New carpenter training center opens in Sacramento region offering high-paying jobs

A group of 45 apprentice carpenters and laborers make up the first group of a new job training facility in Sacramento.

Angel Lopez was among the inaugural class on July 17. He drove nearly three hours from his home in Fresno to attend. Strong commercial construction activity prompted a Bay Area-based building trades association, Associated Builders and Contractors Northern California, to open the Sacramento center.

Lopez, 22, attended community college for a year but didn’t get much out of it.

“I didn’t like it at all,” he said.

Lopez said he was always good with his hands and had done some welding jobs, but he wanted to be a carpenter. He has spent much of last week at the training center framing and building the roof of a house in a large open room.

“The most important thing that we’ve learned so far is how to put the rafters up for the roof and how to set a ridge before that,” he said. “Before this week, I had no clue how to do any of that.”

Lopez said his ambition goes beyond being a carpenter four years from now when he completes the training program. He said he would like to be a general contractor.

“‘I want to start my own business and make money,” he said. “Way more money than I have now.”

ABC trains around 300 apprentices at its Livermore job training facility as carpenters, laborers, plumbers, electricians and painters. The Sacramento facility is starting small at the facility in an industrial park on Roseville Road.

“Our apprentices are being dispatched more and more to job sites in the Sacramento region,” said Associated Builders and Contractors Northern California President and CEO Deborah Maus.

In the Sacramento region, carpentry apprentices start at $32.71 an hour and top out at $51.78 at the end of the four-year training program. Apprentices then become journeymen at the end of the program making $54.51 an hour.

Maus sees the state-approved Sacramento apprentice center growing over the next several years.

“This is where the job growth is in Northern California,” she said.

What is the future of carpentry in Sacramento?

State statistics show the number of construction jobs in the Sacramento region has doubled since 2012 and continued to expand even during the COVID 19-pandemic. In 2023, construction jobs reached an all-time high of more than 50,000 in the Sacramento area.

Alameda and San Francisco counties on the other hand saw declines in employment during the height of the pandemic and are only now recovering lost jobs, the state statistics show.

ABC officials say another factor in the opening of the Sacramento job training center is that construction unions have less of a stranglehold on public sector construction jobs in the Sacramento region than they do in the Bay Area. ABC contractors employ non-union labor.

ABC uses a merit system, meaning the apprentices work for association builders and contractors that are non-union. The pay doesn’t differ, however, whether a construction position is union or non-union. The state sets what is known as a prevailing wage that all contractors must pay when they bid on projects involving public money.

Apprentices earn the money most of the year on construction sites. They are not paid for the four weeks of classroom training a year.

The training program is free funded by mandatory contractor contributions that are made when public works projects are built in California. Unions also run free training programs but the ABC carpenters program is the only such carpentry apprentice program in the Sacramento area.

Carpentry in the classroom

Lopez’s classmate Armando Leiva commutes to the classes from Stockton because carpentry will increase the scope of his work and his wages.

“I’ve been doing some smaller handyman stuff and that’s why I started looking to get into an apprenticeship program,“ he said. “I can do a lot more, get paid a lot more.”

Leiva, 32, said the program is not just teaching construction skills, but how to communicate with fellow workers and the business side of construction.

“Learning something new is a rush,” said Leiva, who also wants to be a general contractor after graduating.

He said a highlight of the apprentice program is the instructors.

“They actually seem to care that we have more knowledge at the end of the week than when we came into class,” he said.

William Marini is one of two instructors at the Sacramento Center. Marini, 68, also teaches at the Livermore center.

He’s been a general contractor for decades but began teaching in 2021.

Marini said he was reluctant at first because he did not enjoy school as a child and he did not think he would enjoy teaching.

“I was going to use this as a temporary job during COVID, but then I got sucked in” he said.

Apprentices, he said, can come from broken families and may not have given the necessary support to believe that they can succeed.

Marini said the hands-on classroom instruction, building structures, teaches the students that they are able to achieve.

“It’s very rewarding seeing people that had no confidence create a future for themselves,” he said.

Information on the apprentice program can be obtained at this link: