The work is tedious and hard and Foliaki, 22, can't get enough of it.

"My dad can't change a light bulb," Foliaki said. "But I kind of had a knack for putting pipe together and helping customers put together sprinklers and faucets. A year and a half later I'm working as a welder and having a real good time."

Foliaki, a second-year apprentice with the Plumbers and Fitters, Local 675, represents the next generation of Hawai'i construction workers being trained for the Islands' building boom, spurred in large part by an unprecedented $2.2 billion worth of military residential projects.

"I'll have a really good chance of constantly working because of the need for welders," Foliaki said. "There just aren't enough."

Foliaki is just one piece of an overall effort to get workers ready for a burst of construction activity:

• U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawai'i, hosted a jobs summit in January that found that while 7,425 more construction workers will be needed, employers are likely to have problems finding applicants who are drug free and proficient in math.

• Trade unions have cranked up their recruiting efforts, including the Plumbers and Fitters' Local 675, which on March 15 began a four-week screening process to find 80 new apprentice candidates to complement the current 300 apprentices. The Hawaii Carpenters Union, which begins its recruitment drive in April, is also negotiating for a 10,000-square-foot training center in Kalaeloa to coincide with its training programs through Hawai'i's community colleges.

• Honolulu Community College, the workhorse of the University of Hawai'i's community college training program, has asked the Legislature for $368,000 to train more people.

• And state and city officials are also setting up four- to six-hour remedial programs to better prepare candidates to pass the various entrance tests just to get into union training programs.

"Depending on the union, as many as 50 percent of applicants fail the entrance test," said Christine McColgan, executive director of the O'ahu Workforce Investment Board, which is working on the state and city's remedial program. "It's basically a math test, sometimes as low as sixth-grade level. But a lot of these people have been out of school for years and they've forgotten how to add fractions, for instance, which is critical in construction."

Much of the urging for more training comes from Abercrombie. He co-wrote the legislation that changed the way the Pentagon builds and refurbishes military housing by letting private developers construct, manage and maintain the homes — and get them into the hands of military families much sooner.

The so-called privatized military construction work will generate $2.2 billion worth of projects on O'ahu during the next 10 years and is expected to drive Hawai'i's building resurgence.

"The Hawai'i delegation has brought in billions for federal construction projects," Abercrombie said. "Now we have to see to it that our Hawai'i workforce will be ready for the opportunity."

How big a job boom?

Projections at the January jobs summit suggest that 7,425 new construction workers will be needed during the next five years to augment the current construction workforce of 26,700.

No one knows the total number for certain — or the numbers for specific skills, such as pipefitters, electricians and carpenters.

The unknown translates into frustration for the people in charge of creating and expanding recruitment, training and basic education programs.

"That is the problem," said John Cheung, president of the Building Industry Association-Hawaii, which hopes to build its own center to house its 18-month-old Construction Training Center of the Pacific, which specializes in training construction middle managers.

"We know there is a need,"

Cheung said. "We just don't know the exact number."

Kirk Kageno, bottom, an air-conditioning repair instructor with the Plumbers and Pipefitters Union, shows apprentices Errol Domrique, middle, and Aldon Kaopuiki how to deal with a broken air conditioner.

The carpenters hope that 125 to 150 of the expected 400 newest applicants pass the initial drug-screen and entrance test just to become eligible for their apprentice program. Eventually union officials hope to teach even more apprentices at their own training center in Kalaeloa.

"The community colleges are still going to be the backbone of our apprenticeship program but they're all filled up," said Ron Taketa, financial secretary and business representative for the carpenters union.

"These military projects will require steep manpower needs. We can't possibly put that many bodies through the community college system to get them onto the job sites."

The current community college training on every major island occurs mostly on Saturdays. But the carpenters plan to run their own center seven days a week, and even at night, to keep churning out trained carpenters.

"Flexibility is what we need to address the demand," Taketa said. "We don't want anyone turning away from us because we don't have the capability. We do have the capability."

Other opportunities

The urgency to train construction workers also means opportunities for journeyman workers such as Emerson Mateo, a 35-year-old carpenter who trains apprentices on Saturdays at Honolulu Community College.

The extra salary that Mateo earns teaching rough framing classes goes into a savings account for his children's education. And while the money is nice, Mateo said he especially enjoys helping an industry that has treated him well for the past 15 years.

"They were short on instructors and I said I was willing to do it," Mateo said. "I wanted to give back to the program what they've given me."

Mateo's classes are bigger than the ones he sat through as a beginning carpenter. And the students today are more motivated, he said.

"They're very eager and willing," Mateo said. "They have a real opportunity now. And I want to teach them what I learned in the past and give them a little heads-up about what will be expected of them."

Like others, the leaders of the Plumbers and Fitters local don't know exactly what kind of response to expect from their recruitment drive that began this month — or how much effort the applicants will need to pass the entrance exam to become an apprentice.

The apprentices will learn in a 13-year-old training center in Pearl City that the union outfitted with a range of teaching tools — from 1960s-era technology that apprentices may still find in the field to an air-conditioned computer classroom that can trouble shoot high-tech problems and state-of-the-art welding equipment.

Herbert S.K. Kaopua Sr., the plumbers' union business manager and financial secretary, believes the training will prepare his members for any job they're asked to do.

Kaopua just doesn't know how many workers he'll need to train.

"It is frustrating," he said. "But we're trying to anticipate what's going to happen."

Foliaki, the apprentice steam fitter/welder, is anticipating her new life in the plumbing trade.

To help herself on the entrance exam, Foliaki went on the Internet and brushed up on adding and multiplying fractions.

Now she attends night classes twice a week, monthly hands-on courses at the plumbers' Pearl City training center and works 40 to 48 hours per week at actual job sites.

The work is hard and the days are long. But Foliaki believes it will all prepare her for a long career in Hawai'i's construction industry.

"There are so many jobs coming up," Foliaki said, "that I know they're going to need skilled workers who can get the job done right the first time."