Workforce Development and Succession Top Agenda at BEC Conference

The National Glass Association’s BEC Conference welcomed over 650 participants to Louisville, Kentucky, March 1-3, for premier programming focused on the challenges the industry is facing. Naming many of those headwinds, including increased performance requirements as well as supply chain issues and project delays, NGA President and CEO Lakisha A. Woods opened the conference by reassuring the audience that NGA was there to support them. “We exist to support the glass and glazing community, and that means providing you with the technical resources, training programs, advocacy efforts and industry connections you need not just to survive, but to thrive,” she said.

The two days of education sessions made clear that the building industry is facing a succession crisis throughout the project delivery chain as seasoned professionals begin to retire and take their expertise with them. Industry leaders acknowledged the ongoing challenge, while also providing guidance on effective succession planning. Sessions also focused on strategies to harness emerging technologies to best fit your business.

As retirements increase, recruiting and retaining employees requires new strategies

Speaking to job growth in 2025 and 2026, Sarah Martin, associate director of forecasting, Dodge Construction Network, said that about 2 million workers are leaving the workforce every year, and their roles are not being replaced. “Every year, we're losing people to retirement, and not really adding to that supply,” she explained as part of her presentation “Building through Uncertainty: 2026 Construction Outlook.”

Other speakers also grappled with this reality. Priscilla Koeckeritz, president and CEO, Brin Glass, began her presentation by asking company owners and CEOs in the audience to stand. She then asked those who would be retiring soon to sit, which amounted to about 30% of that original group. Finally, she asked those sitting whether or not they had a succession plan for their business; not everyone did.

Speaking to Brin Glass’s past difficulties in creating a succession plan, she asked “How do we prepare that next generation of leaders to take on these companies that we built?” Koeckeritz detailed how her tenure at Brin Glass, which started in 2019, had been complicated by CEO Doug Nelson’s passing, unexpected retirements, the pandemic, higher costs, and a new generation of workers.

During this time, Koeckeritz encountered some resistance from staff to changing the company’s operations and processes, and the unhelpful mindset that “If we could go back to doing it how we used to do it, everything would be fine.” Instead, she encouraged attendees to build on the company’s excellence while also embracing change. “You can build on your legacy, but you can’t do it the same way you’ve always done it,” she said. She encouraged company leaders to think differently about recruiting new members, and consider having a mix of employees from inside and outside the industry.

A panel discussion of next-generation leaders of family-owned companies, moderated by Ted Baumgardner, president, Guthrie AI Inc., also explored the critical and complex nature of succession planning. Baumgardner began the discussion by sharing that 60% of contracting companies do not have a succession plan.

Panelists encouraged attendees to start succession planning now, especially since it can be a long and complex process. Patrick Murphy, president, Texas Commercial Glass Concepts, shared that the process of transitioning business ownership will total 13 years for their company. Emily Yukish, president and CEO, Specified Systems Inc., who took over the reins of the company from her father, advised owners to start planning as soon as possible. “It’s not an easy or cheap process,” she said. Leadership at the company considered many different scenarios, and had to consult attorneys, financial planners and accountants to decide on their plan, Yukish added.

All panelists emphasized that having a succession plan helps create stability for a company. Yukish said that having her father still part of the company helped her get buy-in from employees during the transition. Baumgardner also said that having a transition plan in place at his company encouraged employees that there would be continuity, which could aid in retention.

Recruiting and retention was also at the center of the presentation “From Overlooked to Unstoppable,” which showcased the benefits of second-chance hiring. Presenter Joshua Johnson, founder of The Redemption Collective, began by sharing his own experience as a formerly-incarcerated individual who was given a chance at employment, in spite of the barriers that can exist for what he calls “justice-impacted individuals.”

Given that hiring continues to be difficult across the glass industry, he challenged the audience to consider hiring from this labor pool, instead of trying to recruit where they have always recruited. “Every year 600,000 individuals released from incarceration, and more than a quarter are currently unemployed,” he says.

Building partnerships to find new labor from this talent pool is key, he says, and advised glass industry owners and leaders to build strong partnerships with workforce development boards, local community groups and faith-based organizations in order to find justice-impacted individuals to join their workforce. “You don’t need to build a talent pipeline from scratch,” he said. After establishing partnerships, he also recommended that leaders invite members from those organizations to visit their facilities and get to know their business, so that they can better understand what kind of workforce is needed for glazing contractors.

