Last year, American employers posted nearly 600,000 job openings in the skilled trades. About 150,000 new workers entered the trades labor pool through apprenticeship programs. The gap between those two numbers has a projection attached to it: according to commercial real estate firm JLL, 2.1 million skilled trades positions could go unfilled by 2030, at a potential annual economic cost of $1 trillion.
Mike Feinberg has been working on a version of that problem since 2020, when he co-founded WorkTexas alongside Houston businessman Jim McIngvale and Vanessa Ramirez. The nonprofit offers free trades training to adults and high school students, draws on more than 200 employer partners to shape its curriculum, and measures success not by certificates issued but by whether graduates are employed — and still employed — years later.
Reporting on the 2.1 million trade jobs America can’t fill frames WorkTexas as one of the more fully developed responses to that national shortage operating at the local level. The piece details how the program’s employer-first design, multi-source funding model, and five-year graduate tracking combine to produce outcomes that most training programs don’t measure.
Why Mike Feinberg Says the Measurement Problem Comes First
“We are employer-focused,” Feinberg says. “Our mission is to help people get jobs, keep jobs, and advance in careers.”
That mission statement is deliberate in what it leaves out. WorkTexas does not describe its goal as training people or awarding certificates. Feinberg designed the framing that way because, he argues, the rest of the workforce training industry has spent decades measuring the wrong thing.
“You go to community colleges, trade schools, and ask them, ‘Are you successful?'” Feinberg says. “And they say, ‘97.8% of our students earn a certificate.’ How many of those people got jobs? They don’t know.” WorkTexas tracks graduates for at least five years — monitoring employment status, wage growth, and job advancement — because that long view is the only honest measure of whether the program worked.
More background on Feinberg’s career in education and workforce development shows the arc that led him here: two decades building KIPP into a national charter network, then a pivot toward workforce training after KIPP’s alumni data forced a harder question about what the college-prep model left behind.
The Pipeline Problem Behind the Numbers
JLL’s research identified the demographic mathematics driving the shortage. More than one in five construction workers in the U.S. is currently older than 55. For every five tradespeople who retire, roughly two replacements enter the workforce. Electrician employment is projected to grow 9.5% through 2034 — triple the national average across all occupations. HVAC technician roles are on track for 8.1% growth over the same period.
Against that backdrop, WorkTexas served 300 adults, 90 justice-involved youth, and 70 high school students in the 2025-26 school year. The numbers are modest relative to the national shortage. Feinberg’s argument is that the model can travel: every community has the functional equivalents of a McIngvale and a Gallery Furniture — a local connector and a trusted anchor institution — if it chooses to use them.
The Austin launch in April 2025, spearheaded by housing company Camden Property Trust after seeing what its Houston partnership with WorkTexas produced, demonstrates the point. Camden used the same organizing logic — employer-first curriculum, local anchor space, multi-partner funding — and recruited the Texas Apartment Association’s education foundation and a local Goodwill affiliate as partners. The Camden executive who led the effort called his key local contact at the association ‘the Mike Feinberg in Austin.’
Feinberg’s full professional profile and organizational affiliations, including the Texas School Venture Fund that incubates WorkTexas, are listed through his F6S profile. The fund also operates Neighborhood Preschools, addressing the childcare barrier that prevents many adults from accessing workforce training, and Project Remix Ventures, which provides paid entrepreneurial opportunities for justice-involved youth.
Program materials and published work from Feinberg and WorkTexas are available through his Issuu profile, which collects documents from across his career in education and workforce development.
Skilled labor wages rose more than 20% between early 2020 and 2024, according to McKinsey research. WorkTexas data shows adults employed for a year or more after completing the program average $23 an hour. More on Feinberg’s background and current work is available through his public profile pages. The wage trajectory, he argues, is the number the workforce training industry should be competing to move — not certificate counts.
