By Timothy Churchill,Staff Writer

PARIS – The manufactured housing industry in Oxford Hills is experiencing a shortage of skilled labor.

Oxford Hills has five manufactured housing plants that employ more than 500 people: Burlington Homes in Oxford, KBS Building Systems in Paris, Keiser Industries in Oxford, Oxford Homes in Oxford, and Waterford Homes in Waterford.

“It’s just hard to get any help, any help that has any building trades knowledge,” Burlington Homes General Manager Frank Sweetser said Wednesday.

Sweeter said competition was an enormous factor since all of Maine’s manufactured housing companies are located in Oxford Hills.

“We’re all drawing on the same labor pool,” Sweeter said.

Pete Connell, president of Oxford Homes, said Thursday his company was experiencing the same predicament.

“There just aren’t enough people going into the trades,” referring to plumbing, electrical work, house framing, and roofing. “It’s very difficult to find competent workers these days,” he added.

Connell said that young workers today were less “handy” than prior generations. They are “much more skillful with a keyboard and a computer screen.” he said.

Bob LeClair, director of the Manufactured Housing Board for Maine, said Thursday that while the manufactured housing industry in the region is busier than ever, a lack of skilled workers is preventing it from growing at a natural rate.

“Modular sales have soared in the last five years in the state of Maine,” LeClair said, “so all the plants are extremely busy and having a hard time meeting the demand.”

LeClair said modular home sales in Maine have gone from 600, five years ago, to 1,600 in 2004, with about 27 percent of all those homes coming out of Oxford Hills.

A consortium called the Building Trades Training Collaborative has met several times over the last three months to discuss ways to confront the skilled labor problem.

The consortium includes nine industry partners, including the five manufactured housing firms and several contractors, and nine education and development partners, including the Growth Council of Oxford Hills and Central Maine Community College.

In the latest of those sessions, about 15 members of the collaborative met last Wednesday in the Bennett Community Room at the Western Maine University and Community College Center on Route 26.

Vice president of the Growth Council of Oxford Hills, Barb Olson, began the meeting by saying the manufactured housing industry in the area has “a huge amount of potential,” and “competitors being in the same room is a huge statement for where we’re at now” in the process of trying to solve the labor shortage.

Olson said that based on input from industry representatives, “Training is the No. 1 issue.”

Kathryn Young of Oxford Homes agreed. She said the big question looming over her business lately is: “How do we help improve the quality of applicant coming through the door.”

Another problem Oxford Homes is facing, Young said, is training workers to advance to the level of supervisor.

“We often throw a great producer into a supervisor position, but they fail,” she said. “Supervisor training is key.”

After the meeting, Gene Ellis, the director of apprenticeship standards with the Department of Labor, said he encourages employers in the region’s manufactured housing industry to utilize the state’s apprenticeship program. In that program, he said, new workers acquire certification in a trade after they are hired, not before. The apprentice gets hands-on experience on the floor of a business during the workday, while taking classes at night.

Certification for the trades varies, Ellis said, but the minimum is 2,000 hours. With the shortage of skilled labor, Ellis said, then it only makes sense for these employers to turn to “post hire training.”

“It’s a universal problem, finding skilled workers, so the answer is build your own skilled workers,” Ellis said

Diane Jack, the human resources manager at Keiser Industries, agreed that her company was facing a shortage of skilled workers. But Jack said that was not the largest problem.

“Retention is the biggest part,” she said. New workers, she added, sometimes don’t anticipate the challenges of a job at Keiser. “It’s not what they expected, and it’s a hard job.”

Marc Gosselin, director of the Central Maine Community College’s Corporate and Community Services program, said the local manufactured housing industry would benefit a great deal from working closely with the area’s educational centers, including the CMCC and the building trades program of the technical school in Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School.

“A lot of this industry doesn’t know everything that can happen for them,” Gosselin said. He added that CMCC, which offers courses at the Western Maine University and Community College Center in Paris, would do its best to help produce skilled workers for the industry.

CMCC wants to know, Gosselin said, “What do they need for courses? What do they need for training? We want to try to meet their needs in any way we can.”

The next meeting of the Building Trades Training Collaborative has yet to be determined.