Johnson shared that preconceptions about formerly incarcerated employees can negatively affect retention, especially if employees are not offered competitive wages and the opportunity to grow within the company. “People think of justice-impacted talent as only able to come in and build the widget, not run the line,” he said, a mindset that doesn’t appreciate their full potential.

Bright spots in code development, regulations and market outlook, amid uncertainty

Presenters also spoke to the state of the commercial market and regulatory landscape, emphasizing opportunities amid ongoing uncertainty.

“We’ve been living through constant shifts, and that’s not new,” said Dodge’s Sarah Martin. “But how quickly it’s moving is new.” Martin says that what is pushing market growth in 2026 has changed as GDP composition has rapidly shifted. Still, 2026 is likely to see tailwinds from AI growth, including semiconductors and data center investment, which she says will hopefully offset “the continued headwinds that we'll see from restrictive immigration policies and trade.”

Still, 2025 was a difficult year for residential construction; single-family home construction declined 9% due to affordability and higher mortgage payments, Martin says.  The share of first-time homebuyers fell to a record low of 21%, with the average wage of a first-time buyer reaching $40,000. The lack of affordable homes seems to have pushed buyers towards the multi-family market, which had a stronger year, expanding by 8%.  Both single-family and multi-family construction are expected to expand by about 1% in 2026, with supply-side pressures constraining delivery, said Martin.

The regulatory landscape also remains dynamic, according to Urmilla Sowell, vice president, advocacy and technical services, NGA and Tom Culp, owner, energy code contractor, Birch Point Consulting, NGA. The two discussed the status of the Energy Star program, which had been slated for elimination last year, but ended up receiving an increase in funding for this fiscal year. While the program is “still alive,” Culp says, the tax credits are not: the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act terminated 25C and 179D residential and commercial energy tax credits based on Energy Star.

Emerging technology could transform workday roles

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has been a major topic over the last few years. Panelists at BEC Conference’s “AI Is Your New Power Tool: Timelines & Takeoffs” presentation acknowledged that despite the tech’s buzziness, some in the industry may still not know how it can work, or even what it is.

The conversation attempted to offer concrete feedback on how AI can work in a construction context. Here are a few takeaways.

• It won’t replace you, it will support you. Panelists reiterated that AI will not replace jobs, but it will replace tasks, especially repetitive ones like manual counting, data entry and document searches. Far from replacing people, Tyler Clark, Preconstruction Manager/Software Developer, Barringer Construction, argued that AI could “free people up” for sales and business development “so they’re not just sitting at the computer.”
  
  Johnny Maghzal, Head of Revenue, Togal.AI, reminded the audience about the 1980s introduction of AutoCAD as a disruptive technology and the manual drafting process it replaced, which of course led to many efficiencies. He also emphasized that AI is not good at generating ideas, and that it still hallucinates, so requires a human intelligence to check its work.

• Walk before you run. Panelists encouraged audience members to adopt AI in a way and at a pace that makes sense for the business. Clark encouraged businesses to start with an assessment of processes, identifying where AI could help, instead of looking for a software partner first. “The software companies are going to find you and they're going to try to tell you the problems that you have and that there's a solution. And the reality is this, you know your problems better than anyone else,” he said, encouraging participants to identify their pain points first, before looking for AI solutions.
  
  A.J. Hubert, Senior Project Manager, Dynamic Group LLC, offered several different AI tools that companies can begin to try, including:
  
  Reve: an image iterator, useful for creating renderings of elevation drawings for proposals.
  Claude: for writing and grammar.
  GSuite tools: available as part of your google subscription.

• Have empathy for new users of the technology. Panelists agreed that adopting AI in a larger way within a company requires an internal “champion” or employee assigned to pilot programs and help implement and measure the progress of adoption. Part of this process should also include creating user training materials and an onboarding plan for field and office staff.
  
  Maghzal encouraged attendees to “have user empathy” for new users of the tech, and to not only train them, but explain why the tech is useful.

The National Glass Association would like to thank its media sponsor, Vitro Architectural Glass.