Building highways requires a diverse collection of skill sets and expertise. The highway construction industry is composed of a variety of different trades such as equipment operators, mechanics, truck drivers, ironworkers, carpenters, and cement masons. These trades are not specific to highway construction but also apply to other areas such as general building construction. Historically, many of these trades have been dominated by white males. Over the last 25 years, participation of women in the construction industry has been relatively stable, averaging around 8 to 10 percent. Among minority groups, while the percentage of African Americans participating in the construction workforce has been relatively constant (5 to 7 percent of the workforce), the proportion of Latinos in the industry has increased significantly and is estimated to comprise about a quarter of the construction workforce. In 1968, Congress authorized a job training program, which required that states receiving federal aid for highways implement apprenticeship and training programs that ensure equal employment opportunities without regard to race, color, creed, national origin, or sex. FHWA has targeted this job training program to women, minorities, and economically disadvantaged individuals to provide these groups with highway construction-related skills to reach journey-level status. As a nondiscriminatory program, it cannot exclude any individual from participation. The Secretary of Transportation must certify that states have such a program in place. While the program does not have a distinct funding source, job training expenses on federal-aid highway projects are eligible for federal dollars, just like other project costs. According to FHWA officials, each state has discretion in how much or little to spend on this program, as well as how a contractor will be reimbursed, if at all, for training activities on its highway projects. State transportation offices are responsible for providing their state program’s framework. Individual states establish overall training goals for the program such as articulating the number of training slots on selected federal-aid highway construction contracts they expect to award during the coming year. These state agencies also determine which federal-aid highway construction contracts will require that training is provided to a minimum number of trainees and thus which contracts include a training special provision. State transportation agencies—using on-site personnel such as contractor compliance specialists, engineers, and project inspectors—monitor and oversee contractors’ adherence to job training requirements. Multiple FHWA offices are involved in the on-the-job training program. FHWA’s Office of Civil Rights, located in the agency’s headquarters office, provides leadership in setting policy for the program, and in this capacity has assigned oversight responsibilities to the FHWA division offices in each state and has established regulations for state transportation agencies to administer the program. This decentralized management structure—in which certain oversight responsibilities are assigned to division offices—is consistent with FHWA’s approach for the federal-aid highway program in general. Among the primary responsibilities of the division offices are to review the annual goals submitted by the states and oversee whether states are meeting their annual job training goals by reviewing accomplishment reports and annual contractor training reports. FHWA division offices also play a role in assessing the efforts of both the individual contractors participating in this program and the states to meet their respective job training goals and requirements. FHWA’s Resource Center also provides assistance to state transportation agencies and FHWA offices in implementing FHWA policy and programs by providing training on program requirements and other activities (see table 1). While a state approves a contractor’s training approach, the contractor is responsible for meeting a training requirement. If a contractor fails to meet the training requirement stipulated in the contract, the state transportation agency can withhold payments or limit the contractor’s ability to bid on future contract opportunities. The amount of the sanctions or penalties will depend on the state transportation agency’s contract administration procedures. For example, in Missouri, the state transportation agency may levy fines against contractors that do not fulfill their training requirements. Congress authorized the supportive services program in 1970 to supplement the on-the-job training program and support state transportation agency training programs by providing services to highway construction contractors and assistance to highway construction apprentices and trainees. According to FHWA, the main objectives of the program are to increase the overall effectiveness of each state job training program in connection with federal-aid highway projects and seek other ways to increase the training opportunities for women, minorities, and economically disadvantaged individuals. Depending on the needs and preferences in a specific state, services funded under this program may include basic training in the construction industry, stipends to support childcare or defray transportation costs for highway construction workers, transportation career awareness programs, and internships. FHWA is authorized to grant up to $10 million per year in this program. FHWA funds some supportive services through a discretionary grant program. From 2008 through 2010, FHWA awarded 153 grants totaling about $37 million to 37 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, and Puerto Rico for supportive services through the discretionary grant program. According to FHWA guidance, supportive services activities must be connected