For years, the story communities told about their future workforce primarily ran through one path: a four-year degree. That’s a more challenging narrative now, as the U.S. is on pace to be short by an estimated 2.1 million skilled tradespeople by 2030. Many communities already have training programs, apprenticeship pipelines, and employer partnerships in place to help close that gap. Realizing their full potential means positioning the community as a trades destination and making those initiatives a key element of your marketing mix.

A strong trades pipeline solves problems communities already know well.

It closes labor gaps that stall housing and infrastructure. It builds a tax base on wages that arrive without years of student debt attached. And because trades work tends to stay rooted in place, it strengthens a workforce that’s more likely to stay local once trained.

Yet trades still make up a small share of most communities’ marketing programs…

…often too small, given how competitive the market for trades talent has become. That imbalance is an opportunity. Communities willing to shift strategy can position themselves as a destination for both today’s trades workforce and the next generation coming up through trades education.

In practice, integrating the trades into your marketing strategy can feature a few concrete moves.

For example, a section of the community website dedicated to local trade schools and apprenticeship pathways, built to answer the questions a prospective student and their parents are asking. A regular cadence of stories featuring local tradespeople and the employers who trained them, running through the same channels as any other community news. Relationships with regional and even national reporters who often cover workforce and economic development, so a new training partnership or facility becomes an earned media story rather than just another website or social media announcement. And, some communities make the trades a key part of their brand story.

Every one of these moves works best when it’s part of a bigger, deliberate story.

That’s the work we do alongside communities every day. We help places find the authentic story already sitting inside their trades programs, employer partnerships and workforce pipelines, then build the strategy, content, and campaigns that put that story in front of the right audiences, consistently and credibly. A community doesn’t need to invent a trades identity from scratch. It needs to bring the stories it already has to the surface to claim a bigger share of this market, especially as workforce attraction and retention keep getting harder.