You Need Five New Hires to Replace One Retiree

Construction’s labor conversation is usually a counting exercise. Retirements out, apprentices in, subtract one from the other and publish the gap. Angelo Suntres has run those numbers more carefully than most of the people quoting them, and his version ends somewhere the workforce reports don’t go.

Angelo is a mechanical engineer who will tell you he didn’t choose construction, construction chose him. He graduated into the late-2000s recession, couldn’t find consulting work, and took a project coordinator job at an MEP firm in eastern Canada to pay the bills. Twenty years later he’s Director of Operations at Mattina Mechanical, an Ontario MEP contractor, with stops on the owner side and the GC side in between. He wrote a book called The Human Side of Construction, and that title has become the frame for everything he does: the argument that the industry’s hardest problems are people problems wearing technical costumes.

Here’s what stood out from our conversation.

1. You Need Five New Hires to Replace One Retiree

The workforce math starts familiar and gets worse. Roughly 10 million people work in US construction, and Angelo cites reports putting 30 to 40 percent of them at retirement age within five to ten years, call it 400,000 people a year walking out the door. About 250,000 new apprentices start each year, and he pegs completion at 30 to 35 percent. Federal apprenticeship data suggests construction completions run closer to 25 percent, so if anything he’s being generous to the industry.

But the head count isn’t what keeps him up at night. The gap analysis everyone publishes assumes one new entrant replaces one person leaving, and Angelo doesn’t buy it. “That person with 30 years experience, they’re going to work more productive. They’re going to solve problems faster. They’re going to know what to do. And that person coming in, you’re probably going to need five of those to replace just the productivity of the person leaving.”

Which reframes the whole crisis. “The real crux of the problem is the quality of information, getting that asset knowledge that’s out of people’s heads into some sort of system or some mentorship framework or whatever to help bring these younger people up to speed faster.”

He isn’t waiting for someone else to build that system either. After a Toronto tech incubator passed on his mentorship platform idea, he put 40 to 60 evening hours into Lovable and shipped a working prototype anyway.

2. People Want to Be Led, Not Managed

Angelo has worked at a six-person shop where he chased receivables for the owner, and at corporations big enough to have layers between him and anyone with a vision. His read on what changes with scale is blunt. Past a certain size, companies get run by lawyers and accountants, because that’s what a business entity that size requires. The structure isn’t the villain. What the structure does to people is.

“When people get lumped into cogs in a machine and just following a process and they become just managed, not led, that’s where things can kind of break down.”

His example of management at its worst is precise: “nobody wants to be told, hey, you know, Steven, you missed step six in this 10 step process, even though the output was correct.” People want to be in touch with the person pulling the strings. They want to be part of a vision, not a workflow.

The distance compounds it. The farther corporate gets from the boots on the ground, the harder it is to understand what those people need, and Angelo calls avoiding that disconnect the biggest challenge facing large construction companies.

3. AI Fixes the Quantity Problem and Whiffs on Quality

Angelo isn’t an AI skeptic. He’s just specific about which of construction’s two labor problems it actually addresses. Fewer workers processing more information, AI helps with that today. Agentic workflows can issue RFIs and hunt drawing discrepancies fast, but “if you don’t prompt it, if you don’t start that process, it doesn’t know what to do.” The tools amplify people who already know what they’re looking for.

“Tech definitely plays a role in the quantity, because as the demand grows and the supply is still limited, tech’s gonna fill that gap. But it’s missing that element of quality, I think.”

The quality he means is the tacit judgment a 30-year super carries, the stuff that lives in lunchroom conversations and never makes it into any system. Capturing and transferring that knowledge is something he says the current tools haven’t touched, which connects the AI hype cycle right back to the retirement math. The technology that’s supposed to offset the exodus can’t yet hold what the people leaving actually know.

4. The Technology Is the Specialist Now

For a generation the career advice was to specialize, and Angelo thinks AI quietly flipped it. He’s a systems thinker by trade. On a cooling system you’ve got a chiller, a cooling tower, fan coils, and what always fascinated him wasn’t how the chiller works, it’s how the pieces fit together. That instinct is now a career strategy.

“The technology is the specialist now. It is, but it’s only providing us the puzzle pieces. It’s up to us, where I see the future going, to put those pieces together in the right configuration to make the full picture.”

The corollary is that domain knowledge just got more valuable, not less. “We need builders, Steven. Anybody now can use ChatGPT to answer questions, but the information isn’t available in models, at least what I’ve seen, to solve our construction problems alone.” Understanding how trades interact on site, how jobs actually come together, the logistics nobody writes down. None of that is getting taken over by a prompt anytime soon, and the person who pairs it with the tools holds the winning hand.

5. Mental Health Hits the Bottom Line, and Nobody Has Quantified It

Angelo brought heavy numbers to this part of the conversation, so I checked them against the latest data. CPWR and NABTU’s most recent release counts roughly 5,000 construction worker suicides and 11,300 overdose deaths in 2024. Both are declining, overdoses sharply, and both still dwarf jobsite fatalities. CDC data has construction workers several times more likely to die by suicide than from a jobsite injury.

His critique of the standard corporate response is that it’s a checkbox. “Companies, I’ve seen a lot of people have like an EAP, right? Employee Assistance Program. To me, that’s just to check the box.” Published utilization studies back him up, traditional EAP engagement runs about 3 to 8 percent of eligible employees. His hunch on the rest: struggling in silence.

Then he does something most human-side advocates won’t do. He makes the ROI case. A worker who isn’t mentally present is a safety risk to himself and everyone around him, lost-time injuries hit your TRIR, and TRIR hits your insurance premiums and your eligibility with safety-conscious owners. “It hits the bottom line. And right now that’s not quantified... what’s the cost of not doing something? That’s what you got to think.”

His line on responsibility is careful, and worth keeping. Leaders can’t fix everybody’s problems, but “we have a responsibility as leaders and good people to give people the tools they need to fix their problems, not solve them for them.”

The Landing

Angelo opened the conversation with the lesson from his first week in Robert’s truck, and when I asked what he’d tell his younger self, he closed with the same one. “You don’t know everything, but neither does the guy next to you.” It sounds like a poster until you notice it’s the argument underneath everything else he said. Knowledge transfer, mentorship, leading instead of managing, asking the question you’re afraid sounds stupid.

When I asked what keeps him going across the day job, the books, and the platform, he didn’t hesitate. “I want to help other people learn. I want to make their lives better. I want to make their careers better.” This industry has plenty of people building tools. It has far fewer thinking hard about the humans who have to use them, and the retirement math says we need both.

You can find Angelo on LinkedIn, or at angelosuntres.com, where the guides alone are worth the visit.