project-derived virtual training, educator resources, and instructional modules—and help evaluate whether the learning works as intended.
Extend Access and Pathways
Help qualified programs pair BuildingXperience learning assets with classroom instruction, physical laboratories, tool-based practice, apprenticeship, credential preparation, employer training, and supervised field experience.
Each collaboration would be developed with appropriate permissions, defined responsibilities, and technical and educational review.