North Dakota Skilled Trades Outlook

What this evidence establishes

North Dakota’s published electrician outlook points to continuing occupational demand, but its wage geography resists a single statewide interpretation. This brief compares six selected trades and separates long-term employment projections from the wage distributions employers and training providers can use today. It is an evidence baseline for planning, not an estimate of a labor shortage.

The published occupational outlook

The electrician projection moves from 3,270 jobs in the 2024 base year to 3,780 in 2034, with 15% growth as rounded by the source. It reports 350 average annual openings. The difference between the displayed endpoints is 510 jobs over the decade, or 51 per year when divided evenly for comparison. This annualized net change is a WIL calculation, not the source’s annual-openings measure and not a forecast of each individual year.

The larger openings figure includes growth and replacement. It must not be multiplied into an estimate of distinct available workers or read as a count of currently advertised vacancies. Projections are conditional planning estimates; actual employment can diverge from them. The base-year employment below belongs to the projections series, not a newly measured 2026 workforce count.

Wage distributions, not offer recommendations

The median divides the reported wage distribution in half. The 10th and 90th percentiles describe its spread; they are not validated entry-level and experienced-worker pay grades. All wages below are nominal annual dollars for May 2025. They cover the occupation across covered industries, rather than only construction contractors. Benefits and overtime are not included.

Read wages and projections as complementary series with different reference periods and coverage. Do not divide a projected employment change by a wage statistic or infer that a wage difference measures scarcity. This brief does not claim that a displayed difference is statistically significant.

Why geography changes the comparison

The electrician median is $65,710 statewide, compared with $76,950 in Fargo, ND–MN and $59,800 in Minot. The West North Dakota nonmetropolitan estimate is $75,920. These are different labor-market geographies, not interchangeable quotes for the same job. Fargo and Grand Forks include Minnesota territory; neither is a North Dakota-only city estimate. A statewide recruitment budget should therefore be checked against the intended work location and recruitment area. The figures alone do not identify the cause of a wage difference.

Implications for workforce decisions

For training providers, the immediate planning question is which occupations and service areas justify cohort capacity. Electricians have 350 projected annual openings, while power-line installers and repairers have 60; the occupations also require different skills. These totals are not numbers of training seats to purchase. First document local employers, completions, retention and the catchment area. For employers, compare the relevant regional wage distribution with job duties, credentials and the actual schedule before setting an offer. For public planners, use the smaller occupational base as a reason to collect local detail, not as proof that the market cannot support a project.

What is still needed to size a training pipeline

Annual occupational openings are not an apprenticeship intake target. They can be filled through several pathways, including experienced workers and people moving between occupations. A program-level assessment needs actual entrants, active participants, completions, time to completion and employment outcomes, with the same occupation and geography definitions. This brief contains no verified state apprenticeship capacity or completion estimate. It does not establish a training shortfall or evaluate any named provider.

Use a local evidence request with these fields: occupation and credentials; service area; employer demand and reference date; program entrants and completions by cohort; placement and retention outcomes; and data coverage or missingness. Keep persons, jobs, training places and projected openings in separate columns. The next analytical step is to reconcile those measures, not to subtract training enrollment from the openings totals.

Methods and reproducibility

WIL extracted six preselected detailed occupations from the public O*NET OnLine state wage and employment-trend pages on 24 September 2026. The selection spans electrical, carpentry, plumbing, HVAC, welding and power-line work. It is a purposive comparison, not an exhaustive inventory or a ranking of all trades. The .00 O*NET codes used here map to the displayed detailed SOC codes. No parent occupation totals are added to their components.

The wage pages attribute their observations to BLS 2025 wage data; the trend pages identify Projections Central’s 2024–2034 state projections. WIL retained source HTML, exact URLs, SHA-256 hashes, displayed labels, raw cell strings and a reproducible extraction script. Annual wage percentiles are taken from the table headings, even where surrounding source prose uses the informal term “average.” No AlphaHire dataset, model, index or forecast enters these results.

The displayed statewide projections retain their own base employment and published rounded growth. The one derived comparison is (2034 projected employment − 2024 base employment) ÷ 10. It is not a separately estimated replacement rate. National and regional wage references are kept as distinct geographies; no overlapping areas or occupations are pooled.

Coverage and limitations

OEWS measures wage-and-salary jobs across covered industries and ownership categories; it excludes self-employed workers and certain other categories. A worker count for one employer or construction industry cannot be inferred from these all-industry occupational wages. The estimates combine survey panels and modeling, so May 2025 is the reference period rather than a census taken on one day. Annual wage figures are not guaranteed realized earnings.

The projections series and wage series have different purposes and reference periods. The public O*NET extract does not provide the sampling-error detail needed to test the regional wage differences shown here. This report therefore describes the published estimates without asserting statistical significance or a causal explanation. Missing observations are retained as missing; displayed wage percentiles are not confidence intervals.

Neither source measures workers available to change jobs, qualifications for a specific contract, licensed-worker availability, employer vacancies, project schedules, or hiring success. No proprietary labor-demand model is used. Published projections do not guarantee job security, and these pages do not report completed Q3 2026 outcomes. Decisions requiring those measures need additional evidence.

@techreport{WILRB20263NDTRADES,
  title       = {North Dakota Skilled Trades Outlook: Published employment projections, wage distributions and regional planning implications.},
  institution = {Workforce Intelligence Lab},
  type        = {Research Brief},
  number      = {WIL-RB-2026.3-ND-TRADES},
  year        = {2026},
  note        = {Version 1.0; methodology Public-source occupational comparison v1.0},
  url         = {https://wilinstitute.org/library/p/north-dakota-skilled-trades-outlook},
}

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TI  - North Dakota Skilled Trades Outlook: Published employment projections, wage distributions and regional planning implications.
PY  - 2026
PB  - Workforce Intelligence Lab
M1  - WIL-RB-2026.3-ND-TRADES
ET  - Version 1.0
UR  - https://wilinstitute.org/library/p/north-dakota-skilled-trades-outlook
AB  - North Dakota’s published electrician outlook points to continuing occupational demand, but its wage geography resists a single statewide interpretation. This brief compares six selected trades and separates long-term employment projections from the wage distributions employers and training providers can use today. It is an evidence baseline for planning, not an estimate of a labor shortage.
ER  -