Founding story
Fraser Patterson · Founder & CEO
September 2026
With 9 out of 10 contractors saying they can’t find the workers they need, the industry has spent decades assuming the problem is a labor shortage, and therefore that the solution is to build machines or train more people.
But my own unlikely path made me question the underlying assumption that the primary constraint is a shortage of labor. I had been the skilled worker the industry desperately needed but couldn’t see, and later the employer desperately searching for workers I knew were out there.
I grew up in Scotland and started working on job sites with my father as a laborer at 11. Because my father wanted me to have a better future than he did, he sent me to boarding school where I fell in love with mathematics. But by the time I’d left school, I went straight back to construction and became an apprentice carpenter. That decision ultimately took me from working as a journeyman carpenter and high-rise steel worker, where I struggled to find good, consistent work. Despite having valuable craft skills, I had to take on various odd jobs to support myself, including waiting tables, bartending, gardening, painting portraits and working as a barber. I pulled through and eventually became a general contractor, where I experienced the daily frustration of trying to find skilled workers like myself. So same problem, just in reverse.
Perhaps because of my passion for mathematics, I started looking at the numbers and came to a very different realization that only 1 in 20 workers are actually missing from the labor pool. Construction, it turns out, isn’t fundamentally constrained by a shortage of workers, but by a lack of digital access to the 95% of workers it already has. That insight became the foundation for Skillit.
I was a skilled carpenter the industry desperately needed, but I was effectively invisible to it. I struggled to find consistent work because there was no system that knew what I could do and connected me to the employers who needed those skills.
There are millions of workers in exactly that position today. That’s what Skillit fixes. We give every craft professional a profile that makes their skills, experience and potential visible to the industry, so instead of constantly chasing the next job, great opportunities can find them.
As we continue to build out Skillit, these are our guiding principles:
Your skills should work as hard for you as you worked for them. You worked hard to build your skills. Now your skills should work for you. A Skillit profile makes sure employers who need what you can do can find you. You shouldn’t have to chase work. When demand for your skills appears, it should come directly to you—in real time.
Build things that matter. Build a life that matters. The next generation of craft professionals is going to build the data centers, power plants, factories, hospitals, homes and infrastructure that define America for the next 50 years. There is enormous status in being able to point at something that matters and say, I built that. Your kids should be able to drive past something 30 years from now and know their mom or dad helped build it.
Every great project should make you more valuable for the next one. Every construction project ends. Your career doesn’t. The skills you build on one great project should make you more valuable on the next. The real opportunity isn’t one data center, factory or power plant. It’s carrying increasingly valuable skills from one ambitious project to the next. A good job isn’t just a paycheck. It’s working somewhere you’re safe, respected and valued for what you know how to do.
America is about to build again. Make sure you’re part of it. Craft work helped build America’s middle class once. We believe it’s going to do it again. America is about to build on a scale we haven’t seen in generations. That means an extraordinary amount of opportunity for the people who actually know how to build it. AI might be changing what happens behind a desk. But somebody still has to build the data centers, power plants, factories and infrastructure that make it possible.
Your craft built America. Now let it build your future. Some of the most important projects in America are creating extraordinary demand for craft skills. Your skills, experience, certifications, projects and reputation should travel with you throughout your career. If you’ve spent 10 or 20 years mastering a craft, you shouldn’t be invisible because your experience isn’t on LinkedIn. We want every craft professional to have a living record of what they’ve built, what they can do and what they’re capable of doing next.
As always, our best work is ahead of us.
Fraser Patterson