to a federal-aid highway construction project in order to be eligible for funding. State transportation agencies must submit a statement of work to FHWA that details how the grantee proposes to use the requested funding. The proposals are required to establish measurable goals for results, although FHWA permits wide variation in defining these goals. According to FHWA, proposed activities must target their efforts towards women, minorities, or economically disadvantaged individuals to receive funding. According to FHWA guidance, applications are reviewed by panels consisting of FHWA officials and scored using criteria to evaluate the content of the statement of work, including whether the statement of work has defined end dates, how the needs of the supportive services program would be addressed through the proposed activities, and a monitoring plan. FHWA requires each grantee to submit regular progress reports to the respective FHWA division offices as well as a final accomplishment report within 60 days of the program’s completion, which provides information on previously established performance goals. According to FHWA officials, an interim accomplishment report is also requested from on-going activities when additional funding is requested during the annual grant solicitation process. FHWA also uses the supportive services funding for transportation- related education and internship opportunities. FHWA distributes some funding to summer transportation institutes (located at universities and colleges), which provide a curriculum designed to introduce secondary school students to careers in all modes of transportation and encourage them to pursue transportation-related courses of study at the university level. There is also a summer internship program, wherein FHWA selects and places students from various colleges and universities in internships at one of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s modal agencies, such as FHWA, or at a state transportation agency. These programs are targeted at women, minorities, and economically disadvantaged individuals to provide hands-on experience and on-the-job training while working on current transportation-related topics and issues. The overall extent that FHWA’s on-the-job program has helped women, minorities, and the economically disadvantaged reach journey-level status in the highway construction trades is unclear, primarily because a limited amount of usable information is available on program results. However, based on the limited information that is available, state programs have created some new opportunities tailored to individual state circumstances. The skill enhancement opportunities provided by state programs vary across states by requiring different lengths of training, relying on a diversity of entities and training structures to deliver the training, and giving contractors various flexibilities in how and what skills they provide to individuals. Additionally, state programs have varying degrees of focus on reducing underrepresentation. While we cannot definitively report on how well women, minorities, and economically disadvantaged individuals are moving to journey-level status in highway construction, we can describe some of the approaches states have chosen to implement the program and make some observations about how the program has contributed to enhancing the career prospects of individuals from the targeted groups. One way state programs differ in providing opportunities for enhancing skills is by providing different length training periods to participants. Contracts that road builders enter into with state transportation agencies require varying degrees of training that must be provided to trainees, yielding differing degrees of trade proficiency for participants, from a brief to extensive exposure to the trades. For example, in an effort to give as many individuals as possible some construction experience, Florida has adopted a program in which a contractor must provide each trainee with approximately 300 hours of training. State officials explained that this program is intended to give trainees a brief exposure to a trade, not mastery of a craft. Florida reported that 288 people completed training through the program in 2009. Conversely, some states require contractors to have trainees substantively complete or graduate from training programs that may take multiple years—and thousands of training hours—to complete and provide trainees with a high level of work experience and a marketable credential, but that reach fewer people. For example, Texas, which employs this approach, graduated 57 trainees in 2009. Other states, such as Missouri and Washington, fall in between these examples by requiring contractors to provide individual trainees with 400 to 1,000 hours on any given project, believing this is the minimum needed for meaningful skill acquisition. As a result of these different state approaches to the contract training requirement, trainees in different programs acquire different levels of job experience and trade proficiency to take with them when seeking subsequent employment. A second way state programs differ in providing opportunities for enhancing skills is in using different entities to deliver training. Depending on what is available in the state, some trainees participate in the on-the- job training program as part of preexisting training programs—such as apprenticeship programs—or training that was designed and managed by the contractor or an industry group (see fig. 1). For largely unionized construction workforces, training is typically provided through apprenticeship programs. Apprenticeship programs vary in length depending on the trade, but are commonly about 4 years long and follow specified training steps, including meeting job site training time requirements and classroom instruction.