Drawing on over 30 years of experience in the construction industry, Jim Ruhoff shares his thoughts on how simulation supports personalized training and reduces jobsite risks. He emphasizes that simulation technology helps address labor shortages, streamline onboarding, and improve safety in construction by enhancing operator vetting and skills development.
Whether it’s the struggle to find qualified heavy equipment operators, attract new talent, or retain experienced employees, maintaining a skilled and safe workforce in 2025 has its challenges. CM Labs and Safety+Health Magazine hosted a webinar entitled “Insights from the Field: Workforce Development and the Future of Construction Safety” to address these obstacles with leading expert Jim Ruhoff, the Training Director at Real World Construction Training, and discuss how simulation training can provide a practical solution to workforce development.
Jim Ruhoff
Training Director at Real World Construction Training
With more than three decades in the construction industry, Jim Ruhoff’s hands-on experience includes working as a laborer, foreman, superintendent, project manager, estimator, and small business owner. Jim finds inspiration in helping others grasp new ideas, especially when it leads to safer, smarter, and more efficient work on the jobsite.
Read Ruhoff’s thoughts on how simulation offers a solution to recruitment, growth and retention, and upskill training issues that all contribute to the labor shortage and rising jobsite risks facing the construction industry.
We’re having a lot of guys retire, and we’re trying to find replacements for them. We get a bunch of resumes, but they don’t always have what we’re looking for. And, oftentimes, the ones that do are embellished. I think we’ve all been there where we try and make ourselves look better. However, when the time came to put the proof in the pudding and put this heavy equipment operator out there in the position that we hired them for, we found out right away that they weren’t everything that they claimed they were.
Case in point, we hired a guy to run a motor grader and he talked the talk, but he couldn’t walk the walk. We put him out in the grader, and immediately he ruined a bunch of civil components on the jobsite, as well as damaged the machine. So there was a lot of expense with taking that chance, and that’s a pretty good basis for why we needed to find a more inexpensive way to not only vet the people that we hire, but to also upskill and train them along the way.
Currently, in the steps of onboarding a new employee, we have a classroom setting. They have to come and show that they can actually do what they said they could do using simulation. And then I also pair that with some videos that have concepts and strategies built out, and there are quizzes that go with that, so you know immediately if they understand what the video’s talking about. There’s little keys along the way that tell you exactly who you’ve hired and what their capabilities are.
It makes it easy. I learned the old way. I would show up on a jobsite, whether I was familiar with it or not, and all of a sudden my card was up and the foreman would say, “get in the machine, go dig it, and don’t break anything.” So you hop in the machine, and you’re nervous because you’re sure you’re going to make an expensive mistake. It’s a real tense learning situation on the fly out in the field. Simulation completely mitigates that. You couple that with some videos that explain the process and you can absorb that much easier.
Maybe they can run a machine, let’s say an excavator, for instance, and they can dig a trench but maybe they’ve never had to use the excavator to move pipe around. You can up-train that skill using simulation and then they’re ready to go out into the field; they understand the nuances of heavy equipment operator safety.
I can take video of the operator, showing them what their hands or feet are doing, and we can tweak that so that they’re more efficient. And with the drone footage, they can actually watch where they were not doing a good job. For example, they’re scooping with the bucket and they’re traveling and dumping dirt in front of them making it nice and rough or you’re dumping dirt on your cab. Having the simulator where you can pause it mid-exercise and say, “look, we’re digging a perfect trench here, but you really need to be one and a half to one slope on the sides.” It’s a miraculous training tool because the operators are picking it up. They can see what they’re doing on the screen right next to them and you can point out the inefficiencies, as well as what they’re doing correctly. If they fail it at 60%, they don’t get to move on until they pass. We try to make sure that all of our heavy equipment operators are 85% and above. If they don’t pass, we have a real conversation on what we need to do to get there. It’s a real wake-up call for them. This is kind of an ego breaker because there’s always something to learn. We can always become smoother and get better, so it’s a great tool for that. It allows you to tailor whatever you’re doing for training to that particular individual. They’re getting all types of learning in: the audio, the touch and the feel, the visual. Tie it all together and you’re getting a true training experience using as many senses of your body as you can.
In the past, the hiring process was a lot like throwing a dart at a barn and hoping you hit the side of the wall. You just really never knew where the dart was gonna go. Now with simulation, you’re able to be a bit more precise, a bit more calculated with your decisions. I just hired somebody for our heavy dirt crew, for example. We brought them in for onboarding, explained what they would be doing, what their crews were doing, and taught them about the machinery that’s used on that crew.
It probably expanded our limit of what we were looking for. We can hire somebody that hasn’t done it, and we can upskill them immediately. In two days, they’re ready to go out onto that crew. It’s really opened the doors, and we can pinpoint where we want them to be by the time we get them out there, all in.
Simulation provides very good hands-on training. You can mimic whatever machine you’ve got out there in the field. It doesn’t matter if you’re using CAT controls or wires. The muscle memory goes down and you can verbally talk the trainee through the process of the exercise.
Before we had simulation technology, one of the hardest things we could convince heavy machine operators to do on a daily basis was walk-around inspections. We have logs that they need to fill out, but those are fakeable. When they have to do it with simulation, they’re actually understanding, for example, it’s not like a track is going to break, it’s broken; the headlight might be out, no, it’s out. Breaking the track on a machine is one of my favorites and you know right away they’re paying attention within seconds if they stop and say, “something’s wrong. Let’s shut down the machine, hop out, and walk around to see what we can find.” One of the things we noticed right away with the walkaround inspections is if there are multiple possible issues in the exercise when using the simulation training, you’re tasked with finding something specific at each step. My operators are all eyes. They’re trying to catch everything wrong while they’ve got that view of that side of the machine. They’re immersing themselves, and that’s a good thing.
Want to hear more about Jim Ruhoff’s insights on construction workforce development and safety? Watch the full on-demand webinar: Insights from the Field: Workforce Development & the Future of Construction Safety.
