Research Report · Report 3 in Volume 1 · 2026
This report uses day-by-day labor records from 18 construction projects built with a multiskilled labor strategy to estimate what would have happened if each worker had been limited to one trade: how much longer the same work would have taken with the same crew, or how many workers would have had to be added to keep the same schedule.
Study at a Glance: Labor Records from 18 Multiskilled Projects
Construction projects need different trades at different stages of the work. A project can have enough workers overall and still be short in one trade on a given day. If each worker can work in only one trade, spare hours cannot move to the trade that is short, even when the workers are qualified to do that work. The contractor then has two practical choices: keep the crew and take longer, or keep the schedule and add workers.
The 18 projects in this report were built by contractors using a multiskilled labor strategy, in which qualified workers moved between trades as the work progressed. Their labor records show the hours each worker recorded in each trade on each workday. The analysis focused on each project's core crew: 183 workers who recorded 10,194 core-worker days and about 89,620 hours, about 17% of them multiskilling hours.
The report has three objectives:
Video Summary
Every project showed an increase. Put the other way, the multiskilled crews finished in about 22% to 38% fewer workdays than the same crews limited to one trade would need.
About 9 to 12 added workers for every 100 core workers on an average day, 17 to 22 on a high-demand day, and 31 to 34 on each project's peak-demand day. Peak staffing would have reached about twice the average, a level prior research associates with productivity losses of about 15% to 20%.
At least one trade would have had more work than its workers could cover on about 73% of recorded workdays: nearly three days in four.
Assigning the same workers to their theoretically optimal trades, chosen with hindsight, reduced these effects but did not remove them. The findings held even when only half of the multiskilling hours were treated as necessary.
These are modeled estimates from labor records, not measured delays or productivity gains.
Recommended Citation
Lines, B., Ogundare, I., Kassa, R., Smithwick, J., & Sullivan, K. (2026). Schedule Duration and Labor-Curve Outcomes. Multiskilling in the U.S. Construction Industry. Report 3 of 6 in Volume 1. Simplar Foundation. https://doi.org/10.22361/vf3qybkgbd
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