A 1-Million-Worker Trades Coalition, a Training Gap, and Skills That Finally Reach HR Systems
Four stories from the past month share one thread: everyone agrees skills matter, and almost no one can yet prove them at scale. The gap between saying it and showing it is where veterans and employers both lose time.
Lowe's Foundation builds the largest skilled trades coalition in US history
Announced September 1, 2026, the Building Futures Skilled Trades Coalition brings together more than 75 companies, colleges and workforce organizations. Members include NVIDIA, AT&T, Bank of America, Carrier, General Motors, DEWALT and Duke Energy, alongside NAHB, NCCER and SkillsUSA. The goal is to train and develop 1 million people for skilled trades by 2035.
The target answers a projected shortfall of about 2.1 million unfilled trades jobs by 2030, based on US Department of Education data. The coalition names three priorities: changing how people see the trades, investing in training and credentialing solutions, and measuring progress against shared benchmarks.
For veterans, this matters because military service already builds many of these skills. What is missing is a trusted way to show them. Shared benchmarks and credentialing are exactly where hands-on, data-backed assessment fits. For employers, a coalition this size signals that competition for trained people will only sharpen.
CompTIA: 83% say upskilling is imperative, 34% have a program
CompTIA's Workforce and Learning Trends 2026 surveyed 1,049 HR and L&D professionals in the US. Some 83% agree that improving skills is imperative. Only 34% of organizations run a formal, company-wide reskilling or upskilling program.
The report finds that skills-based effort has gone mostly into hiring, meaning dropped degree requirements. Far less has gone into developing skills inside the company or confirming them once someone is hired. CompTIA also counted more than 275,000 job postings that asked for AI skills in January 2026.
The takeaway is a widening gap between a skills-based statement and a skills-based practice. Employers have removed a barrier at the door but have not built the measurement behind it. A candidate who can show verified, practical ability closes that gap for the hiring manager.
Kahuna sends validated frontline skills into Workday and SAP
On September 22, 2026, Kahuna Workforce Solutions launched the Kahuna Skills Aggregator. It takes skills already validated on the job, such as assessments, sign-offs and certifications, and turns them into one capability language. That data flows into workforce planning and HCM systems, including Workday Skills Cloud and SAP Talent Intelligence Hub.
The target is frontline work in energy, manufacturing, field service and healthcare, sectors that have long sat outside skills-based organizations. Kahuna's pitch is that planning, scheduling and pay can rest on real, validated ability.
This is infrastructure news, and it echoes a theme we keep seeing: the hard part is delivering a proven skill to the system where hiring and staffing decisions get made. Generating the proof is only half the job. It has to arrive in a format the employer's stack can read.
DOE: energy employs 8.5 million and wants more skilled talent
The Department of Energy's 2026 US Energy and Employment Report counts 8.5 million energy jobs, or 5.4% of all US employment. The median wage is $63,000, which is 24% above the national median of $51,000. For the first time, the report adds a Future Outlook chapter covering rising demand for skilled energy workers and sharper competition for talent between energy and other growing sectors.
Energy and grid work is one of the critical industries where a veteran's technical background transfers directly. Good pay and strong demand make it attractive, but employers still need confidence in hands-on ability before a new hire touches live systems.
The takeaway
The pattern is consistent. Coalitions, surveys, software launches and federal reports all point to the same bottleneck: verified, practical skill that an employer can trust and a system can read. That is the layer PowerTechs is building, using game-based challenges that generate trace data on how a person actually performs.
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