“What stands out is that Dycom is treating workforce readiness as core infrastructure, not an HR line item,” said Dan Schawbel, managing partner of Workplace Intelligence, a thought leadership and research agency, and author of the Back to Human: How Great Leaders Create Connection in the Age of Isolation.

More businesses should replicate this approach, he said: mirroring the environment employees will work in and offering hands-on prep that builds more confidence and loyalty than a slide deck ever will.

How Dycom is recruiting workers with no trade experience

Dycom’s investment in workforce development is rare and expensive. Most organizations treat training as one of the first budget items to shrink when times get tough, and few companies are willing to fund a facility when virtual training is cheaper and faster, Schawbel said.​

Many companies use modules and short certifications as training, but Dycom’s investment in a 49-acre campus facility shows the company is building for retention as much as skill. 

“People who eat, sleep and train together on a realistic job site show up ready and tend to stay,” Schwabel said.

Dycom broke ground on the facility in the spring with plans to open it in the first half of 2027. The campus will include a simulated town environment with realistic conditions for hands-on fiber deployment and utility work, and a dedicated mock mission-critical facility for training on complex electrical systems and specialized driver training, among other programs.

Along with the facility, the company is also sweetening the deal with two weeks of vacation to employees on day one, Fortune reported.

Dycom did not respond to interview requests for this story, but CEO Daniel Peyovich told Fortune the offer of training and PTO benefits makes Dycom attractive to a variety of new hires, including those with zero experience.

“You’re really taking — I use the joke, but it’s not really a joke because I have two college kids — the kid playing XBOX at home on his couch.” The training introduces them to working in the elements, with tools, with customers, and in difficult situations, he said.

Why immersive training can improve workforce readiness and retention

Dycom serves customers across a wide range of infrastructure-intensive industries: energy, chemical, manufacturing, petrochemical distribution, water and wastewater treatment facilities, electric utilities, telecommunications equipment distributors and manufacturers, and construction companies. The list goes on. ​

Meanwhile, cloud migration, AI workloads, and data center growth are driving unprecedented demand for long-haul fiber corridors and high-strand interconnects, Payovich said.

With that demand, building up a workforce that can handle today’s needs and those a decade from now is a key strategy for Dycom.

The realistic environment offers plenty of rehearsals, building cognitive and muscle memory along with context before using live wires, rather than relying on online simulators, said Diana David, director of ServiceNow Futures, a forward-looking department of the software development company, and author of Future Proof: Reinventing Work in the Age of Acceleration.

Across much of the workforce, she’s seeing short, self-directed modules and just-in-time learning. Dycom’s multi-week approach not only builds skills like working with an apprentice would, but also gives the company a unique opportunity to set its safety-first values for recruits before the stakes are high.

How workforce training can shorten the path to productivity

The immersive training strategy “shortens the loop” by bringing untrained people on board and turning them into practitioners. David calls the speed at which a company turns new hires into productive workers its "organizational metabolism."

While bodily metabolism breaks down food and drink into energy for essential functions, organizational metabolism is about how you convert the people you're hiring into productive, safe or governed value producers.  

Immersive training strategies can speed up that metabolism. She's seeing that loop shorten in other industries during this era of rapid tech transition, noting that boosting your metabolism isn’t just about capital investment, but about people and how to upskill them for tomorrow’s needs.

“It's an iterative process because things will change, and they now have the campus that they will have to upgrade potentially as things progress,” she said.

Another lesson here for leaders is that talent scarcity in your industry is a strategic problem, not just a recruiting one, said Schawbel of Workplace Intelligence. He argues the problem deserves capital investment, not just a bigger budget line for job postings.

More than anything, he said the takeaway is that companies willing to build their own workforce pipeline in a tight skilled-labor market will be the ones with workers when everyone else is still competing for the same shrinking pool.

For executives, Dycom’s strategy offers a broader lesson: When experienced talent is scarce, building the workforce you need can become a competitive advantage.