Blue collar workers: Keeping up with a growing city

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — They’re the jobs that keep a roof over your head and the lights on. Blue-collar professions are seeing an increase in interest in Sioux Falls.

Electricians, plumbers, construction workers, and more are an important part of keeping up with an increasing population. More people mean more houses to build and customers to serve.

“As the city starts to grow more and more, there’s a higher demand for construction, and higher demand for housing, higher demand for about every blue-collar trade that goes into the infrastructure of our metropolis,” Matt Haynes, instructor of construction management at Southeast Technical College, said.

Haynes knows what it’s like for the students he’s teaching to become the next generation of construction workers, because he was once in their shoes.

“I always had a little desire to build houses and have kind of, I don’t know, just kind of inert carpenter inside of me,” Haynes said.

Construction management is just one option for students looking to learn a trade. For one first-year student at South East Tech, this was a more fitting alternative to a four-year degree.

“I originally went to South Dakota State,” Carson Sarahan, a construction management student at Southeast Tech, said. “Didn’t really like what I was doing there. I worked construction for a year. I really like being in construction, so I thought I’d come here, get a construction management degree. Two-year degree, more simple.”

While working towards that degree, Sarahan is already getting experience in the field.

“I currently work for SealPros asphalt paving,” Sarahan said. “Basically, we pave asphalt roads, do maintenance on them.”

With a growing need for blue-collar workers, Southeast Technical College is expanding the space to teach those programs.

“The next step is more lab space,” Haynes said. “So, we have the manufacturing lab space going on behind me, and then we’ll have our new home-building lab.”

Having on-campus lab space is a big step compared to the program’s beginnings.

“When we first started, it was a small little cold storage building,” Haynes said. “We built a shed our first year. And from there, we’ve kind of used different lab locations on campus wherever we could find space. And then, from there, we started working with Habitat for Humanity, and we started building houses on site.”

That space will allow all trade students to get hands-on experience while staying on campus.

“HVAC, welding, the plumbing department, manufacturing will also be expanded, or a new program will take place as well,” Haynes said.

“That would be awesome to have more, just more things available, more areas to go to, different stuff to do,” Sarahan said.

As for just how important blue-collar jobs are, Sarahan says there’s a guarantee people will continue to need workers like him.

“I think mainly it’s like, you’re never going to lose your job to a computer,” Sarahan said. “We’re always going to, there’s always going to be stuff being built. It’s just construction is always going on. You can’t replace it.”