The District’s new Department of Buildings believes it has an answer to its staffing woes: train college students and recent graduates.
The agency, which emerged in October from a split of the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, is launching an unpaid career pathways program to funnel local architecture and engineering students and recent graduates into mentorship and shadowing opportunities and, then, into the agency’s open jobs.
The program, “a pipeline into jobs that are available and pay well,” is in its early stages, said Ernest Chrappah, the department’s acting director and former director of DCRA. He said in an interview that the department is having initial conversations with Howard University and the University of the District of Columbia about partnering on selecting students, and plans to expand that to more local institutions.
